When you oversee the growth of a team from 6 to 100 employees in just over a year like I have, one of the biggest challenges you face is keeping up with recruitment requirements. When in rapid expansion mode, it is easy to lower standards and fall into a “just fill the seat” mentality. When this happens, high attrition generally follows.
One way to try and curb high attrition rates is to get better at measuring candidate work ethic. For most people assessing the work ethic of candidates is something that seems very subjective and not something that is east to apply metrics too. And in with that assumption, you are missing some very easy data points to capture and use in being more analytical in your recruitment process. Let me highlight three data points to capture in the recruitment process that have a strong correlation to work ethic.
- Timeliness
- Resume Quality
- Preparation for Interview
We all make note of these items during the process, and often include them in the overall evaluation of the candidate. But rarely is anyone capturing these items as data and using it to help measure work ethic and use it to predict work ethic once employed.
Timeliness is simple. Where they early, on-time, late, really late or a no show for any of the interviews in the process. If people are early or on-time it’s a positive and can show a general behavior once employed. On the other hand if a pattern of being late or not showing up is already evident before being hired, why would you expect that to change once they are part of your team?
One thing that is common here in the Philippines is dramatic excuses for being late or missing interviews. If you are or ever have done recruiting here, I am sure you can rattle of a long list of excuses; family emergency, death of a loved one, getting sick, and stuck in traffic being the ones I hear the most. Its easy to dismiss the excuse as a valid reason to be late or not show, but time and time again when we hire people who started like this, they don’t stick around. Putting a weight behind timeliness is extremely important. Over time you can track the attendance patterns of people you hired with low timeliness scores and I guarantee you that you will see a strong correlation between the two.
Resume Quality is also something that generally has a direct reflection on the candidate’s level of professionalism. If you are expecting someone to treat your business with respect and hard work, yet their resume is out of date, incomplete and/or full of typos, once again you are fooling yourself. Im sure we all think at some point the resume is just a resume and bad candidates can have good resumes and vice versa. Well if you do think that, then don’t you owe it to yourself to start tracking data to validate that. When you find you are mistaken, and bad resumes general equal bad employees, you can thank me. Come up with simple scoring system. Like an English teacher would grade a paper. Grade the resume and add the data to both your decision-making and your data analysis.
One of the deal breakers for me when I interview is how prepared is the candidate. When I ask them how did the hear about the job, and they say a friend told me to apply I get concerned. My follow up being did you research the company before coming here. When they say I didn’t. Its pretty close to an automatic fail. If a friend told them about the job, but they didn’t do anything to learn about the company it’s a clear sign they are not taking this serious. So why would I expect them to take their job serious once they start. Again come up with a simple scoring system to indicate how did they hear about the job, what kind of research did they do about the company and how much knowledge do they come in with about the job they are applying for.
So there, you go. That’s how you can add some powerful analytics to your recruitment process. Come up with you own measurements for timeliness, resume quality and interview preparation. Use them along side the tests and assessments and interviews, to build a more complete candidate profile. All track these data points over time to compare to data once they are an employee like schedule adherence, productivity and quality of work. I promise you, you will see strong correlations between the pre hire and post hire data.
HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.
Decision-Making, Analytics & Intelligence > Philippines 