We all want to have the best people on our teams. The cost of making a bad decision in the hiring process is significant, with the Department of Labor estimating a loss equal to almost one-third of first-year earnings for each new employee that doesn’t work out. Beyond budget perks, which are significant enough to warrant hiring the right person from the start, there are other reasons to recruit only the best.
The Importance of Hiring the Right People
8 Reasons to Improve Your Hiring Process
From the preservation of workplace culture to a boost of your company’s reputation, here are all the benefits hiring teams should be aware of before sending your next offer letter.
1. Saves Time
After you onboard a new hire, they should be adding to your productivity as a business, not taking away from it. Yet, the wrong person may require frequent followups, retraining, and even disciplinary action—all things that require your investment to make things right. Compared to excellent performers, these poor performers can do damage to your schedule, keeping you from doing your job. Hiring right eliminates unnecessary performance distractions and lets you focus on what’s relevant.
2. Fosters Business Growth
Nothing lays the groundwork for the future quite like hiring well now. Getting the right employees on board ensures they grow with you, contributing to your overall success as a business and reducing the need to hire again and again for each new leadership position you may develop down the line.
Mature employees are worth more, too. Consider how hiring better employees at even entry-level positions can lead to better-staffed management positions later on. Of course, this all starts during the hiring process, which includes writing good job descriptions, asking the right job interview questions, making reference checks, and more.
3. Reduces Turnover Costs
Of all the wasted dollars a company suffers, turnover costs may be the most frustrating. There’s nothing quite like investing time and money into an employee, only to lose them for one reason or another. What could you have done with that money instead?
Turnover costs can make up almost 25 percent of the salary of the role you’re filling. How many times can you afford to make the wrong hire? Most companies cannot keep making bad hiring decisions and keep their financial goals intact.
4. Increases Team Building Activities and Morale
Adding new talent can cause a momentary disruption in the workflow and connectivity of existing teams. After the adjustment period, however, the right hire should be able to jump right in and contribute to the natural cohesion of your best teams. A bad hire, on the other hand, can sow discord and cause tension where it may not have even existed before. Look for each new hire’s potential for being a team player before you bring them on permanently.
5. Avoid Training an Employee Who’s Not Staying
Hiring costs can drain the budget. Add in the time and money expenses of training a new hire, and you have quite the investment made for each additional employee. If that hire doesn’t work out, you’ve lost hours and hours of one-on-one time with your training teams and management, who probably have better things to do. When faced with making yet another bad hire who will take away from your employee development resources or choosing someone who will stick around, always go for the latter.
6. Protects Your Image as an Employer
Did you hear about the business who can’t seem to keep any employees? That’s not a place most job seekers want to join. Whether your hiring ails are your fault or a symptom of a declining job market, what people say about your company does matter.
Consider each bad hire an announcement to the world that you can’t seem to attract good help. Also think about the significant damage they can do internally. Do you really want them talking negatively to other team members about their experience and tarnishing your company culture? Invest in better job candidates and limit those help wanted ads that can publicly damage your image.
7. Maximizes Productivity
While your top leadership teams should have some input into your next hire, especially as it affects their departments, asking non-HR personnel to constantly contribute can drain their time and energy. Instead, use their input to hire better the first time and keep them doing what they should be doing while your hiring managers handle the rest.
Interviewing, offering feedback, and all the meetings that come with hiring can eat up hours better spent growing the core business. Good hires limit this activity and get your people back to work.
8. Avoid Giving Confidential Info to People You Don’t Trust
Every business is an information business when you consider that they deal with private corporate data, passwords, Slack channels, social media accounts, and customer contact information. When you hire someone, you’re trusting them with some of this information. If they leave, who knows what they may try to do with it.
If the frustration of issuing confidentiality agreements and worrying that those agreements is becoming too much, you may need a better hiring process. Getting trusted people in the door can help alleviate anxiety and potential legal fallout.
Should You Consider an RPO Provider for Quality Candidates?
You probably already know that hiring well has benefits, even if you weren’t aware of all of the reasons why. But what are the next steps for taking charge of your recruiting and making significant changes in the process—and the outcomes? And how can you make sure you’re finding the best candidates and, more importantly, hiring the best employees?
Partnering with a proven recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) company may be the best first step. With best practices already in place to find the most skilled and qualified candidates in your industry and chosen geographic location, you’ve handled most of the groundwork.
Consider Elastic Recruiting
From there, it’s easy to customize parts of the process to make it resemble your core brand culture and values, but some RPO companies aren’t made for smaller businesses and can’t scale easily when you need it most.
That’s why many companies are switching to an Elastic Recruiting option. It does all of the above but also gives you tools to eliminate the busywork and have access to more successful recruitment strategies. You’ll always have the opportunity to add your special touches and handle interviewing and decision-making when it counts.
Ask how Comeet can simplify recruitment and help you hire the right person the first time around with an Elastic Recruiting approach, which grows with you as your hiring needs change.
