With many scaling businesses spending at least five figures annually with recruitment agencies, more and more businesses are exploring other options. Add to this that at least 1 in 5 of those recruits become a “bad hire”, and each bad hire costs four times their related salary, the whole process is costly. All of this is contributing to a rise in companies looking at their internal recruitment methods, in a bid to take control of the process.
Our experience working with companies globally has shown us that the companies who have the biggest amount of success, are those that have their own internal recruitment methods. Not to mention the fact that those with internal recruitment methods save on average over 50% on recruitment spend.
From this work, we have compiled some of the silver bullets that you can use to enhance your own internal recruitment methods:
1. Be Ahead of the Game
Proven through the work we do, carving out time for recruitment each and every week is a non-negotiable. Establishing a routine of talking to great people every week (even if it means you talk to some for a year before they say “yes” to a coffee) means the talent pipeline never slips. When vacancies open up you always have a list of great candidates to choose from. Depending on the size of your business this can be as little as a few hours a week, through to several days a week, as we do, for some of our bigger clients.
This process takes time to develop, but delivers every time, even with roles that should be almost impossible to fill. This includes recruiting a CFO with an Oil background to join a startup drilling company in a very dangerous part of the world (a bodyguard was included in the package!). To finding an elusive Concept Artist out of a market of about 20 for a growing gaming company. This proactive recruitment approach has been proven to work every time and carving out that time internally each week will be invaluable.
2. Create a Recruitment Scorecard
At Duo, we don’t start any recruitment without first establishing a scorecard. This looks at both the fit with the business culture, and the role we are hiring for. Once you have put this together you can cross check continually throughout the recruitment process.
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Do they have the right behaviours to be successful in the role? Do those behaviours demonstrate values that align with our company?
We measure alignment with the essential behaviours of each role (i.e. procedural, achievement motivated, proactive etc). Then we look at whether the behaviours shown during the recruitment process fit into our culture. We focus on behaviours NOT personality. For more insight into why to focus on this see our post on why behaviour is more important than personality.
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Do they have the skills, knowledge and demonstrable results to be successful in the role?
Although this is always secondary to behavioural and value fit, we test how skilled applicants are at the job they are applying for. We look at previous results they have achieved to stress test what they are telling us they bring to the table. For a sales role this could be win rates, amount of new business secured, size of deals, volume of clients etc.
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Do they demonstrate any of our non-negotiables?
Every business should have a set of non-negotiables – things that would derail your culture if you brought someone in who exhibited them. This may be dishonesty, an ego, adversity to change. Essentially what are the items that if they manifested at any point in the recruitment process would disqualify someone? (Hint – if you don’t have any derailers it may be why your hiring is unpredictable…)
These are just two key elements of our internal recruitment methods, but both can net you big returns and better predictability of success before hire.
To find out about more about how we drive change in internal recruitment methods reach out and talk to us. Every client we have worked with has saved at least 50% on their recruitment fees. You can read more about one of these examples, in the work we did with Orange Bus.