Every organization wants superstar employees and some will even delay the hiring process weeks or even months until that perfect candidate blips on the radar. What happens though if once you find your purple squirrel, they have mange or rabies? Do you cut them lose or keep them around for their quota busting, nut gathering ability?
Economist Dylan Minor and Cornerstone OnDemand’s chief analytics officer, Michael Housman, examined nearly 60,000 workers to determine the cost of retaining toxic workers. In their study, they define “toxic” as conduct harmful to an organization’s people or property. They found that retaining toxic workers, even those residing in the top 1% for productivity, cost far more than the rewards reaped from a toxic employee’s high production.
Their study revealed that a top one percent worker could produce over $5,000 in annual cost savings however a company could avoid $12,000 in costs by not hiring a toxic worker. In short a toxic worker, even if they are super productive, is far more costly to an organization than an average, non-toxic worker. Take a look at the chart below provided in their study!
Even though a worker in only the top 25% of productivity saves a company far less than one in the top 1%, the study shows that replacing a superstar toxic worker with a less than stellar non-toxic worker, to still be the more cost effective choice.
Why are toxic workers so much more expensive? The most apparent answer is turnover. Toxic workers drive other employees away and the cost of replacing those employees is high not to mention that morale and productivity often drop until a replacement is found. Additionally toxic workers produce other toxic workers. Negativity spreads like wildfire.
Interestingly enough, toxic workers are more productive in terms of their output and one 2013 study found that unethical workers remain longer at organizations. This explains why toxic workers are so often selected and even retained for long timespans.
In summary, avoid hiring a toxic worker if you can but should you find yourself burdened with one or many, remove them despite their high production. As former GE CEO Jack Welch put it, “People are removed for having the wrong values…we don’t even talk about the numbers.”
Last year the national average for filling an open position reached 29 days which was a record. Believing that recruiters are simply dragging their feet and waiting for a purple squirrel is a common assumption and true to some extent. To be fair though to recruiters and hiring managers, the number of measures that must be taken the moment a position becomes vacant needs to be considered.
- Advertise the position
- Identify acceptable candidates
- Conduct interviews
- Complete background and reference checks
- Extend an offer
- Wait for the candidate to accept the offer
When you consider all of this, 29 days doesn’t seem so long but it is! According to some statistics, top talent remains on the market for only 10 days! Additionally, during that 29 days, as the position remains open, productivity, revenue and morale drops among your employees. The solution seems simple. Speed up the hiring process! Weed out candidates with an ATS. Conduct more interviews in less time with video interviewing! Even with those measures in place, is ten days to fill a realistic goal?
Recruiting in the business world isn’t like recruiting in the sports or entertainment industry. My team has an open position at quarterback and Cam Newton is available? You’d better believe we are going after him! He’s a proven star! Carmello Anthony is a free agent and I need a forward? My VP of People Operations is calling up Carmello’s agent. My movie’s director just dropped out? Let’s see, is Scorsese Spielberg or Christopher Nolan available? No? What about Alejandro Inarritu? He’s been nominated twice in the last two years.
Within these fields top talent can easily be identified. Right from the start a short list of stars to fill the open position is formed. In the corporate world unless you are poaching executives at the “C” level from high profile companies such as Amazon, Apple or Google, most top talent is relatively unknown. You don’t know that you have a potential Steph Curry, Odell Beckham Jr., or Cate Blanchett applying for your open position. At least not from the start.
Though your job candidate’s resume may scream success up front, you certainly want more than a few days to determine the validity of their credentials. Assuming an organization is lucky enough to find their dream candidate within seven days of posting a job, recruiters are left with only three days to interview the candidate, verify references and negotiate an offer before the candidate accepts another. Careerbuilder released a survey a few years ago and the results showed that 41% of employers believed a bad hiring decision cost them upwards of $25,000 and 43% of them blamed their bad hires on a rushed hiring decision.
Organizations face a problem. Move too quickly during the hiring process and they risk hiring the wrong candidate. Move too slowly and they risk a great candidate getting away. Move slower still, 29 days slow, and they risk losing not only the good candidates but all of the rest. Hiring managers can ill afford to hold out and wait for a Steph Curry or an Adrian Peterson. As Dr. John Sullivan points out, “…it’s mostly luck if the most desirable candidates decide to enter the job market precisely when you coincidentally have a job opening.”
So can you hire a great candidate in ten days? Yes, but only if luck is on your side. Generally you shouldn’t try because your rushed hiring decision could produce a bad hire. However if you drag your feet too long waiting for the perfect candidate, your luck will turn to misfortune. That is if you believe losing revenue is unfortunate.
The possibility of hiring people online has changed the recruitment market immensely. Almost every bigger company uses online recruiting methods in one way or another. There are just so many possibilities.
Social recruitment is one of those. It means using social networks to reach and pick out potential employees. Freelancing websites are another one. They are a great way to find and contact a lot of external talents. Last but not least, a lot of companies use online as an easy way to support their offline recruitment methods. For example by posting their offer on their website.
But why are companies so crazy about online recruitment? All the ways described above have their specific advantages and disadvantages. But recruiting online is inherently different than previous methods. In this article, we’ve put together the 4 main benefits of finding new employees or external experts online.
- Faster recruiting process
To start it off with an obvious one, recruiting online yields results much quicker than traditional methods. Here’s what it takes to make an offline job ad – contact newspaper to insert ad, get it approved, wait for print, wait for delivery, wait for candidate response. You’ll notice the word wait three times at the end there. Here’s the online process – post on platform of your own choosing, wait for candidate response.
These examples are a bit oversimplified, but you get the idea. Candidates can view your online job offer right away, 24 hours a day and response as quickly as they can. Waiting for CVs or other documents to physically reach you is simply inefficient when compared to online alternatives. A faster recruitment process means your company gets the workforce it needs sooner.
- Reduced costs
It costs less. Not only is it cheaper in general, in some cases it comes with no additional financial costs, e.g. social recruitment via Facebook or LinkedIn. Professional online recruiting platforms will cost more than your Facebook page, but the bottom line should still come out in your favor.
And it’s not just monetary savings either. Online recruitment also saves your HR department time. This means they have more time to optimize working processes, train your employees and pick out the best prospects for that job opening. Another online specific advantage is the fact that you can always change your ad or posting relatively easily compared to offline methods.
- No geographical barriers
It doesn’t matter where you are anymore. Your target audience doesn’t have to be in a specific region to get the TV ad, the newspaper, see a poster or pick up a flyer. They just have to be using certain online services. This means you can access a global market of experts. You all know the advantages of outsourcing – it can be cheaper and bring very valuable talent and experience that maybe just isn’t there in your region.
- Filtering possibilities
A larger pool of candidates to pick from might seem intimidating at first, but it doesn’t have to be. Statistically, the more people you reach, the more likely it is that the people you are looking for are among them. If you use external services, for example, you will be able to look for people who work in a specific niche or have plenty of experience in the field you want. You can filter by region, language, and sometimes even expected pay. This won’t be the case if you’re using other forms of online recruitment. However, with the emergence of trends like Big Data, more companies are using their databases to help determine which employees are most likely to be hired.
Of course, offline recruitment can still be useful in some cases. But if you’re not using any online channel or platform for finding candidates in 2016, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Viktor Marinov is the voice behind the freelancer magazine at http://www.freelancermap.com. Every week he comes up with helpful hints, checklists and guides for freelancers and independent workers. If you would like to know how to find remote jobs online or how to niche yourself as a freelancer, check out his freelancer tips!
Dr. John Sullivan published recently an article titled, “Recruiting Trends for 2016 And Their Supporting Best Practices, Part 1 of 2.” Part one lists recruiting trends twelve through six while the six highest impact trends are reserved for part two to be released at a later date. Curious to see if video interviewing made the cut, I was momentarily floored from the get go when I read trend #12, “Anonymous resume screening and blind interviewing.”
In an effort to bring more diversity to recruiting, recruiters are not only being trained to recognize their unconscious biases but also are being trained in best practices to hide “irrelevant” information. Best practice number one includes hiding information such as the candidate’s name, address and grades which are not seen as accurate predictors of success. Best practice number two suggests reducing the number of visual biases. These visual biases are not detailed but using more telephone interviews is encouraged. Another suggestion offered was to hide the candidate behind a screen. The third best practice was to reduce voice bias by offering online questionnaires. The best practice of reducing voice bias seems to contradict the best practice of conducting more phone interviews. In summary a trend is forming that recruiting should be done blind and deaf. You don’t know the candidate’s name, gender, age, and additionally can’t see or hear the candidate. Imagine the Dating Game where the woman asks written questions of her suitors, they in-turn write down their responses on an index card, and then toss them over the curtain to her without revealing any hint of their charm or charisma. Perhaps this isn’t a fair analogy. Hiring should be more scientific and based on the candidate’s skills not the emotions they invoke in you, correct? But what becomes of cultural fit if we remove a candidate’s face and voice, or is “cultural fit” just a euphemism for discrimination, as an HR professional once put it to me?
Google is mentioned in the article as one of the firms experimenting with blind resumes and though Google’s site does promote diversity, their culture is important to them as well. As is written on their careers page, “Lots has been written about our great perks, but read on to find out what our culture is really all about.” Cultural fit is important not just in determining if the candidate is right for the company but also in determining if the company is right for the candidate. Is the effort to hire a diverse workforce based on skills alone ignoring the cultural fit factors necessary to increase employee retention? Trend #10 promotes the use of recruiting videos such as video job descriptions and video job offers to better show off the excitement and passion of an organization. Perhaps such a practice will better help organizations promote their culture and improve fit with candidates.
I concede that a candidate’s name and grades aren’t accurate predictors of success. In fact data that Google derived from their recruiting processes suggests G.P.A. truly is irrelevant several years post-graduation. Location to me though seems necessary perhaps not for fit but just to know whether the candidate requires re-location or sponsorship to work at your company. I will assume the recruiter understands the job specs and is providing the appropriate resumes to the hiring manager.
Eliminating bias in hiring is certainly a desired goal, but are employers losing the ability to find and hire the best candidates by going blind and deaf? Only if you believe that cultural fit won’t make your organization more successful. We have to ask, is diversity more important than every other objective and will diversity alone optimize your workforce? Are diversity and cultural fit mutually exclusive?
The extent to which extreme measures to decrease bias and increase diversity are necessary points to a larger problem that these best practices cannot circumvent. Prejudiced managers exist and even if the candidate is hired sight unseen they will reveal themselves the first day they report work. If the employee comes from a class, race, ethnicity, etc. to which the hiring manager is biased, you aren’t doing the candidate or your company’s retention rates any favors.
The other big unknown is will flying blind and deaf actually result in a more diverse workforce? What do you think?
The hiring process has changed over the years as old methods of hiring make way for new ones. Online job postings killed the classifieds and soon postings will succumb to social media. Video interviews will replace the phone screen. Resume screening software has replaced humans and eventually the flaws these systems carry with them will be replaced with better technology.
I’m setting myself up for ridicule by trying to guess what the future of hiring will be like in 100 years but then again who is going to read this post in the next millennium and point out all the ways I got it wrong?
First off, in one hundred years few jobs may be left that a robot isn’t already performing? According to the Boston Consulting Group, robots will replace humans in factories at a greater clip in the next decade than seen before. As of now only ten percent of jobs than can be automated are taken by robots but by 2025 Boston Consulting foresees that 23% will be automated. Two University of Oxford researchers estimated that by 2033, 47% of all U.S. jobs might be taken over by computers. Imagining that the majority of factory related jobs will be automated by 2115 is not so difficult. Continue reading “What Will Hiring Be Like In 100 Years?” »
Careerbuilder released a survey recently of 374 HR professionals and 319 job candidates asking them how technology degrades the hiring process. Here are a few problems reported.
Fifty-three percent of HR professionals believe a long application process helps to screen out unenthusiastic job candidates. Unfortunately for employers, over 60% of job candidates reported that they started an application process but dropped out because it was too complicated or lengthy. Continue reading “Survey Says Hiring Process Suffers From Huge Disconnects Between Job Candidate and Employer” »
Two years ago, Flight Centre, an Australian airfare company, began to allow their recruiters rather than their hiring managers, hire the job applicants. Instead of presenting a small pool of qualified candidates to the hiring manager the recruiter instead gives them an employee.
As someone with recruiting experience, here are a few reasons why such a simple move is so brilliant. Continue reading “5 Reasons Why Your Recruiters Should Do The Hiring” »
With so many available applicants per every open position, how companies are having trouble filling open roles might seem bewildering. The infographic below shows the obstacles plaguing both job candidates and hiring managers in today’s hiring process. Continue reading “Infographic: Challenges of Today’s Hiring Process” »
Hire-Intelligence To Address Video Interviewing At Annual American Psychological Association Convention
The first ever research conducted to determine the validity of web-based video job interviewing will be presented on August 10th in Washington D.C. at the 2014 Annual APA convention.
Titled, “Exploring the Validity of Asynchronous Web-Based Video Interviews” the session will address research sponsored by Hire-Intelligence and conducted by GCG Solutions principal Dr. Charles “Allen” Gorman. The study sought to evaluate the ability of video interviews to provide valuable, job-related insights for employers who use video to screen job candidates. The research found that ratings of the applicant, applicant characteristics, and video interview responses all predicted job performance and associated work outcomes. Continue reading “Hire-Intelligence To Address Video Interviewing At Annual American Psychological Association Convention” »
Hire-Intelligence, in coordination with Synchronized Resources Inc., will present “Access, Accommodations & Video Interviewing” on August 5th in Washington D.C. at the National Industry Liaison Conference. Continue reading “The Annual NILG Conference Discusses Video Interviewing & The Disabled” »