Streamlining hiring procedure to attract elite technical talent
Highly skilled and talented candidates already have a bunch of emails from different companies about new job opportunities. Top talents always value their time and hence will refuse to jump through hoops to get a job.
Gone are the days when a person would do anything for a job while there are people out there who are desperate for a job, chances are if they were the best fit, they wouldn’t be as desperate. Hence, if businesses refuse to up their hiring process, then they will miss out on the best talent too.
As we are an RPO company, we constantly see two main things candidates crib about. One is the tedious take-home assignments that companies make them do and the other is the extremely long interview stages that go for days. Time is of the essence to everyone, be it candidates or employers. To survive in the modern era, companies need to up their game and change the recruitment process in order to attract and bag the best talent in the market.
Take-home assignments
While a majority of the candidates have gone through take-home assignments when applying for a job, interviewers tell that they use those assignments to assess the candidates. However, it is high time companies realized that the candidates are not solely applying to one company. They will have applied to multiple companies, all at the same time. Most of the candidates take 10 hours to 25 hours to prepare for a single interview. Hence when you add in a take home assignment, which they are also receiving from the other companies they applied for, they simply do not have the time to do their best at it.
While having an assignment given to the candidates is a helpful way of figuring out which candidate fits best, it is also important to understand the pattern in which candidates chose to do these assignments. When dealing with multiple assignments, candidates chose the easiest and shortest assignment first, keeping the longest, tedious one for the last. Hence, companies that give out time-consuming assignments miss out on the finest candidates who value their time.
Giving very job specific concise assignments is the best way to give take-home assignments. If not home assignments, the other alternative is on-site assignments. Bring the candidate to the office or a center and give them an assignment with a time limit. The candidates that pass that stage can go to the interview stage. It is better to have a timed test even though it adds in pressure than have a take home assignment.
Number of interview stages
Less is more when to comes to recruitment too. Lesser the number of stages a candidate has to go through, better it is for the company and the candidate. The interviews can be concise like the following points.
First Round – Phone Interview
Phone interviews are convenient and a simple way to gate-keep candidates. Filtering of candidates is done by assessing their communication skills, the basic skills required for the job and if they will fit into the company culture. It is a 30-60-minute process with good success rates.
Second Round – On-site Interview
The candidates selected after the phone interview is called on-site for a personal interview. This is broken down to two main tests- a technical test and a face-to-face interview. The technical test can vary from a written test to a modern-day test according to the company’s wishes. The face-to-face interview will be with the hiring manager and the people the candidate will have to work with or report to if they get the job. The interview might be further broken down by sitting down with two interviewers at a time rather than have a huge intimidating panel at one go.
It is best to finish all the interviews on the same day rather than make the candidate come to the site more than one day as candidates might be from different parts of the country and is banking on the consistency of the procedures.
Conclusion
All you have to do is put yourself in the shoes of the candidate to understand how this concise procedure is an advantage over other companies. Consider a highly talented candidate applying to two different companies. One of the companies follows the above method for the recruitment process and in a week’s time sends the candidate the offer letter along with a neat salary package. However, even though the other company followed minimum number of tests, they call the candidate back for a few more interviews to attend. With the first company’s offer letter in hand, the candidate will not even be motivated to attend the added interviews. Hence, the second company ends up missing out on one of the best fit talents. All you have to realize is that the candidate isn’t solely applying to your company and just as much as the candidate wants a job, you have a competition with other companies to get the best talent on your side. Work on the ways your plan to attract potential candidates who hold the future of your company.