Shortlisting on a Shoe String

Your Pocket Guide to Shortlisting on a Budget.

Recruitment can be costly – in terms of time and money. Finding the right person can take up to 68 days, according to a 2015 study by management consultancy company, CEB. Regardless of the process, recruitment costs can reach up to two-thirds of an employee’s annual salary, according to WorkplaceInfo.

At Employment Office, we believe the recruitment process is an exciting opportunity to discover your next star – and should not be seen as a burden to your bottom line!

With this in mind, we have put together a little pocket guide to shortlisting on a budget – a guide to finding the right people for your organisation, minimising the time and cost impacts, and without compromising the quality of your recruitment process.

Read on as we share with you the most efficient way to conduct shortlisting – a six step strategy focusing on getting recruitment right from the get-go, that promises to keep your hip-pocket happy.

  1. Conduct a detailed job analysis

It is essential that you identify, and get all stakeholders on the same page regarding; the aim of the role, the position description, the selection criteria, and the vision of your ideal candidate.

Organise a single meeting with all staff involved in the hiring process (Recruiter, HR team, Future Leader) to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Be sure to brief each staff member on the aim of the meeting beforehand and inform them to bring any relevant material (previous job descriptions, hand over notes and an exit interview transcription). This simple but critical step will minimalize email-tennis and set the ball in motion for the next stage of recruitment, helping condense the time to hire.

  1. Seek the right information from applicants

With certain competitive roles attracting hundreds of applicants, it is simply not viable to read every resume and cover letter. ‘Screening questions’ refers to a series of questions determined by you that will immediately ‘knock out’ unsuitable candidates, and equally, draw attention to outstanding candidates.

75 to 88 per cent of applicants are screened-out when the recruiter first glances at their resume.

Screening questions help accelerate the recruitment process as you no longer need to sift through hundreds of irrelevant resumes that recruitment software will automatically identify as unsuitable.

When designing screening questions, consider which factors are ‘make or break’ in terms of legal requirements and the candidates’ skills.
Legal necessities: If your role requires a heavy vehicle licence or re-assignment to a remote location, be sure to flag these in your screening questions. It sounds simple, but all too often recruiters forget to ask candidates about key criteria, resulting in time being wasted by sorting through resumes of candidates who legally cannot do the job.

Qualifications: Many competitive jobs have non-negotiable requirements – you can set the bar high with screening questions, weeding out candidates who haven’t yet reached the required number of years of experience or level of education that the role demands.

In-depth insights: Design open-ended questions with the key requirements of the role in mind. Your questions could include anything from ‘Describe what you have learned from other leaders, and how this has shaped your leadership style,’ to ‘Discuss a time when you had to deal with a serious customer service issue – how did you handle the situation?’

  1. Screen with phone or video interview

Before investing time and energy in face to face interviews, it’s essential to communicate with candidates in real-time to get a sense of their personality and verbal communication skills. A phone interview, or better, a recorded video interview as conducted at Employment Office, will help you arrive at a high-quality shortlist with new intel that you can use to guide inform your questions in the final face-to-face interviews.
When resources are tight, every minute counts, so be ready with a list of questions at hand and know what you are looking for in terms of essential, desirable and undesirable responses. 15 to 25 minutes should be sufficient for you to decide whether to continue the candidate to the next stage.

  1. Conduct Face to Face interviews

Structure and standardise the interviews – Have a clear plan of how your interview should go and keep an eye on the clock to stay on track. This will get easier each time. Secondly, ensure all interviews follow a similar structure to make it easy to compare applicants later.

Involve others – Having multiple interviewers reduces bias and enables recruiters to focus on one or two skill sets each, rather than one interviewer looking for all qualities in the candidate. Alternatively, one recruiter could ask questions, while the other HR representative takes notes.

Address what’s important: the behavioural and theoretical – To craft your interview questions, revisit the job description and consider the key selection criteria. Ask questions that address experience, skills, values and desired behavioural tendencies.

The best questions challenge candidates to share an anecdote with you – perhaps a time when they overcame pressure or made a significant change to processes within their company in the face of unyielding resistance. Telling a story makes it easier for the candidate to relax, and gives you the opportunity to tease out the candidate’s skills, rather than the candidate simply listing their attributes.

Compare apples with apples – Many recruiters assign ratings to each response in order to have a numerical figure that will enable them to quickly identify outstanding candidates. To reduce the margin of error, ensure all interviews have the same idea of what a ‘10’ and ‘0’ looks like.

Consider cultural fit – The face-to-face interview represents a critical opportunity for you to consider if the person would adapt to your work environment and feel comfortable among your team. Does the candidate prefer to work independently or with the team?

  1. Consider a Group Assessment Day (GAD)

For organisations hiring in bulk or testing a number of strong applicants for a competitive position, a Group Assessment Day is a popular alternative to multiple interviews. GADs afford recruiters the benefits of an individual interview (as some recruiters choose to conduct individual interviews during the GAD), and the opportunity to observe candidates in teams, and in role-play situations relevant to the role.

Observing candidates for two hours or more for both behavioural and skills qualities means that you improve your chance of uncovering the best match for the role, compared to only analysing a candidate in an individual interview.

In the short term, GADs save HR managers, who are hiring in bulk, from hours in the interview room. In the long term, GADs lead to higher quality hires and thus, reduced turnover.

  1. Give your candidate the all-clear

Remember, more often than not, outstanding candidates are also applying to your competitors. Thus, at this late stage of the recruitment process, your candidates are a ‘flight risk’ – they are time sensitive, so you must be too. We recommend conducting background and reference checks as efficiently as possible.

Background checksKeep your workplace safe and protected from legal nightmares by conducting thorough pre-employment checks. This could include police checks, education verification checks, medical checks and visa checks.

Skills testingA simple online skills test could mean the difference between an outstanding hire and an incorrect hire. A skills test is an easy way to ensure candidates have the skills they claim. Skills testing could include Microsoft office testing, typing, numeracy and literacy, and attention to detail, technical writing and business communication tests, or more comprehensive tests relevant to particular roles.

The Key Take-Away

Ultimately, the key take-away is that you can only save time and money in the long term by implementing high-quality recruitment practices today. A streamlined recruitment method as outlined above will save your team hours in manual labour and will cut-out non-essential communication. This means your candidate-attraction strategy will be lean in terms of resources but mean in terms of hire-power.

 

Editor’s note: In celebration of the holiday season, Employment Office is delighted to offer clients our Candidate Video Star Special. Book by 5pm Thursday 21st Dec and we will:

  • Rate and rank your candidates according to your criteria
  • Record up to 10 video screening interviews (each approx 10 minutes duration)
  • Tailor the interview questions to your needs
  • Accelerate the screening process, getting you to the best candidates quicker and without hassle
  • Handle all candidate care over the Christmas period
  • Assist with scheduling your face to face interviews

Contact us today and mention ‘Christmas Special’ to take advantage of this fantastic offer.

Employment Office is the leader when it comes to uncovering top talent. Click to learn why we are not a traditional dinosaur recruitment agency, and how we can give you bang for your buck.

Sources:

 WorkplaceInfo, Recruiting Costs, accessed 2017,

http://workplaceinfo.com.au/recruitment/problems-and-challenges/recruiting-costs

Signature Staff, The True Cost of Hiring New Employees, 2016

https://www.signaturestaff.com.au/blog/true-cost-hiring-new-employees/

CEB, Recruiting Slowdown Hurts the Bottom Line, 2015: https://www.cebglobal.com/human-resources/recruiting/accelerating-recruiting.html

Ideal, Shortlisting Step-By Step Guide For Candidate Recruitment, accessed 2017, https://ideal.com/shortlisting/

 

 

 

 

 

Your New Strategy for Gender Diversity in Recruitment

Matters of gender equality are once again a hot topic in Australia. Just last month, high-profile journalist, Lisa Wilkinson left The Today Show, after her request to be paid on par with her colleague, Karl Stefanovic, who was reported to be earning almost double Wilkinson, was rejected by Channel 9.

Further, radio host Dave Hughes from Melbourne Hit 101 station, took a pay cut this year to ensure his female co-host, Kate Langbroek, received pay parity. At the same time, Google has been under fire for gender pay disparities where more male staff have higher-paid roles due to bias recruitment and promotion practices.

With Lisa Wilkinson, Hughsey & Kate, and Google making headlines for gender pay disparities, workplace gender diversity has been on the lips of recruiters around the world. Whether it be pay, diversity or equal opportunities for development, issues of gender equality manifest in many different ways in the workplace, effecting both men and women.

In today’s progressive political climate, companies cannot afford to ignore the growing importance of gender diversity.

In fact, organisations with a balance of men and women are 15 per cent more likely to financially outperform single-gender dominated companies, according to a McKinsey & Company 2015 study. Yet, women hold only 13 per cent of chair positions, 25 per cent of directorships, and represent merely 16 per cent of CEOs, according to the Australian Workplace Gender Equality Agency in 2017. By the same token, men represent only 22 per cent of workers in the Health Care and Social Assistance industry, 30 per cent of workers in Education and Training, and 45 per cent in Financial and Insurance services.

For employers looking to diversify their workplace and promote themselves as an equal-opportunity organisation, there are a number of simple strategies you can adopt today, at minimum cost, to set you apart from your competitors.

Read on to learn how to strengthen your recruitment advertising strategy to improve gender diversity in your organisation, as advised by Recruitment Advertising Team Leader at Employment Office, Jess Harkin.

  1. Identify your company as an ‘equal opportunity employer’

Unless the role you are advertising for allows you to stipulate a particular gender of applicant based on particular legislative requirements – specifying that you will only accept men OR women for a position is discrimination and can potentially get you into all sorts of hot water.

Instead, Jess advises recruiters to include a small note in the job ad identifying them as an ‘equal opportunity employer.’ If you are a male nurse applying for roles that traditionally attract and are filled by women – you are much more likely to apply with confidence for this position than if this line item had been omitted.

For those organisations with an internal policy for equal opportunity employment – why not take it one step further and celebrate this in your advertising? It may be common knowledge within your organisation, but unless your employer brand is well-known within the industry, potential employees won’t be aware of it.

  1. Be aware of gender-coded language

Yep, this is a thing! Believe it or not, certain words in a job description can significantly impact on the likelihood of the reader to apply. Gender-coded language refers to words that are more likely to appeal to one gender more than another. For example, studies show that a job description peppered with traditionally dominant characteristics such as, ‘strong,’ ‘decisive,’ and ‘independent,’ can tend to appeal more to men than women. By the same token, empathetic language such as ‘encouraging,’ ‘supportive’ and ‘committed,’ can tend to garner a stronger emotional reaction from women more often than men.

“Rightly or wrongly, hiring managers use gender-coded language all the time – and often, they’re not aware of it. Most of the time it’s not an issue, however when you have a clear strategy to attract a certain gender pool – having gender coded language that is too heavily skewed in the wrong direction, may have an impact on your success rates.

If you know you want to attract more of a particular sex to your next role, take some time to review your choice of wording for a very simple and subtle way to improve your chances of attracting the right people,” Jess shares.

  1. Distinguish between your ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice-to-haves’

A 2014 study found that, in general, men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the criteria on the job ad, but women apply only if they meet 100% of the qualifications, according to a Hewlett Packard internal report.

Women are perfectionists. (Not overly surprising, right?!!) But this also spills over to when we reflect on our own skills and experiences. When it comes to applying for a job, we are more likely to remove ourselves from the application processes if we don’t believe we tick all the boxes. On the other hand, men tend to have more of an innate confidence in their ability, and thus, are more likely to apply even if they only match a few of the criteria. “The key message to employers is to be very clear in defining your ‘must haves,’ and ‘desirables’. All of the ‘nice to have’ skills and qualifications that aren’t mandatory – leave them out of your ad and just discuss them at interview stage,” Jess advises.

  1. Harness the power of imagery

Another easy way to improve diversity attraction is by showcasing the men and women in your workplace through imagery. This goes for all of your marketing material – everything from job advertisements to your website, careers video and in email communications with candidates.

Jess encourages HR managers to take pictures of their workers in the office or out in the field to keep content authentic. “If you’re in a male-dominated industry and want to attract more women, of course, use more women in your imagery, and vice versa. For example, if you’re recruiting for a machine operator role, which traditionally attracts men, why not include a picture of a woman operating the machine?” says Jess.

  1. Walk the talk

If you aim to be a leader in your industry when it comes to gender equality, it’s critical to showcase the successes of your diverse team to your talent pool.

Jess reflects on her own experience, when she decided to join Employment Office. “I was drawn in by the number of female leaders in the business. I had come from a very male-dominated industry, and so it was refreshing to walk into an executive leadership meeting where 80 per cent of the team were women. It gave me confidence that my contributions and successes would be valued and rewarded on an equal playing field – and I know many other women think the same way. To inspire women (or men if you’re in a female-dominated industry) to apply to your organisation, be proud of your successful staff of both genders, across every level of the business, and share their stories on your website and social media,” Jess advises.

Whether your goal is to attract more women or men, depending on your current recruitment challenge, there are many simple and cost-effective techniques you can use today, to enhance your gender diversity and be recognised as an equal opportunity employer.

Editor’s note: Employment Office Recruitment Advertising Specialists are experts at delivering high quality recruitment campaigns, that will attract the very best candidates to your organisation in the most cost-effective way. Contact our RA Specialists to learn how we can craft an outstanding recruitment advertising strategy so you can begin attracting the high-quality candidates that you need today.

 

 

Sources:

Australian Workplace Gender Equality Agency, 2017

https://www.wgea.gov.au/sites/default/files/Stats%20at%20a%20Glance%20FEB2017.pdf

 

Australian Workplace Gender Equality Agency, 2016 (Female- dominated industry statistic)

https://www.wgea.gov.au/sites/default/files/Gender%20composition-of-the-workforce-by-industry.pdf

 

McKinsey & Company 2015

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters

 

Hewlett Packard 2014. cited in Harvard Business Review blog post

https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified

 

Harvard Kennedy School: Gender-coded language study

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/evidence-gendered-wording-job-advertisements-exists-and-sustains-gender-inequality