Dr. Steven Hunt, Chief Scientist at Kronos, Inc, recently published a 3 part series in the ERE Daily examining how companies should pursue making hiring decision in a tight labor market. Although, I did not read parts 1 & 2, I agree with Dr. Hunt’s statement “readjusting hiring standards may actually be the easy part” for Human Resources and Staffing Departments to consider. However, I do not agree with his statement “the challenge is likely to be maintaining these standards in the face of mainly pressure from organizational leaders and to ‘hire anyone who breathes’”. I propose if Human Resource Departments, Staffing Departments and Hiring Managers understood the key areas affecting a candidate’s hiring experience and continually evaluated their processes for necessary improvements that both the quality of the candidate’s hiring experience will improve and in tandem the quality of hire will improve. Thus, HR would not have to even entertain lowering their standards in a tight labor market.
Within the last 18 months, Bernard Hodes has introduced a new product offering - QTrac. QTrac is an analytical and benchmarking tool which measures the ROI in 4 areas that impact a company’s employment brand. Areas of impact are; source of hire, recruiting process effectiveness, employment brand and retention. QTrac captures the voice of the employee and translates it into robust HR Metrics identifying trends, strengths and areas for improvement with an organizations candidate experience. From a HR perspective the advantage of obtaining such HR Metrics - priceless.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand as the reader reading this article you perceive my opinion as biased since I am part of the Bernard Hodes QTrac Team- perhaps a little. However, it was only a short while ago when I sat in the Human Resources Manager’s chair trying to support the company’s revenue goals, operational goals and shareholders return on invest by attempting to control turnover, increase retention, build leadership bench strength and find the “best people” for our open positions. I would sit in meeting after meeting brainstorming for new ideas, programs, initiatives and attempt to uncover “Best Practices” to implement. We would struggle to obtain data from HRIS to support the effectiveness or success of the initiative. Typically, this lead to the HRIS department manually manipulating data to develop information that remotely satisfied our needs. While attempting to do the best to support our talent and find new talent we had Hiring Managers and Senior Executives asking us questions we really didn’t have answers to. So with all these dynamics playing out all at once, yes there might have been a time or two when someone was hired just to have the positioned filled with “someone breathing”. Can you relate?
