Hiring new employees is expensive and costly. It’s been found that “an average company loses anywhere between 1% and 2.5% of their total revenue in the time it takes to bring a new hire up to speed.”
What happens during your typical selection process?
Recruitment could be seen as a mindless task – you’re looking for an individual who will fill the technical gap within your team. However, it is vital to not purely recruit for technical skills. With the cost of hiring a new employee exceeding the cost of retaining an employee, recruitment process optimization is necessary, where you want to be able to ensure you’re hiring top talent that will stay with your firm in the long run. Therefore, soft skills and rapport with your team are important contentions to be considered, as you want to be able to grow your firm alongside this employee in the long run.
The importance of hiring a good candidate cannot be overstated.
According to the US Department of Labor, the average cost of a poor hire is up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings. The CEO of Link, however, put the average of hiring a bad hire as high as $240,000. With the economy just starting its boom period and with the future still uncertain, it’s important not to spend your recruitment budget freely on just any candidate – you want to find someone who will add significant value to your firm and someone who will invest in the growth of your organization.
With all this in mind, let us walk you through our in-house recruitment process and show where emotional intelligence plays a key role in optimizing your hiring process, especially in recruiting young talent.
Step 1 – Where are Your Gaps?
The first step in recruitment is understanding the gaps on your team.
You need to determine your team’s or organization’s goals – what are you trying to accomplish? Then, ask yourself, your hiring manager, and your team what technical and soft skills you have and which ones you’re missing. For instance, get your entire team to take a few leadership assessments such as the MBTI, EQ, or DiSC Assessments, to see where your strengths and development opportunities lie.
These three tests measure different aspects of an individual’s abilities, preferences, and priorities.
- The EQ Assessment assesses how well individuals understand, express, and manage their emotions and are in tune with others given life’s daily challenges.
After taking the DiSC Assessment, for instance, your team might be mainly “C”s (Conscientiousness) and lacking in individuals who are D’s (Dominance), i (Influence), or S’s (Steadiness). C’s are very analytical, reserved, precise, private, and systematic. Therefore, when looking for applicants, you might want to look for individuals who are D’s, i’s or S’s so your team can be more well-balanced. You may want some direct and results-oriented individuals to drive your team forwards (D’s), or some outgoing and enthusiastic individuals to motivate and encourage your team to sell their ideas (I’s), or some patient and tactful individuals to think processes through carefully and ensure every idea and individual on the team is supported (S’s).
Jot those wants down when you’re writing out a job posting and designing the requirements for your dream employee. Now here’s the key thing when writing out your job posting – you can’t just look at the technical gaps within your organization and call it a day, you also have to focus on the emotional gaps within your organization. Companies are made up of humans, not machines. And humans have emotions, which can often influence their behavior, communication, and attitudes. By hiring for soft skills (alongside hard skills), you can ensure that your newest employees will fit in well with your organization’s values, culture, and team norms.
After writing down your requirements, how do you get top applicants to apply for your position? You need to be able to sell your organization and why it is the best place to work. Show your potential applicants you care and that you lead from the heart. To learn more about improving (and selling) your employees’ experience to attract top talent, check our case study on Google as a top employer and download our worksheet on how you can become one here.
Step 2 – Sifting Through Your Applications
Once you post your job posting, you can expect some job seekers who are mindlessly mass-applying to roles, but also some genuine and promising applicants. As you’re sifting through your applications, consider their technical skills, candidate experience, and what kind of individual you are looking for.
It is essential to determine what your dream employee would look like, what emotional skills your dream employee would need to succeed at their job. For instance, if you were hiring for a marketing lead, they would have to be influential, innovative, and strategic to lead your marketing team. From an emotional intelligence skills standpoint, you want to find someone who scores highly in optimism, independence, flexibility, self-regard, and problem-solving.
We recommend seeing what other platforms your potential candidates have listed their credentials on to understand who they are as individuals – whether it be looking them up on Linkedin, or other forms of social media. Although social media can’t give you the full picture of who your applicants are, you can see what other experience they have that’s not posted on their resume.
Step 3 – The Interview
Now, we’re getting to the exciting stage – the interview process, where you finally get to meet your applicants and communicate with them in real-time. With technology advancing rapidly and the pandemic accelerating the transition to digital workspaces, virtual interviews are becoming more common, and are here to stay.
Video interviewing allows you to gather different sorts of information about the candidates that you’re meeting with. In Mehrabian’s novel, Nonverbal Communication, 55% of what people hear is body language, 38% is from the tone of voice, and 7% is words. Therefore, make sure you pay attention to what your candidates are saying verbally and nonverbally. This can provide a lot of insight into their skills and level of comfort on some of their communication and social skills.
When conducting your virtual interview, we also have a list of things to look out for and questions that pertain to the EQ competencies that we are looking for. For instance, one of our favorite questions to ask is: “Tell me an example of when you were under large amounts of stress and came out of it on top.” This gives insight into your applicant’s emotional response when met with stress, along with how long it takes them to bounce back and the actions they take to manage their anxieties, and how they complete their deliverables – is it handed in on time and of high quality?
To gain access to the rest of our interviewing checklist and sample of great emotional intelligence interview questions, sign up for our newsletter here and we’ll give you access to our subscriber exclusive resources.
Step 4 – Sample their Work
This step may be optional but is telling of your top candidates’ skill levels in various aspects. Whether it may be asking your applicants for their portfolio, or past projects or even small assignments such as editing a blog post, or conduct and presenting a brief analysis on your organization, this extra step in your recruitment process will help you separate the candidates that are serious about your company to those who are mass applying for positions.
This will also give you a sense of how your candidates (or potential employee) may work. For instance, this can give you a sense of how this individual works – how early or late do they hand in their deliverables to you? And at what quality do they hand in said assignments?
In this step, we also typically ask our short-listed candidates to fill out an MBTI and EQ Assessment. These assessments can give you a better idea of what each applicant is like, what gaps they may fill, and how they may fit in with your team. Not only will these assessments speak to their strengths, but also areas of improvement. They can provide you with insight on how to develop them within your firm, and their potential for growth inside your organization.
Step 5 – The Selection
After conducting all your interviews, this is where you have to make a decision. Comparing all your candidates in terms of certain criteria side by side, and weighing the criteria in order of importance, you’ll have to decide which employees’ skills suit the needs of your organization. Conduct reference checks with your top applicants to get confirmation that their resume and skillsets are true to who they are. Which candidate will you choose to stay with your organization in the long run, and do they resonate with your values and culture? What ideas do they have in store for you, and how much did they prepare for your interview?
Now, the recruitment process doesn’t just end when your dream candidate accepts your offer of employment. After welcoming your new hire to your firm, you must ensure that you have a seamless onboarding process so your new recruit feels comfortable and can transition smoothly into your organization. Conduct frequent check-ins with your newest hire so they aren’t overwhelmed and know that they are supported.
Show your newest hires that you care about them, that you’re invested in their growth and success, and they’ll return the favor by investing back into your organization and going above and beyond. You can learn more about onboarding your newest hires in our blog post here.
What is your firm’s current recruitment strategy? How successful have you been in attracting top talent? To learn more on how to become the employer of choice, and optimize your recruitment strategy, sign up for our biweekly newsletter here, where you will receive our latest updates, an inventory of free resources, and much more!
If you need further support on developing the best recruitment process for your firm, book a call with me here; I’d love to listen and provide support in any way I can.
Or learn more about how you can design the optimal recruitment process and find your dream employee to fit in with your strong team through our High Performing Teams keynote or about developing your communication skills through our Communicating with an Impact keynote.
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