here’s how to raise your recruitment bar with every new hire.

Here’s how to raise your recruitment bar with every new hire Recruitment can happen during the hiring season or outside of it. How your company approaches each new hiring task can go a long way in raising the recruitment bar with every new hire. Today, you do not need to read a management book to understand that people are the most important asset of your company. Collectively, the people in your organisation must make hundreds and thousands of decisions to drive profitability. If they make the wrong decisions, your business loses. Too often managers approach recruitment casually, make off-the-cuff decisions, let their personal biases lead them, and fail to integrate learnings from previous hiring experiences.

Here are three things you can do to raise the quality of talent as well as the hiring process - every time you hire:

Hire based on attitude rather than skills

The best recruitment strategy is to hire for attitude and train for skill, especially in today’s rapidly evolving business environment where adaptability is critical to success. According to a hiring survey, only 19% of new hires succeed and among those who lose their jobs midway, 89% leave due to issues with attitude. Hiring for attitude ensures that employees fit in well with the culture of your workplace and reinforce your employer brand.

So how do you hire for attitude? It is hard to train experienced employees on personal attributes. Be sure to emphasize important attributes upfront in your job description (JD): positive approach to challenges, curiosity to learn new things, and being a people person and team player. For example, if you state that you are seeking extroverts for a public relations role, introverts are less likely to apply. Try to explore the person behind the persona in the resume. Look for subtle hints on how a candidate might have overcome adversity. Active participation in professional networks and community organisations might indicate an outgoing nature, for instance. As part of the hiring process, see if you can have a prospective employee shadow existing employees he is likely to work with and observe the person in action. This also allows you to gather and assess existing employee feedback on the incoming candidate.

Leverage data and surveys

It’s important to understand that the recruitment process does not end with getting the new hire through the door. A post-hire analysis helps you leverage data to improve your hiring for the next time around. The HR team must learn to harvest and analyse recruitment data. Collect as many data points as possible over a six-month to one-year time frame and analyse it for important metrics. For example, consider the application-to-hire ratio. By calculating how many applications you need before you make a hire, you can optimise hiring campaigns. Both excess applications of low relevance and low application volumes that result in long time-to-fill are red flags. With analysis you can determine what went wrong and how you can course correct.

Post-interview surveys help assess candidate impressions on your interview experience, application process and perceptions of your employer brand. For instance, ask how effective the JD was in giving them a good idea of the position or was there any information they would have liked before the interview that was not available to them? By integrating the learnings from data analysis and surveys into your next recruitment campaign you can ensure better outcomes with each round of hiring.

Use hiring panels with more than one person to gain multiple perspectives

To continuously improve your recruitment process and hire great people every time, you need to gather multiple perspectives on each candidate. Hiring panels comprising two or more people are more effective than a one-person panel. This is because multiple person panels help you avoid personal bias that can creep into the hiring process and evaluate candidates from multiple viewpoints for a more balanced assessment.

Raising the bar with each new hire is all about attaching high strategic relevance to the hiring process, being thorough with how you want the candidate to achieve the organisation’s objectives, and approaching the recruitment as a continuous process of analysis and improvement, as opposed to a seasonal or one-off event.