Poor candidate fit: Symptoms vs problems
When new employees lack motivation and are a poor cultural fit, these are symptoms that your real problem is that you're focusing on the wrong things during the hiring process.
Not every new hire works out, that's a fact of life, but no employer should accept high employee turnover as an unavoidable cost of doing business. It's tempting to make generalisations like "young people just don't want to work today", but you can't blame new employees for continually not fitting in if you make the same old mistake of hiring on skills and then firing on attitudes down the track.
The impact of poor candidate fit
The significant business impact of poor candidate fit extends far beyond the immediate cost of hiring a replacement. There's also the productivity and morale impact on the rest of your team, which is short-staffed and then forced to train someone new, only to watch them not fit in and eventually leave as well.
Estimates vary, but in the long-run a bad hire can actually cost a business up to 2.5 times the employee's salary, according to a survey by The Australian newspaper.
The problem of poor candidate fit typically stems right back to the very beginning of the hiring process. Employers frequently don't cast their net wide enough when looking for new talent, only sticking with traditional sources like Seek. Even then they're overwhelmed with the response and it leads to poor decisions.
Even if they eventually do manage to identify great applicants, it's often too late because they've already been snapped up by another employer.
Related article: Why recruiters are switching to Predictive Hiring Technology
Meanwhile, your hiring team is spinning their wheels – working hard but not seeming to get anywhere. They're spending a lot of time shuffling paperwork and chasing the wrong candidates, when they could devote that time to the development of your people, your teams and your overall business culture – important tasks which will help build cohesion and further reduce employee turnover.
Identifying candidates who are likely to stay
Expr3ss! predictive hiring makes it easy to open the funnel wide when looking for new employees. Along with Seek, Expr3ss! can be integrated into a wide range of platforms, including free job boards and even your own website. You can also create QR codes to share far and wide, which anyone can easily scan with their phone to quickly apply for a job.
There are major advertising savings to be had from hiring people via free sources, but that's not the only benefit. You now have a much deeper pool of talent, but there's a new challenge: finding the best people becomes a fishing expedition.
Once again, Expr3ss! predictive hiring comes to the rescue by helping you discover the best applicants who should make it through to the interview stage.
When recruiters skim through a huge pile of resumes to decide who makes the cut, they're glancing at skills – but the right skills alone aren't enough to be sure that a candidate is a great fit for the job and your team. You need deeper insights which can't be found in a CV or cover letter.
Related article: Garbage in, garbage out
Expr3ss! short surveys quickly and cost-effectively pinpoint job applicants with the right skills, attitudes, temperament and cultural fit. The surveys typically take around six minutes, and include deal-breaker questions to ensure applicants have all the necessary qualifications and certifications before they are recommended for an interview.
Next, you can apply Expr3ss! benchmarks to see which applicants have not only the right skills and qualifications but also the right attitudes and temperament for the role. You can also use Expr3ss! to better understand your current team, to ensure that new hires are a great fit, so they can hit the ground running.
Straight away this gives you a major head start when it comes to identifying those candidates who will fit in nicely and are more likely to stick around.
Great candidates are often motivated self-starters who can remain calm under pressure, great attributes which you can't see on a resume or necessarily even ascertain from a short face-to-face interview. Yet, knowing someone can keep their cool in difficult situations is especially important if they're in customer-facing roles.
Misjudging applicants because you've only glanced at their skills and don't have any insight into their character is a sure-fire way to ensure that you keep hiring the wrong people again and again.
As well as giving applicants a star rating according to their suitability for the job and your team, Expr3ss! can also flag those great candidates who are likely to be snapped up quickly, so you put them at the head of the queue when arranging interviews.
If new hires keep experiencing the same old problems and don't stick around for long, it's time to ask yourself if you're the problem – because you haven't been asking the right questions when deciding which candidates should make it through to the interview stage.