By Dean Klovens

Human resource assessment programs throughout the world are designed to enhance job prospects and employment opportunities, while identifying skilled professionals and top talent for business. Assessing skills coupled with the need to understand cultural fit between the candidate and company is essential to avoid extra cost and slowdowns in production. We believe that business leadership, both domestic and foreign, need to know the risk factors when they fail at identifying the “right” person for the position. The point here is how to avoid this costly and time consuming problem.

Risk Factors in Human Capital Investments

We want to emphasize there is uncertainly and unpredictability in hiring that can adversely affect business planning and subsequently hurt a company’s profit margin and bottom line. Bad hiring leads to increased recruiting, legal, and insurance costs, a potential slowdown in productivity and a hit on business reputation. In addition to the aforementioned, the overall expense in making new hires can range anywhere from $250,000 to $350,000. Therefore, having a strong recruiting plan requires time and effort in order to ensure the right individual is selected.

In today’s world we are witnessing more competition amongst companies in order to identify, interview and hire the best talent for the best price. We do this in order to avoid the problems we encounter when a new employee just doesn’t work out. This may occasionally be unavoidable, but companies need to have a plan in place to limit future such situations as much as possible. Prevention is key and a strong knowledge of placing people in the right culture and fit is what it takes to make that hire successful and a good investment in human capital development.

Word to the Wise: It’s the Culture

Companies can’t afford to risk the high price of poor performers. The importance of culture and fit cannot be stressed enough. Leadership must include culture fit as an effective factor for hiring people, one at least as important as skills and education. For example, if you work in a time sensitive industry, one aspect to consider when interviewing is to determine how a candidate would perform in a fast paced environment. Someone who is too slow to get work done in a reasonable time frame isn’t going to be a good hire no matter how well they may otherwise do the job. One must have a good idea of factors like these in considering whether a person is fit or not before making a hire.

Another tool used by businesses to determine the capabilities of the candidate is to conduct a personality test such as DISC or Myers-Briggs; these programs provide insight into a candidate’s strengths as a leader and his or her capabilities as a decision maker.

Hiring the Right Person Prevents another Headache

The discussion here briefly focused on the risks American companies, big and small, domestically or internationally, confront when a person they believe is a good hire ends up being just the opposite. There is an adverse impact on margins, company reputation, expenses, and productivity, to name a few, if bad hires occur.

If you’re company is ready to commit to having a first class recruiting program email John Ruh (john@johnruh.com) or call him at 773-775-6636 and ask him to run a free 1 hour session on Recruiting Like A Pro at your business.

Where does recruiting belong?

It belongs in Marketing because good recruiting requires good marketing. Or, it can be put in a separate department (your recruiting department can be done in house or it can be outsourced) that reports to the president/GM.

Here is why:

Can you imagine any major sports teams (which have the best recruiting methods by far), letting their HR Manager or CFO do recruiting only when he/she has the time? Of course not! This is a very time consuming process and the recruiter must have a combination of hunter skills, the time to devote to it (a minimum of 30 hours to do a quality search) and internet technology know how. Most of the time is spent sorting the cream from the milk. Taking short cuts is the best way to miss out on the perfect fit.

And here is the good news no recruiter will tell you:

The recruiting paradigm made a 180 degree shift when the Internet came into being. Candidates went from private to public domain. Now you can reach anyone if you have the right technology and know how. Just like marketing, it calls for the expertise on how to use today’s internet options properly.

The new paradigm costs less!

Contingency recruiting is an obsolete paradigm and a new model is available to you that costs less and does a better job. You can now have an outsourced contract recruiter (or an employee who serves as your recruiter, full or part time) who knows your culture and your people and is paid on a time and materials basis. You can now afford to have a five-step, leading-edge recruiting model so your program can achieve its’ goal, which is providing two to three candidates who are an 8, 9 or 10 (on a scale from 1-10) and who fit into your culture.

The Final Benefit

When you have this in place your managers can expect a 7+ performance out of existing employees because they know they can now replace a poor worker and find an 8, 9 or 10. P.S. Call or email for a one-time one hour facilitated discussion with your managers on the 5 steps to recruiting right.