Improving Hiring Efficiency

The hiring process must involve something more than just reading a cover letter, examining a resume and sitting down for an interview. Studies have shown that it can cost a company anywhere from 20 to 200 percent of a year’s salary for making an erroneous choice in the hiring process. Ergo, when a human resources director chooses prospective candidates for a position, appropriate steps should be taken in order to efficiently hire the best candidate.

Most companies are taking additional cautions for improving hiring efficiency. One of the tools being used to improve hiring efficiency is a pre hire assessment. Pre hire assessments are a collective set of subjective and objective techniques which cover multiple aspects of the hiring process. Many of you may realize that about 50% of applicants falsify their resume and a smaller percentage of candidates continue to lie throughout their interview. Therefore, these objective steps help to improve the hiring efficiency.

What is considered to be objective in the realm of hiring? Objective assessments are a set of tests which evaluate a potential candidate’s knowledge (regarding the position and company), skills and abilities. Another resource frequently used is a background check. These objective pre hiring assessments will mark the difference between the best candidate for the job and losing 200 percent of a year’s salary.

The main benefits that a company will achieve when using these extra precautions during the hiring process include a reduction in turnover, better performance from the new employee and the most important, an improvement in the hiring efficiency. A company is only as successful as its employees. Therefore, the hiring process is singly the most important faction of a company.

The other difficulty for hiring directors is that hundreds of applications may come in for a single position. Over 50% of those who apply for a certain position are not qualified which causes tedious work for human resources. In addition to the candidates that lie on their resume, human resources must waste their time on people who should not be applying for the specific position. These pre hiring assessments help human resources to reduce the stress and the number of ineligible applicants. Human resources will be able to save valuable time by eliminating those candidates who are not qualified for the position.

These additional hiring assessments are beneficial because they obtain objective data which is useful in the hiring process rather than purely subjective feelings and answers. You can even assess how well these candidates will work in a new environment and how motivated they are to do this job.

About 65 percent of fortune 500 companies use these types of hiring tactics. This does not mean that smaller companies cannot. These pre hiring assessments are actually designed for companies who have a small human resource department and a limited budget. Therefore, this hiring process is beneficial to large companies just as much as smaller companies.