Maybe you’ve seen the current Vox article stuffed with real-life tales of nightmare hiring processes. The painful tales vary from two-month-long interview processes, requiring references to finish a 15-minute questionnaire, six interviews with 9 folks, and the listing goes on. Whereas your organization most likely doesn’t commit these actual sins, it’s totally doable that there are different painful points of your course of.
A current Management IQ research requested leaders and workers, “In case you modified your title in your resume and utilized on your present job, do you suppose you’d make it by your organization’s screening course of?” Sadly, solely 39% of workers felt they’d positively make it by their firm’s present hiring course of.
It’s a disturbing discovering, nevertheless it’s additionally the important thing to testing whether or not your present interview course of is a nightmare. To take action, it’s price utilizing an method that has been a staple of shopper and advertising and marketing analysis for many years: secret buyers.
Collect some pals, colleagues, or trusted high-performing workers, change their names, anonymize their resumes as acceptable, and enter them into your hiring course of. Chances are you’ll have to create some new emails for them and, if you wish to get actually intense, possibly even buy a number of pay-as-you-go cell telephones. Your secret shopper candidates most likely gained’t make it by the complete interview course of with out being found, however sometimes they will progress far sufficient to disclose severe flaws.
To take this even additional, choose a number of of your most fierce or feared rivals and have your secret buyers conduct the identical train together with your competitors. You’ll not solely reveal the issues in your organization’s hiring and interview processes, however you’ll additionally get a a lot clearer benchmark towards which to measure your comparative strengths and weaknesses.
The issues you’ll reveal in a course of like this vary from the mission-critical to the mundane. Maybe you’ll study that candidates are being advised that they’ll have to current a whole and fully-researched advertising and marketing plan to even qualify for an interview. You would possibly uncover that it takes actually 40 to 50 mouse clicks to submit an software by your recruiting web site.
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Now, it’s nearly definitely the case that a lot of the flaws you uncover aren’t coming from the expertise acquisition crew however from hiring managers and executives. And that’s why this course of is so helpful. A secret-shopper kind of method provides you real-life examples of the issues within the interview and hiring course of. It’s one factor to inform executives that the expertise acquisition crew feels just like the interview course of must be streamlined. It’s fairly one other factor to say, “We require six interviews with 9 completely different hiring managers, whereas our greatest competitor solely requires three interviews. And that’s why they’re successful proper now.”
There are inconsistencies and flaws in just about each piece of the hiring and interview course of. For example, one hiring research found that 4 out of 5 hiring managers couldn’t pinpoint the issues in a collection of interview questions. And one other research reveals that 62% of HR executives suppose that their firm’s hiring managers are inconsistent in how they interview candidates.
The important thing to fixing these points, whether or not they’re minor or full-blown nightmares like within the Vox article, is to floor and showcase them. A secret-shopper method, whereas a bit of labor, is a robust and visceral strategy to begin the method.