What do you mean take ownership of my recruiting?

Ever feel like you're spinning your wheels in your hiring process, only to be left with less-than-ideal candidates? 

It might be time to reconsider your approach. In our latest episode, we, Max and Mike, take you on a deep dive into owning your hiring process. We chat about setting clear expectations, understanding your hiring needs, and developing effective strategies for finding the right candidates. Instead of blaming the market for the lack of good candidates, we encourage you to reassess and refine your strategies. We also underline the importance of striking a balance between speed and quality in hiring, ensuring that you don't compromise the integrity of your process while securing the top talent.

We shed light on crafting informed decisions in your hiring process and fostering a positive work environment. We also discuss how the COVID pandemic has impacted hiring practices and why it's imperative to avoid falling into a crisis mode of hiring. We firmly believe that exceptional effort, extraordinary leaps, and the use of exceptional tools are key to achieving exceptional results in your hiring process. So, join us and learn how to set yourself apart from your competitors, attract and retain top talent, and foster a culture of excellence in your organization. Let's revolutionize your hiring process together!

We love to hear your hiring experience, whether you're a hiring manager with 100s of hires, about to make your first hire, or an applicant that has a story to tell. Share your stories with Max & Mike at hiringexperiencepod@gmail.com

This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not to be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

This is the Hiring Experience the podcast that helps you break down the art and science of hiring. Hosted by Max and Mike friends, founders and creators of rapid hiring, on a mission to bring an end to the resume, bringing you tactical advice to help you attract, select and retain the best talent. This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Max: 0:35

Alrighty. So, building off of what we kind of talked about last week there and wanting to own your hiring process, we find that people need to take control of it and take responsibility for it. The cliche of there's no good people out there is just simply not true, but we've already kind of addressed all that. So we want to move on through the process of what it means to own your process and the expectations that you have for hiring and making sure that when you're out there looking for candidates, you come at it with properly set expectations as well as an understanding of what you're hiring for and what your primary objectives are when filling a role.

Mike: 1:33

Yeah, so I think maybe let's kick off with what ownership in your hiring process means. So what would ownership look like to you in a hiring process? What does that mean overall?

Max: 1:45

Owning your hiring process to us means that you accept that when somebody comes to you and says there's just no good candidates, that's why we can't fill this role. Not accepting that and putting it out onto the market in the fact that, well, there may not be any coming in, doesn't mean that they're not out there, or it doesn't mean that they haven't applied and we haven't missed them. And so it's on us, as the hiring manager or the recruiter or whomever, to take that responsibility and find, maybe, a new way to do things, tweak things and continually work this problem until we get to the point of where we have actually found that suitable candidate.

Mike: 2:33

Yeah, so I think what that looks like as actionable information would be to define your hiring needs, clearly define them, develop your strategy, choose the tools that you're going to implement for that strategy and then ultimately take responsibility for the results, Right? So, like Max said, if there's not the candidate pool that you were looking for, coming in circle back, Did we define the right needs? Did we develop the right strategy? Did we use the right tools? Repeat right, Instead of coming to the conclusion that we did these three things once, the results were not what we were hoping for and it's the fault of the world, right? So?

Max: 3:16

it's this odd thing that we tend to do with hiring that we want to just simply put it out onto the applicants and the candidate market that there's nobody out there that's good enough to work with us, but the odds are we are probably just not identifying them. And so, like Mike said, identifying what you are hiring for is the first step of all of this, and then from there, how you're going to go about it. Are we doing a passive strategy? Are we going to do some sort of active recruiting? Are we using modern technology and tools that allow us to move through this process as fast as possible so we can vet the quality of candidates in a fair standard, but also a rapid sequence, and so that we can identify the candidate before anybody else does, and allowing us to keep it moving and not identify a candidate two weeks later and already have them have been scooped up by somebody else.

Mike: 4:24

Yeah, that'll. You know. We speak a lot about speed and reducing your hiring cycle and the benefits of that, and essentially what that comes down to is if you as a company, have the ability to interview a prospect before your competitors have the chance to even qualify a candidate, then you're 10 steps ahead. Right, Because you have essentially the first go at the biggest pool of talent possible. So your whole process from there will improve, as opposed to when you're slower and when you can't get there quick enough. You're now picking from candidates that have already been either distributed to your competitors so those top tier candidates, your competitors move quicker than you and they're gone already. Right, it's losing out on anything. It's like if you take three weeks to get back to a prospective client, they've probably selected another provider. It's the same thing with your candidates.

Max: 5:23

When we look at this now from the hiring perspective, of a shift in the market that's happened over the last few years obviously coming out of COVID and people being in a situation where their hiring was fluctuating from one side to the other and that all of a sudden they needed to hire more staff, or to the other side, where they needed to lay off or reduce their staff rapidly, and those kind of things made it tough for people to hire.

Max: 5:54

And what we get at from there is that are you still in that hiring crisis mode where you might just be taking everyone off the street because you're like we need bodies, we need people, we need people, we need people, while we preach speed constantly?

Max: 6:13

What we mean by that is Mike said it it's being able to interview and qualify candidates before your competitors have even opened their application. That doesn't mean that you cut the corners of what you're actually looking for, circling back to the beginning of identifying the criteria of what you're hiring. For that part you can't compromise on in the process, because then what you're actually getting is you're filling the seat saying, yeah, we found a person, but you also understand and know deep down that they're not the right fit for this role, but you felt that the need to have somebody there was better than having nobody there until we found the right candidate, and so balancing those two things is also a part of the dichotomy of hiring here, and so you want to make sure that you have assessed that as well as a part of your strategy in that and not taking the note to heart that speed is everything, so therefore we don't need to qualify candidates at all.

Mike: 7:19

There's a definite clarity that we want to add with that. So I think you did a good job of providing clarity around what that means to us, what speed means, and it's essentially doing the little things faster and having all of the necessary information available quicker and having that translatable between everyone involved in your hiring process, as opposed to you know a lot of redundancies introduced and things like that. So you're not again, you're not cutting corners, You're making informed decisions. It's educated speed. It's not speed for the sake of going quicker and you're focusing on the right things with that Right. So coming back to kind of the crisis mode of hiring In the COVID pandemic there was a lot of, like Max said, you're just bringing people in, filling them as quickly as possible, high turnover rates in various different industries, higher than usual, and it was more almost like a constant churn of staffing.

Mike: 8:19

Understanding that you know the pandemic was taking precedence over everything else and how we react to that and how the different processes we have to introduce, the staffing levels we had to introduce, were strenuous for everyone. So a lot of things were compromised on understanding that you cannot keep those practices because they don't result in a cohesive work environment. You can't keep having that turnover rate. You can't keep hiring like you were in the pandemic, where you know you're cutting corners just to get people in the door.

Mike: 8:51

So, having having these informed decisions and making sure that you know you still have an edge over your competitors and you can go quicker, but making those right choices to and being as informed as possible so that you continue to foster a positive work environment and that as well will set you apart from your competitors. So if you can integrate these two things where you're quicker than everyone else and your work environment is better than everyone else, then by nature you'll be attracting and retaining people that are better than everyone else. Right, it's not doing, it's not being average, expecting exceptional results at the end of the day, Like nobody. You can't reasonably think that if I do an average job at everything all the time, I'm going to have magical, exceptional results. You have to put in exceptional effort, you have to take some extraordinary, exceptional leaps and you know, use exceptional tools and then, and only then, will you have exceptional results.

Max: 9:47

I think that kind of sums it up pretty good right there.