Using our heads to solve your Reward challenges.
In today's tight labour market, organisations often find themselves competing to secure the best talent. Establishing a positive employer brand with attractive benefits and competitive salaries is only part of the equation for attracting top candidates. True success lies in selecting the best person for the job, ensuring they possess the right skills, whilst still being able to provide a challenging opportunity so that individual has room to grow and hence is more likely to stay with the organisation. This is a both an opportunity and a key risk.
Organisations are constantly striving to maximise the cost-effectiveness of their hiring processes, aiming to minimise both time and cost per hire. This often involves leveraging AI to streamline certain stages, such as shortlisting. However, while financial metrics are important, one of the key indicators of successful recruitment lies in the new hire turnover rate. Whilst a healthy turnover rate may bring fresh perspective and foster innovation, excessive voluntary departures, especially within the first 6 months, have implications that can go beyond a financial cost to the business.
When an employee prematurely exits the organisation, as well as the direct re-recruitment cost, there are other costs. While it's natural for new hires to require time to acclimatise to reach optimal productivity levels, a clear mismatch between their skills and role requirements can lead to substantial daily performance challenges. This can disrupt certain operations and place additional strain on the team, potentially lowering morale and ultimately affecting company profitability. Prolongedly unfilled vacancies in key roles can also result in projects being left undone, negatively impacting organizational outcomes and competitiveness.
Another consequence of poor hiring decisions is the potential harm to the employer brand. When employees feel that their roles were oversold during the hiring process, often due to pressure to hire quickly, it can lead to the employee experiencing frustration. In some cases, they may doubt their competency and professional worth, where in reality they were wrongly selected and put in a situation of being unable to fulfil unrealistic expectations placed upon them. This negative experience can make ex-employees keener to spread their negative experience through word-of-mouth or leave unfavourable reviews, hindering the company's ability to attract talent in the long run.
While it's understandable to want to have the best talent on board, it's equally important to ensure a match between the candidate and the role. Overqualified professionals may quickly become disengaged and seek other opportunities if they don't see a chance for development or career progression. Additionally, employees may resign shortly after employment due to misalignment with the company's values and culture, working hours, or unmet flexibility or financial expectations.
This is why an effective recruitment process, focused on quality hires, may prove more cost-effective in the long-term than solutions dominated by minimising time and cost. This is especially relevant for key or specialist positions, where a professional's expertise directly impacts organisational outcomes. A robust recruitment process begins with well-written job descriptions that accurately reflect the responsibilities and day-to-day duties and a good understanding of the role. This should be followed by effective skill-based assessments to ensure candidates have the required level of each role-relevant skill to maximise the chance of selecting the right match.
After getting the basics right, it's crucial to remember that the interview is an important part of the process, where the potential relationship begins. It should be founded on honesty regarding the role, workload, and benefits to prevent disappointment when reality does not meet expectations. This highlights the importance of using an interview as an opportunity to ensuring a mutual fit, where both the company and the candidate's expectations are met, enhancing the likelihood of a long-term employment relationship. Such a relationship enables individuals to thrive and perform at their best while aligning with the company's objectives, ultimately contributing to sustainable organisational outcomes.
When Reward Heads resources Reward roles for clients and indeed ourselves, we use a robust assessment process built to understand the skills, knowledge and experience required for the role and match that to what each candidate brings. We started using a bespoke framework that we initially developed to ensure that we knew the skills and knowledge of our own team and use it to set learning objectives so that not only could they develop but also so that we can offer ever more to our clients. We customised this for external recruitment and use it to bring new talent into our own team so that we know it works. We then use experienced Reward consultants to interview to truly understand this assessment and the candidates CV. It is not enough for someone to say that they have run a pay review, we explore exactly what their role was, what went well, what improvements they would make for next time, how they ensure fairness and consistency and so on.
We would love to support you to recruit the best reward talent for your organisation. Please let us know if we can at rewardsolutions@rewardheads.co.uk
Klaudia Nastanska - HR Coordinator