Recent studies into the effectiveness of certain hiring processes and strategies have returned with the surprising result, indicating that perhaps employers should begin considering abandoning the interview process all together. This conclusion has been the result of varying studies the results of which have indicated that statistically anywhere from fifty to seventy-five percent of newly hired employees fail to meet the expectations set for them by their employers at the time of the executive search and interview process. This means that not only does the typical interview process not only fail to successfully allow employers to assess a candidate’s skills and qualifications, it is in fact a major drain on the company’s time and resources given the amount that must be invested in these practices and given that the outcome of these proceedings is likely only to meet with dissatisfaction and mean that the company must begin the process over to make the same mistakes over and over again. Ultimately, in order for companies to escape this cycle of poor hiring decisions and the flagrant waste of resources used in doing so, employers must learn to abandon those traditional hiring practices which tend to center around a dependence on interviews to determine a candidate’s worth.
To answer this problem, there are two primary routes that employers can take. The first solution will mean making an even greater investment in the company’s hiring process, putting more time and money into the interview, background check, and general assessment protocols in order to revise and refine these techniques until they meet the needs of the organization and are capable of effectively finding genuine talent. On the other hand, these strategies can be thrown out altogether. In the place of these traditional and typically unsuccessful systems, employers will need to find a new, more effective means of carrying out their executive search and hiring practices, namely a means which substitutes a more efficient assessment technique in place of the interview process. Here, a number of techniques and strategies already exist for companies to take advantage of, all of which, while taking the interview process out of the equation, have still been shown to be highly effective in allowing employers to make a thorough assessment of a candidate’s skills and qualifications.
To meet this need, many employers have begun thinking outside the box in their development of new hiring strategies, while others have simply relegated these duties to external parties in get the job done for them. Along the former point, some companies have begun using large events to bring their more serious candidates together. Here the employer will have the opportunity to see these individuals interact with one another and with certain of the company’s employees, as well as having the chance to discuss these candidates’ work history and skills in a more open, less stressful environment, allowing them to really get to know these individuals. Other companies, in abandoning interviews, have bolstered their application process, effectually turning it into a series of challenges designed to test a candidate’s skills. On the other hand, many employers have already turned away from the typical hiring practices by hiring out to the professionals at executive search firms and temp-to-hire groups to conduct these processes for them. But whatever the method chosen, given the state of the business world, the economy, and the job market, companies can simply no longer afford to waste so many resources again and again through worn out hiring procedures.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
