Hiring is like spinning plates: How to manage talent in your hiring process

Hiring is like spinning plates. Just as the spinner manages plates on a pole, the recruiter juggles candidates through a hiring process.

To be successful in either profession, you need focus, attention to detail and a unique set of skills. You need a strategic plan in place to reach your goals. You have a small margin of error where simple mistakes can be costly.

In this blog, we discuss how can you effectively manage talent in your hiring process and keep the plates spinning?

Plates, like candidates, come in all shapes and sizes. Some break easily and others require more attention. Some breaks are tolerable, and others are devastating. Any professional plate spinner will tell you that success is highly dependent on the type of plate you spin in the first place. Spin the wrong plates from the outset and watch them crash out no matter what you do.

When it comes to talent, all businesses are looking for the expensive china. Yet, with no strategic hiring plan in place, too many are wasting precious time, money and effort focusing on the everyday crockery instead. In this market, businesses need to be targeted in who enters their hiring process. Look beyond the CV and be more proactive and creative in who you identify to enter your hiring process.

Once you know who you’re targeting, the challenge becomes developing an effective hiring process that’ll give you the best chance of hitting your key objectives. The best hiring processes are all underpinned by a well thought out and repeatable strategic plan. A plan that outlines the structure of your hiring process and keeps talent engaged and satisfied throughout. You need to consider the following questions:

• What is your key objective(s)?
• Who are you targeting?
• How will you source them?
• How will you screen them?
• How will you assess them?
• How will you interview them?
• How will you negotiate with them?
• How will you onboard them?

Each question represents a key stage of a typical hiring process where any plate could begin to wobble or fall. The more thought that goes into a comprehensive and harmonious hiring plan the better chance you have of executing it successfully.

An effective hiring process must focus on optimising the talent experience. In a competitive market where talent has more options and bargaining power than usual, creating an experience that positively differentiates you from competitors is key to success. To do this, you need to align your hiring process with the features and benefits that relevant talent wants the most. Talent wants respect, honesty, communication and feedback from employers. They want to feel like they’ve been fairly treated irrespective of if their application is successful or not. With this in mind, be honest in ALL your interactions, be quick in ALL your responses, be constructive in ALL your feedback and treat ALL candidates with respect. Pay the appropriate attention to each plate or watch each plate fall.

An effective hiring process also needs to be agile. Plates won’t spin forever and are more likely to fall the longer you keep them spinning. In this market, take too long and the highest quality plates will be spun by someone else. Talent, just like employers, tend to want to move through a hiring process quickly. Talent is understanding of a business doing their due diligence (interviews, assessments, reference checks etc.), but they won’t sit on their hands for too long. This doesn’t mean you should rush your process; it simply means be prompt in your decision making and don’t leave talent waiting. Otherwise, you risk missing out on talent with skills that are increasingly challenging and expensive to re-find.

Spinning plates is a complex task. As is managing talent through a hiring process. A successful hiring process requires a well thought out end-to-end strategic plan that optimises the candidate experience. This can be achieved by building strong relationships with prospective talent and having an agile and effective hiring process. Your ability to do this will determine if the plates keep spinning. At Ignite, we have established a recruitment process over four decades to help our clients find the talent they need to be successful. We specialise in IT & Digital, Business Support, Engineering, Government, Professional Services and Information Management recruitment. If you need support in your recruitment process, our teams can help.

NEXT ARTICLE

How to future-proof your talent strategy

Do you have a future-proof talent strategy? Alarmingly, only 16% of business lead...

Read More