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A guide to turn around your recruiting strategy

September 1, 2021

A complete Guide to Performance Recruiting

While experienced recruiters may take a plethora of other criteria into consideration before hiring, some stick to the old ways of placing performance recruiting above all and wanting no more! To be trustworthy, being a fanatic advocate of each hiring method won’t end in good terms because, like everything else, each method has pros and cons.

Knowing this, what would be the benefits of putting faith in the final numbers of a recruiter? Will you be a fallen victim to an employee’s pure outcome and regret your decisions, or will it be the other way around? Or tired of large bills for tools and applications without a result?

To better realize the effects of performance recruiting, we will crack down its elements in startups – because a vast majority of entrepreneurs are young and inexperienced nowadays – and its benefits in general. It’s worth to mention that opting for the wrong candidate can immeasurably disrupt your working flow, cost you a heck-ton of working time, expanses, energy, and positive team morality, and throw a wrench into your day-by-day tasks.  

Performance-based recruiting in building startups

If you’re hoping to be the next one-in-every-century brain who supervises the wisest and most creative teams of all time, then you should focus on hiring the best-fit candidates. Now, as intriguing as it sounds, you need to put a hold on your urges and push your recruiting staff into performance-based hiring.

That is approximately the best to pay on what brings you the most result. You pay your affiliates and network to recommend candidates, viral your open position, and just get rewarded once you achieve the final goal either to be the hiring or the leads.

Numerous factors are affecting hiring processes in a startup atmosphere. And, as you might have guessed by now, most of them can harm the business. Let’s take a look at some of them here:

Fake Enthusiasm

It’s a hiring interview, and everybody’s after putting on an excellent presentation (we don’t use show here to respect people’s grinding and enthusiasm). Although the digitalization age has utterly reshaped how applicants approach companies and find jobs, and “freelancing” has finally found a place in the working terminology, the competition is still fierce and without remorse. When a job seeker makes it to the last stages of being given a salary, benefits, and insurance, they would absolutely put on their war-face and try to impress.

With these talented sharks in the market ready to take your breath away and live up to your expectations, getting lost in the transition and making errors will be as casual as receiving unrelated applications. So, making a judgment call in these types of situations won’t happen in 90% of the cases, and the wrong candidates will be appointed to the wrong positions, and you will hate your professional life for a good time afterward.

Performance recruitment helps tap into new horizons by enabling your network and community to affiliate awesome candidates.

That is really amazing because the chances are two times higher to better assess a candidate for you who knows the candidate and your company culture.

It helps you gather community around yourself ready to deploy resources to find the one you are looking for and that is by far lower the cost and longer-term sourcing channel.

It provides a translucent path to selecting the immensely qualified and hot candidates capable of carrying your business into the happy-endings!

Emotions Getting in The Way

Everyone’s young, excited, hopeful noobies, with an emotional scurry to reach the stars. Having emotions lose you, the scene of choosing the qualified candidates is a common mistake.

In interviews, you are face-to-face with somebody who has passed every particle you’ve laid in his path to acceptance. They have come out of your startup’s screening procedures heads high and now are ready to win you away in person. Studies show that quite a large number of managers fall victim to their emotions in the physical session and get enticed by what applicants bring forth to the table. After a certain point, leaders think that they have the one-and-only employee in their reach, and they just need to stretch out to convince them to join their team. They stop listening and immediately start negotiating to lock down the candidate and get them onboard. At this moment, leaders and managers have lost it all and ultimately give in to the interview’s vibe.

This shouldn’t be happening to you, and a solid selection process including giving real-world problems to be solved helps you fight such urgent emotions. It allows you to be more rational and never stop evaluating the candidates based on their resume, profile, and potential.

Read more in order to prepare the best bias-free shortlisting process

The Fallout

Recruiting the wrong candidate set your startup back ages and costs you a lot. At this point, you would have two options:

  1. Just go with it and swallow your frustration until the time is right to set up other new interviews and hire the right applicant.
  2. Fire the wrongfully-acquired employee, which will have a catastrophic impact on your company. You have to immediately set up the screening and selection process again, which will cost you a lot, and spend a couple of working days choosing the best-fit.

Either way, there’s no silver lining for you. You will suffer until you get the right guy in the position and finally focusing on growing.

The Performance Profile Index

It’s quite common to mistake the action for motion, especially in today’s workspace. Most of the time, when employees are assigned to roles they don’t fit, the dishonest acts begin, and it’s relatively easy to mistake them for actual beneficial and fruitful actions.

Many hierarchical organizations fall for this act of deception, believing that an unqualified member is doing what they have been tasked with. They always seem to be active and right on the job without missing a beat while it’s just a show. This pattern appears to be repetitive in mis-hirings, which causes a lot of problems and headache for anybody involved.

To eliminate such problems, big organizations turn to performance-based hiring to avoid taking in the wrong candidates. That, however, won’t be sufficient on its own. You need to come up with a performance profile index.

This performance index list helps you determine what goals there is to be achieved and what actions should be taken to reach them. Keep in mind that we pointed out actions, not motions, neither end-goals. Some fixate on the goal in solidity, which undermines the level of effort, struggle, cooperation, and teamwork an employee undergoes to reach the end of the race. A well-rounded performance profile index indicates and highlights employee strides to show how much they have actually contributed to a task or project, instead of only focusing on reaching the end goal.

Performance profile index is a one to three-page performance calibrator that distinguishes a high performer from phony ones in a specific job or role. It’s an updated, more relevant job description list that enlarges each employee’s efforts. This way, the pretenders can be separated from the doers!

Read more to avoid recruitment biases

Vibrant Candidate Pool

We have been over this in the past. Keeping a streamline of qualified and exciting candidates for the unseen future is a must.

Maintaining an active candidate pool filled with potential candidates who are busy in the recruitment sector can be massively beneficial to you and your organization. These pools are the cherry on the top for recruiting agents who are actively searching them for hot and engaged candidates.

  • It is estimated that 15-20% of job-seekers are not actively applying for jobs.
  • A big chunk of candidates almost up to 60% are “Passive Candidates”
  • Combined, these two demographics demonstrate that nearly 95% of the market is comprised of passive candidates.

What these statements tell us is that a considerable chunk of high-performers and top-applicants reside in the 5% remaining market space, which only solidifies the point we are trying to make. Having an always reliable and alive pool of worthy candidates sourcing from your networks is an absolutely critical and life-saving portion of the performance recruiting.

Conduct an “Evidence-Based Interview”

We have all at least once experienced this; we walk into an interview ready for some business-related questions to be thrown at us but what we get instead are unpolished and off-topic questions that not only breaks our mental preparedness but also sometimes end in some kind of argument and other types of destructive back-and-forth conversations that don’t help anybody.

To properly conduct the interview and to keep it from falling apart and being steered into an utter disaster, you, as the interviewer, need to be up for the task. You need to grid out the questions and establish a structure for how they will present to the audience. It’s imperative to write down the right questions on the paper and ask them at the right time.

Read more about the must ask questions in an interview

To better understand how these questions should be formed, you can take note of the following steps:

  1. Correctly Assessing The Job: Knowing precisely what the vacant position requires and the exact job boundaries.
  2. Determining Applicant Competency: In terms of skillsets, knowledge, past experience, personal characteristics, what should be asked from candidates.
  3. Have Behavior-based Interview Questions: The BBI has constructed on the premise that past behavior is a good indicator of a predictable future. These questions help to measure personal manners.
  4. Scoring Scale: Getting only answers won’t cut it. You need a definite and well-balanced scoring system to weigh given answers.
  5. Interview Guide: Having a correct understanding of how the interview process will help stressed and anxious candidates ease up and relax. It also gives them the necessary information to ready up for the big day. Remember, it’s not all about you.

Read more about how to Conduct a Successful Interview

Optimizing Candidate Experience

So far, we have gone through all the things you can do for yourself and how you can take advantage of performance-based hiring techniques to get more out of interviews. Now, it’s time to look at the other side and see how you can help them.

A comfortable and unstressed applicant is more likely to give you a truthful answer, cooperate smoothly, and in some cases, give you fantastic feedbacks that can help you in further interview conducting.

Try to set a good vibe and to make sure that interviewees go through a delightful and memorable experience with your agency. Ensure that all the hiring team meets up with the candidates, encourages them not to miss the opportunity, and that all the expectations are clear. Remember, a smile can too go a thousand miles.

Read more about tips to enhance candidate experience

Sum-up:

Hiring is a tricky procedure, and the people in charge of it go through heaven and hell to do their job right. There’s no foolproof way of doing it, especially when you’re going through the selection of the fittest. Performance-based Hiring is the golden ticket out of sticky situations like this when one slip up can mess everything up for startups and organizations alike and shoot them down the costly pits of mis-hiring.

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