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The War for Talent: Why You Can’t Fill Open Positions Part 6: Low Priority on Hiring Processes

In this eight-part series, we will take a close look at eight different factors that will affect your company’s ability to attract and retain top talent in the marketplace.

Most business leaders readily agree with the idea that building a team of high quality people is vital to the success of the business. They want top talent because they know they need the skills and knowledge those employees bring to the table. However, when it comes down to the nitty gritty of the hiring process, those lofty ideals often fly out the window. It can be hard to make room in the schedule for interviews, reference checks, and feedback, especially when 20 or 30 other urgent tasks are clamoring for attention. Unfortunately, when hiring processes continually get pushed to the back burner, the organization as a whole suffers.

Why You Never Get Around to Hiring Good People

The hiring pace of your organization has direct impact on what kinds of candidates you will hire. The war for talent waits for no one, and you may end up narrowing your options by default as high-demand candidates get tired of waiting and move on to your competitors. Because the success of your organization depends on enlisting quality people, hiring should rank near the top of your priority list. That’s not always the case, however. Hiring pace can be affected by several factors:

  • Budget Approvals—If your budget is tight, it may be difficult to get approval for new hires. The danger here is that budget hang-ups can leave candidates marking time for weeks while you wait for the green light.
  • Access to Decision Makers—When key people are on vacation or out of the office on a business trip, the hiring process gets stalled.
  • Heavy Workload—Busy schedules and full calendars often mean that candidate selection and interviews take low priority, both for hiring managers and for decision makers.
  • Meetings vs. Interviews—Internal meetings often end up outranking interviews. Because interviews deal with candidates who aren’t yet part of the team, they can seem less critical than issues pertaining directly to sales or business growth.

How to Shift the Cultural Attitude Toward Hiring

While you can’t always control all of the factors above, the key issue is cultural attitude. When leadership views hiring as a priority rather than a burden, processes tend to flow more quickly. This shift in thinking can be facilitated by placing emphasis on the critical nature of hiring:

  • Recognize that hiring the right people affects every aspect of your business success. This is the key issue in the war for talent. In order to move your business forward, you need quality people with the skills and knowledge to facilitate growth.
  • View hiring as a vital role for decision makers, not just a symbolic approval. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, told Entrepreneur that he always participates in hiring senior-level employees, even if it means flying candidates to his private island at company expense. Why? Because he believes that success depends on delegating key areas of the business to people who can make them thrive.
  • Identify areas of weakness and realize that in order to move forward, you must address them. One of the keys to successful hiring is finding people who have the strengths needed to offset weaknesses within the company. Failure to make this a priority will hinder growth.
  • Connect HR activities to the bottom line. It’s easy to disassociate hiring from the core pursuits of the business. That’s because the impact of certain activities (sales, marketing, etc.) on the bottom line is obvious, but hiring can seem like a separate, less important, category. Nothing could be further from the truth.
  • Recognize the risk of losing top talent if you don’t move quickly. The best candidates most likely have several options available to them. A sluggish hiring process may be enough to send them on to the next organization.
  • Assess the consequences for your employer brand. Your hiring process can present your business as one that values quality candidates or, conversely, as one that minimizes the worth of its people. By giving greater priority to the hiring process, you also prioritize the people involved in that process.

Facilitating this shift in cultural attitudes toward hiring will also help manage candidate expectations during the hiring process. When your hiring manager can confidently answer questions about next steps and time frames, you will be in a better position to maintain positive interactions with candidates even if a hang-up in the process does occur.

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