3 Important Lessons We Learned About Recruitment In 2022

2022 was the year of the Great Refresh. On the heels of the mass resignations hitting the country, there were expectations for mass unemployment rolls - but instead, what happened was historically low unemployment, as people not only chose to work, but chose to work on their own terms.

The shifting economy may yank the rug out from under the labor market in the year ahead, but for now, there are still more job postings than people looking for work, and top talent is scarce on the ground. 

In addition to these immediate concerns, there is a broader shift in mindsets and priorities for both employers and employees to consider when it comes to recruiting. The rapidly changing state of work in the United States demands agility.

Old ways of doing things and traditional expectations no longer apply, meaning hiring managers and their teams must be able to pivot to attract in-demand talent, keep that talent, and avoid having existing talent poached by the competition.

Here are 3 lessons we learned about recruitment in 2022, which we can carry with us into 2023 and beyond.

1. Candidate Expectations Have Increased Considerably

How recruiting is done has been shifting over the past decade, becoming more impersonal and digitized. Candidates have been working hard to keep up and find ways to push their applications to the top of the virtual stack. 

The rise of the applicant tracking system (ATS), automation, and AI-powered filters set candidates up to believe they must “beat the system” in order to stand out from hundreds or even thousands of competitors. 

They buy into the myth that 75% of applications are discarded by ATS without ever being seen by human eyes, and focus on outwitting the algorithm instead of truly showcasing their strengths.

An environment in which there were far more applicants than actual jobs led to an increased willingness to jump through hoops, with candidates complying with expectations to spend hours on multi-page applications and complete assessment after assessment in hopes of an interview.

Today, candidates’ expectations for their experience have shifted considerably. Application processes deemed too difficult will lead to candidates abandoning them midway through and seeking greener pastures elsewhere. 

Likewise, the number of assessments a candidate is willing to complete is shrinking, as job seekers feel increasingly confident of their worth and the value of their time. Other factors can also cause high-quality candidates to self-select out of the hiring funnel, including lack of communication and delays in setting an interview.

These facts shouldn't discourage recruiters; instead, they should serve as guidelines on how to stand out from other employers. Ensuring candidates (and their time) are treated with respect and staying in constant communication goes a long way.

Delivering a superior candidate experience can also entice high-value applicants to stay engaged and develop a rapport with their recruiter, meaning even if they aren’t offered this particular role, they can be pursued for other roles in the future.

Putting the Lesson into Action

TalentWall™ by Crosschq can help pinpoint problem spots in your recruitment process by highlighting where candidate drop-off exceeds expectations. Issues can be discovered and rectified, making it easier to keep top talent interested.

It can also serve as a way to ensure recruiters and hiring managers stay attuned to each other and to their candidates, helping them see at-a-glance where a candidate is in the hiring funnel and what needs to happen for them to advance to the next stage.

2. Traditional Pre-Hire Screening Processes Aren’t That Reliable

Three of the main pre-hire screening processes used to evaluate a candidate - assessments, the reference check, and the interview - simply aren’t as good as they should be at helping hiring managers choose good candidates. 

Assessments

Pre-hire assessments have been used extensively to thin out the application pool, but many of them aren’t that good at predicting post-hire performance. In fact, one assessments study by Crosschq Data Labs revealed that a very popular pre-hire assessment actually had an inverse relationship with post-hire performance: candidates who scored well on the test later performed poorly as employees.

Reference checks

Traditional reference checking is extremely time-consuming and doesn't yield much in the way of usable data on candidates. It’s also highly subject to unconscious bias, and information gained from impromptu interviews can vary widely, making it difficult to fairly compare candidates.

Interviews

Interviewing data from Crosschq Data Labs revealed that interviewers also weren’t highly accurate at predicting how well a candidate would do after hiring. This seemed to be connected to the fact that most interviewers had only done the task once or twice before, and results improved when interviewers did the job regularly. However, interviewing is also possibly the recruitment stage most vulnerable to unconscious bias, and could be hampering DEIB initiatives and preventing organizations from building diverse, innovative teams.

Putting the Lesson into Action

Carefully consider which assessments you use, and how much weight you give results when making hiring decisions. Making assessments a major pass/fail requirement for candidates to move to the next stage could be robbing you of top talent.

Avoid bias in hiring and gather more and better information on your candidates by switching to a digital candidate checking process like Crosschq 360 that removes unconscious bias for reference checking and lets candidates score themselves against the same set of questions their former peers and managers will be using to provide a clear picture of their abilities and other attributes.

Be interview ready. Consider switching from a one-on-one interview method to collaborative interviews, with a team including the hiring manager, departmental head, and key team members a new hire will be working closely with. This can help cancel out individual biases, and provide a better take on whether or not the candidate will add value and mesh with the company culture.

3. Quality of Hire Is Your Most Critical Hiring Benchmark

Quality of Hire is a measurement of the value an employee provides your company. It can be based on a variety of other metrics, from hiring manager satisfaction to performance to retention and more. It can also change over time, as more data is added, making it almost like an employee's “credit score” in the trustworthiness department.

Identifying candidates in the recruitment pipeline with the potential for high Quality of Hire has become one of the most important parts of hiring. Why? Filling a role with a poor-performing employee or one who will leave within the month is not cost-effective and can damage productivity and morale.In contrast, focusing on Quality of Hire as a priority has been linked to better performance, longer retention, increased revenues, enhanced morale, and reduced costs.

Putting the Lesson into Action

How do you measure the potential Quality of Hire in untried candidates in your hiring pipeline? The best way is by benchmarking Quality of Hire across your organization using Crosschq’s Quality of Hire Scorecard. This helps you understand what your average Quality of Hire is, and where improvements can be made.

It also helps you pinpoint which employees have the highest Quality of Hire scores, so you can look for similarities between them. Ultimately, the goal is to build candidate profiles that match those of your best employees, then match candidates from your pipeline to those profiles.

You can also use Crosschq Analytics to follow new hires through their first 90-365 days, leveraging simple surveys to see who is doing well and who is struggling. This gives you a chance to identify new hires who are struggling, and help them do better.

You can also continue to use the scorecard to measure Quality of Hire in each newly recruited cohort, and track which recruitment strategies are delivering new hires with the greatest potential. 

Are you ready to find out how Crosschq can help you carry the lessons from shifts in recruitment into 2023 and beyond?

Contact us for a free demo and find out how focusing on candidate experience, screening best practices, and Quality of Hire can help to elevate and future-proof your workforce.