The Math of Candidate Quality

The Math of Candidate Quality

One of the most misunderstood concepts in recruiting is candidate quality. When you deal with a small number of candidates, it’s easy to think finding great people is easy. As you scale your recruiting efforts up, something surprising happens:

When I get more applicants, the quality goes down! I have to do a lot more work to find interesting and hireable people.

Unfortunately, recruiting is subject to the Law of Large Numbers. The law of large numbers states the larger the sample size, the more the results will trend toward their expected value.

Consider this:

10 applications 4 qualified, 40% Quality

100 applications 14 qualified, 14% Quality

1000 applications, 132 qualified, 13.2% Quality

10,000 applications 1,290 qualified 12.9% Quality

When you only have a few candidates, things can look unnaturally easy. As you get more candidates, you see the quality decrease. But you know what? That’s ok. It’s how math will always work. The more you scale up, the more accurate your measure of quality will actually be.

Ok, so what is a quality candidate, anyway?

The standard way to measure that is simply to figure out what percentage of candidates are actually qualified:

A better way to measure quality

Around 30-40% of candidates will never engage with your recruiting efforts. Whether you call, text, or use smoke signals doesn’t matter. They will simply not respond. We believe the best measure is the percentage of qualified and engaged candidates. Here’s the math:

This is hard to measure if you don’t have a communications hub like Pivot. But when you do, you can analyze your candidate sources for the number of engaged candidates they supply… and you’ll be surprised by the difference between sources. Ultimately, there is one inescapable rule:

You cannot hire people you cannot talk to.

Recruiting Shouldn’t Be an Emergency.

Recruiting Shouldn’t Be an Emergency.

If you feel like making hires is always done in fire drill fashion, you are not alone. It’s especially hard to recruit well when you are small or you are not a hyper-growth startup. If you think about it, the reason recruiting feels like an emergency is simple:

 

 

 

 

Since we don’t hire every day, we don’t give it every-day priority.

Rule 1: Always be recruiting.

Rule 2: See rule #1.

The single biggest recruiting mistake is stopping. Why is it a mistake to stop recruiting?

• It takes lead time to restart the recruiting engine.  It takes time to push buttons, refresh content, and post jobs.

• It costs money to restart the engine. You’ll have to sponsor jobs to get candidates quickly.

• You will not build a talent community,which further increases future recruiting costs.

• Managers will retain poor performers because they don’t have confidence there will be a new person quickly.

• You’ll fail to exploit opportunity if you can’t staff up quickly.

You don’t have to have every job in the company posted all the time. There are reasonable limits. But you should always be recruiting for positions like:

Sales, Engineering, Production (people who make the product, provide service or bill hours), and Administrative Support

So, what do you do if someone applies and you just can’t hire them? It’s easy:

“That position is filled. Would it be OK if I reached out to you if the job opens in the future?”

Most candidates will happily say, “Yes,” and when you do go to make a hire, you’ll have people you can reach out to start the process immediately.

 

Eat Your TOFU ( Top of Funnel)

Eat Your TOFU ( Top of Funnel)

We get to look at a lot of recruiting pipelines. There’s a pretty consistent pattern:

There’s not a lot of engagement at the top of the funnel. When there is, it’s usually a chatbot that is putting candidates on hold for a few weeks until recruiters have time to work on the req.

Early pipeline engagement doesn’t happen on a schedule, and if we really want to make hires, it requires almost instant attention. Applicants just aren’t going to wait for recruiters who are stacked up with interviews, hiring manager calls, onboarding, and team meetings to call next week. In fact, this alone is a great reason to look at the SDR model:

What if someone was able to get to talent within a few minutes?

What if that person kept driving the pipeline for the recruiters? How many qualified candidates would get away?

Well, we’ve been doing this for two years. Pivot Live is a team of live humans that hook up to your inbound and outbound recruiting funnel and engage quickly. Every time. (Our human conversational recruiting specialists engage in an average of 5 minutes and four seconds after candidates apply or respond to the outreach).

The results? Well, Gartner’s SDR study wasn’t far off:

We generally increase the number of candidates who make it to an interview by 65%.

We reduce the advertising cost per candidate by an average of 50%.

Recruit Smarter, Not Harder! How to Make Technology Do the Heavy Lifting

Recruit Smarter, Not Harder! How to Make Technology Do the Heavy Lifting

We all know that recruiting can be daunting, especially when you have a large pool of candidates to choose from. However, with the right technology, you can recruit smarter, not harder, while maintaining the human touch.

 1. Identifying the Right Tools for Your Team

One of the most critical steps in making technology work for you is identifying the right tools for your organization. Many different software programs and platforms are available to help streamline the recruitment process. These tools can help you sort through resumes, schedule interviews, and even conduct initial screenings.

2. Reaching the Right Audience

Another critical factor in using technology to recruit smarter is ensuring that your job postings reach the right audience. By using targeted job boards and social media platforms, you can increase the visibility of your job postings and attract more qualified candidates.

3. Keep it human 

Finally, it is essential to remember that while technology can be a valuable resource, it should never replace the human touch in recruitment. Make sure you are still taking the time to interview candidates and get to know them personally.

By following these tips, you can make technology work for you and recruit smarter, not harder!

 

Recruiting Takes a Lesson from Wartime Logistics

Recruiting Takes a Lesson from Wartime Logistics

One of the most often misunderstood aspects of fighting wars is the importance of logistics. You can’t fight for long without food, fuel, ammunition, and replacement troops. 

In warfighting, logistics are pretty much everything. General Dwight D. Eisenhower put it best, “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.”

We save the accolades for brilliant tactics and strategy. Tactics and strategies, however, were assured success by boring, old logistics. In WW2, for example, only 3 in 10 US soldiers actually served in a combat role. The rest were truck drivers, deckhands, mechanics, radio operators, and a myriad of other support roles which might have never seen the front line. And yet their contribution decisively won the war.

Ok, so why does this matter in the talent acquisition world?

No CEO ever got accolades for incredible recruiting. Their bonuses are based on their profits which they can quickly pad to look better by cutting costs and laying people off. They have little incentive to improve recruiting processes or repurpose existing personnel rather than lay them off. Such measures might stave off shareholder pressure, but it won’t build a long-term successful business.

In business, we hand out accolades for brilliant marketing, winning sales, and shiny products. We don’t hand out the accolades for hiring the people that make all of the success happen. And yet every winning company recruits well. They know when to recruit and when not to, how to recruit, and how to keep and train up the people they have.

Now that we are in the talent shortage that all the academics predicted would happen (even without COVID), maybe it’s time to re-evaluate how to succeed. Maybe it’s time for CEOs and COOs to start looking at Talent Acquisition, Recruiting, or whatever you call hiring people as the best way to create winning business strategies. Success comes with consistency, and you won’t achieve that without a strong backbone to support the people in your company.