Power to the people! That’s a good thing, right? Not if your company doesn’t have its best face forward in the hiring process. In a recent global study, 83 percent of job recruiters admit the current job market is candidate driven. That’s a big shift from even a couple of years ago. How big? As one respondent explains, “It started changing [in 2013] and is in full swing this year. In six years, I [had] only lost one candidate to a speedier recruitment process by the client’s competitor. This year, I have lost seven.”
Top employers and job placement agencies have learned to adapt, but have you? Let’s take a look at the top three qualities held by those with competitive hiring practices in 2015.
They offer higher pay
Nearly 90 percent of “great” candidates are either under-employed or under-compensated. This presents a huge opportunity for those who are willing to step up their compensation strategies, not only with recruiting but with retaining as well. But how much is enough?
While salaries have been rebounding in recent months, they hadn’t been doing so very rapidly…until now. A 3 percent base salary rise is the standard across the board in most industries this year. That’s a huge leap from where salaries had been. For instance, Computerworld’s 2015 IT Salary Survey shows notable compensation increases for IT pros in a range of positions. Average total compensation (which includes bonuses) increased 3.6 percent in 2015, compared to 2 percent in 2014 and only 1.8 percent in 2012.
“Certainly the compensation packages you’ve been holding on to for two or three years are outdated. Even last year’s strategy won’t cut it. The job market will reward those who are willing to reward their employees and new hires. It’s as simple as that,” says The HT Group Managing Partner Nad Elias.
They hire fast
Most job offers come after about four weeks and three interviews. That’s not bad, but consider this: Most job rejections happen after about two to three weeks. Has your own time-to-hire cost you great candidates? If so, consider ways to streamline the process while improving your chances of identifying the right people for the job. How? With smarter screening.
From collecting applicants to skills testing to background checks, there are high-tech ways to screen better and faster. Take technical assessments, for instance. TrueAbility’s AbilityScreen® is a performance-based technical assessment platform operating in a real-time, cloud environment that gives technical professionals from around the world the opportunity to conduct live performance interviews to prove their technology skill sets. According to the San Antonio-based company’s COO-Founder Frederick Mendler, innovative tools like AbilityScreen can help reduce time-to-hire by 60 percent, and empower hiring managers and recruiters to objectively evaluate the skills of technical professionals without having to be a technical expert themselves.
“The candidate is put in a real-world environment where they must demonstrate their ability to perform skills needed on the job,” explains Mendler. “Once they complete the assessment, instant results and a detailed report are available to the recruiter with stacked ranked results and deeper-level breakdown of the tasks. We ran some data on AbilityScreen with a customer and they reported that each recruiter saved a full day of work each week by not having to manually review resumes and make technical phone screens.”
They make it easy
A recent Jobvite survey says it all: Half of job seekers think it’s important to see job listings without having to register on a site. One-third of job seekers say the amount of time to complete an application matters. And one-fourth of job seekers say that the ability to apply for a job via mobile is key.
So why do we continue to make it so hard for top candidates to get from point A to point Z?
“In this market, it’s important to break down the barriers that can stop a top candidate from applying for or accepting a position. If you don’t, your competitors will easily become more attractive and more relevant than your company,” continued Elias.
So, given these three main factors: Is your hiring process designed to find, qualify and keep great candidates? Share your experiences. It may help another!
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