Outsmart your competition by automating the process so you hire the best, faster.

It’s no secret that as business owners and leaders we don’t enjoy the recruitment process and frequently feel ‘let down’ by the results of our efforts.

In fact 80% of Australian Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) report they are not satisfied with their current recruitment approaches and these are the reasons why,

It’s hardly surprising when you consider that many organisations still deploy recruiting approaches that are over 100 years old.

Here are 6 steps to optimise your recruiting standards into the 21st century.

We also share how to automate the process, saving you time with even better recruitment results using the new online recruitment application, RemiPeople.

  1. Clearly articulate what skills, experience and capabilities are needed upfront

To identify the best person for the job, a crucial first step is to fully understand the nature of that job and commit to assessing all applicants against these criteria.

Review the job description and where required perform a job analysis to develop your essential selection criteria (ESC) to asses the capabilities the role requires.

This is an effective filter where only applicants who can demonstrate achieving the ESC proceed through to the next round.

See our article on how to stop losing talent during the hiring process for an in-depth look at best practice candidate screening.

RemiPeople allows you to generate questions to determine if applicants meet your ESC. Applicants answer these questions online during the application process.

A Leader Board (Score and rank candidates) summarises who meets the ESC requirements so you can quickly filter out those that are unqualified or unsuitable saving you valuable time.

Committing to hiring criteria before we review applicants helps to eliminate bias. One study found that if male applicants didn’t possess all the job skills required, the importance of those skills were downplayed. Women we’re not afforded this advantage.

Clearly communicating the standards to candidates also creates a fair and transparent hiring practice that reduces the number of spam résumés and makes the employer more attractive.

Here’s a video to show you how it works.

2. Stop wasting valuable time on assessing the wrong information

Demographics (gender, estimated age, interests) and credentials (place of education & work, years of service, position titles), all found on a résumé , are poor predictors of on the job performance.

Yet we spend up to 60% of the entire recruitment process screening résumés assessing such information.

And what about the time wasted sifting through résumés that amount to little more than spam? Nowadays it takes no effort to apply for jobs even if your unqualified or unsuitable.

“I applied for 40 jobs in nine minutes”

Nick Evershed

Once you’ve filtered the unqualified or unsuitable candidates, RemiPeople allows you to automatically build work sample tests, which is a far more effective second filter to assess candidates.

Instead of making subjective judgements about the kind of work a candidate has done based on their résumé , have them actually do the work. In other words mimic the work candidates will actually do.

Standardise it so every candidate faces the same test.

Having candidates do this online during the application process is most effective. RemiPeople guides you through this process and allows you to score and rank candidates responses.

A simple Leader Board (Score and rank candidates) can help you immediately identify who are your most qualified and strongest candidates and therefore who to select for interview.

Here’s the video that demonstrates how it works.

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3. Compare candidates equally in a more standardised and comparable way

Guess what. You’re biased, so am I.

Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that despite identical résumés white men get more call backs than women and people from ethnic minorities get even fewer call backs. Let me repeat, this is despite candidates using identical résumés .

To avoid this, evaluate each applicant in the same way.

RemiPeople allows you to do this automatically. Of course you can develop a standard evaluation form, containing questions that address the roles ESC along with a scoring metric and use it the same way for every candidate, but this will add time to the process not save you time.

RemiPeople helps you to avoid bias, something humans are simply not capable of because bias is unconscious, ie we don’t even realise it’s happening. RemiPeople eliminates information about race and gender, in fact it avoids reviewing résumés during the pre-interview assessment phase so it doesn’t play a role in the decision-making process (Score and rank candidates). This allows you to objectively assess candidates only their ability to do the job based on the criteria you’ve set.

See our video to watch how it works.

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4. Data is power. People decision making should be data driven.

We should get better at measuring and evaluating that what we’re doing is actually working.

We actually don’t measure enough. Without reviewing and acting on data we are not positioned to attract top talent.

RemiPeople helps you track your recruitment funnel. What are the characteristics (eg gender, race) of applicants who succeed at each filter? What assessment criteria eg work skills/interview questions correlate with top performance and which parts of the application process are turning candidates away?

We’re all familiar with saying ‘If it’s not measure then it’s not managed”.

Watch the video to see how your business can become more data driven.

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5. Stick to the script during an interview

In our post about candidate screening we talk about how the structured interview process is twice as effective as the semi-formal interview process, which is the norm.

Structured interviews are characterised by preset questions, asked of each candidate in the same order and scored immediately. This way, interviewers are likely to gather more comprehensive, standardised and comparable information about all applicants. For more information read our ‘how to guide’ on best practice interviewing.

RemiPeople contains an interviewing app that guides you through the process of conducting and evaluating a structured interview.

It may be surprising to know that the informal introductory chit chat at the commencement of an interview can create an unlevel playing field for candidates.

Finding common ground, such as personal experiences and shared connections eg support for the same footy team can unfairly advantage ‘in-group’ candidates (ie those that interviewers feel are most similar to them) while outsiders are more likely to feel stressed and anxious.

Not sticking to the script during the interview process will only stymy your attempts to hire the best.

This video will show you how.

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6. Get creative to attract a broader pool of candidates

One of our hiring handicaps is that we genuinely think that we ‘just know when someone is a good fit’ but in fact all we’re doing is identifying someone who is similar to us.

That’s not a hiring strategy and only serves to limit the talent pool to select from.

Recruit outside your comfort zone. Many others have.

“Google and 14 other companies …. no longer require a degree”

Apply your metrics and determine what job qualifications matter most, not through intuition but backed by data. This can increase your potential talent pool along with providing the clues as to where to find and recruit talent.

Scrutinising the language used in job ads can help to increase the diversity of your applicant pool as gendered language has been shown to discourage potential applicants. Use this free gender decoder to assess how gendered your job ads are.

For example, the more women infer jobs to be male dominated the less they find them appealing despite reporting they had the skills to do the job.

Think of recruitment as a sales activity, entice more applicants with important benefits such as flexibility, equal pay, promotional opportunities and a culture that fosters diversity and inclusion.

RemiPeople provides companies the ability to ‘sell’ themselves when they invite applicants to complete the online assessment. Almost like a careers web page.

This builds your employer brand and helps applicants judge for themselves if they are suitable for the role, which is correlated with increased employee engagement.

If you haven’t already done so click on the link to watch how easy it is to fix your internal recruitment process.

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