Breaking the recruitment cycle: embracing innovation in hiring

17th July 2024

How to disrupt traditional recruitment and fill vacant roles quickly and effectively

Recruitment is facing a potential crisis. Existing approaches aren’t working – staff are unsatisfied, and jobs are getting harder to fill, despite over 25% of the working age population being economically inactive or unemployed.¹

Is there a better approach to recruiting and retaining talent?

50% of applicants accepted a job offer then backed out before starting²

Recruitment is expensive. As well as the time and effort it takes to find a good candidate, there are huge sunk costs if those hires don’t stay on. Gartner found that companies are battling with an average failed hire rate of 28% across industries. Combine that with the average time for a new hire to be at full productivity – a lengthy 29 weeks – and it’s clear that something isn’t working³.

53% of businesses say their inability to attract talent is the main barrier to transformation⁴

People with the right skills are out there. But businesses are having a hard time finding them.

Scroll through most jobs listings and you’ll see the same few phrases repeated endlessly: ‘must have 5+ years of experience’ or ‘need experience in a related role’. Employers typically focus on experience as the main criteria for making decisions when filling a role.

It’s time for a paradigm shift.

66% of workers say they would remain at an organisation that values their skills and potential more than job titles and degrees⁵

Imagine if you could fill a vacant strategic role without using an agency, without placing an advert, without an interview or any sort of induction. It is possible.

Let’s go back and examine the traditional approach. You look to fill a financial controller role by recruiting someone with experience. You assume that means they know what they’re doing. They can just jump in after a quick induction.

So, you steal someone else’s financial controller. That leaves a gap that the other organisation needs to fill by stealing another financial controller. Soon, it’s just a game of offering the highest salary and the most benefits to outcompete the others.

But a job title doesn’t necessarily reflect talent. Or cultural fit. That new financial controller might not like their new company and you’ll need to start the whole process again.

There’s a better approach: recruiting based on skills.

The skills-based approach

There might be someone great for the role who doesn’t have the required experience. Maybe they’re from another department but they’ve been overlooked because of the short-sighted way recruitment has traditionally been done.

A financial controller needs to deal with suppliers, chase invoices, handle numbers etc. There could be someone with exactly those capabilities in another role, such as a project co-ordinator.

If you mine your own talent, you can fill a role with a bit of extra training instead of the typical six months of onboarding. Recruitment is cheaper and more effective, and staff see that progression isn’t a linear process – there are opportunities all over the business.

Technology makes it possible

Assessing the skills of your workforce is possible thanks to advances in technology. Civica’s People Hub solutions include a talent management module that uses AI to assess skills across the workforce and match existing staff to open positions.

Profiling people to match them to the position offers huge advantages over the traditional recruitment process. There’s a much larger pool of potential recruits. There’s very little cost involved in moving people into the new position. The chances of success are higher as the recruit is already within the organisation. Staff know that their skills are valued, and they become more engaged as more time is spent in developing their skills. The organisation’s culture and reputation improves. The list goes on!

Make it work for you

This skills-based approach to recruitment doesn’t necessarily need to be restricted to internal recruitment. You can adapt the process to work the way you want. Civica’s talent management module can be set up to identify potential recruits from across a wider database. For example, housing associations might like to assess the skills of residents to see if one of them could fill a vacant role.

Our software tools work as a platform. Recruitment is just the first step in the working journey, so the more joined up you can make the process, the better it will be for everyone. Training, benefits, even offboarding all contribute to people’s experience of working for your organisation.

A fresh mindset

External recruitment is always going to be necessary. And experience on the job is always going to be one of the factors recruiters need to consider. But to fix the staffing challenges many organisations are facing, perhaps it’s time to rethink our priorities.

If you’d like to explore how a new approach could benefit your organisation, Civica’s People & Workforce Management team have a return-on-investment tool to get you started. We’ll help you use the results to build a case for investment in a new way of managing talent.

To find out more about Civica People Hub and how it can help with your employee management please speak to our team.

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Howard Watson, Divisional Sales Director, People and Workforce Management