Reasons Employers find the Hiring Process

Reasons Employers find the Hiring Process Difficult Essay

Instructions/Descriptions

Reasons Employers find the Hiring Process Difficult Essay

Answer the questions based on the article attached

[Order Now]

1. Summarize the article in your own words. (Minimum of 250 words). [Marks:2]
2. Reliance on data science in the hiring process, is this critical to the desired outcome? Describe this is no less than 100 words. [Marks: 2]
3. Discuss why employers find the hiring process difficult? Make some suggestions to develop such a recruitment process which can hire the best employees for the organization. [Marks: 1]

48 Harvard Business Review May–June 201948 Harvard Business Review May–June 2019

Harvard Business Review May–June 2019 49Harvard Business Review May–June 2019 49Photographs by JOHN KUCZALA

Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong

[Order Now]

B U S I N E S S E S H AV E N E V E R done as much hiring as they do today. They’ve never spent as much money doing it. And they’ve never done a worse job of it.

For most of the post–World War II era, large corporations went about hiring this way: Human resources experts prepared a detailed job analysis to determine what tasks the job required and what attributes a good candidate should have. Next, they did a job evaluation to determine how the job fit into the organizational chart and how much it should pay, especially compared with other jobs. Ads were posted, and applicants applied.

Then came the task of sorting through the applicants. That included skills tests, reference checks, maybe personality and IQ tests, and extensive interviews to learn more about them as people. William H. Whyte, in The Organization Man, described this process as going on for as long as a week before Peter Cappelli Professor, the Wharton School.

Outsourcing and algorithms won’t get you the people you need.

50 Harvard Business Review May–June 2019

Subcontractors can scan websites that programmers might visit, trace their “digital exhaust” from cookies and other user-tracking measures to identify who they are, and then examine their curricula vitae.

At companies that still do their own recruitment and hiring, managers trying to fill open positions are largely left to figure out what the jobs require and what the ads should say. When applications come—always electronically—applicant-tracking software sifts through them for key words that the hiring managers want to see. Then the process moves into the Wild West, where a new industry of vendors offer an astonishing array of smart-sounding tools that claim to predict who will be a good hire.

They use voice recognition, body language, clues on social media, and especially machine learning algorithms—everything but tea leaves. Entire publications are devoted to what these vendors are doing. The big problem with all these new practices is that we don’t know whether they actually produce satisfactory hires.

Only about a third of U.S. companies report that they monitor whether their hiring practices lead to good employees; few of them do so carefully, and only a minority even track cost per hire and time to hire. Imagine if the CEO asked how an advertising campaign had gone, and the response was “We have a good idea how long it took to roll out and what it cost, but we haven’t looked to see whether we’re selling more.”

Hiring talent remains the number one concern of CEOs in the most recent Conference Board Annual Survey; it’s also the top concern of the entire executive suite. PwC’s 2017 CEO survey reports that chief executives view the unavailability of talent and skills as the biggest threat to their business.

Employers also spend an enormous amount on hiring—an average of $4,129 per job in the United States, according to Society for Human Resource Management estimates, and many times that amount for managerial roles—and the United States fills a staggering 66 mil- lion jobs a year. Most of the $20 billion that companies spend on human resources vendors goes to hiring.

[Order Now]

Why do employers spend so much on something so important while knowing so little about whether it works?

WHERE THE PROBLEM STARTS Survey after survey finds employers complaining about how difficult hiring is. There may be many explanations, such as their having become very picky about candidates, especially in the

Idea in Brief THE PROBLEM Employers continue to hire at a high rate and spend enormous sums to do it. But they don’t know whether their approaches are effective at finding and selecting good candidates.

THE ROOT CAUSES Businesses focus on external candidates and don’t track the results of their approaches. They often use outside vendors and high-tech tools that are unproven and have inherent flaws.

THE SOLUTION Return to filling most positions by promoting from within. Measure the results produced by vendors and new tools, and be on the lookout for discrimination and privacy violations.

The winning candidate was offered the job. The vast majority of non-entry- level openings were filled from within.

Today’s approach couldn’t be more different. Census data shows, for example, that the majority of people who took a new job last year weren’t searching for one: Somebody came and got them. Companies seek to fill their recruiting funnel with as many candidates as possible, especially “passive candidates,” who aren’t looking to move. Often employers advertise jobs that don’t exist, hoping to find people who might be useful later on or in a different context.

The recruiting and hiring function have been eviscerated. Many U.S. companies—about 40%, according to research by Korn Ferry—have out- sourced much if not all of the hiring process to familiar organizations such as Randstad, Manpower, and Adecco, which in turn use subcontractors, typically in India and the Philippines.

The subcontractors scour LinkedIn and social media to find potential candidates. They sometimes contact them directly to see whether they can be persuaded to apply for a position and negotiate the salary they’re willing to accept. (The recruiters get incentive pay if they negotiate the amount down.) To hire programmers, for example, these

[Order Now]

Harvard Business Review May–June 2019 51

slack labor market of the Great Recession. But clearly, they are hiring much more than at any other time in modern history, for two reasons.

The first is that openings are now filled more often by hiring from the outside than by promoting from within. In the era of lifetime employment, from the end of World War II through the 1970s, corporations filled roughly 90% of their vacancies through promotions and lateral assignments. Today the figure is a third or less. When they hire from outside, organizations don’t have to pay to train and develop their employees.

Since the restructuring waves of the early 1980s, it has been relatively easy to find experienced talent outside. Only 28% of talent acquisition leaders today report that internal candidates are an important source of people to fill vacancies—presumably because of less internal development and fewer clear career ladders.

[Order Now]

Less promotion internally means that hiring efforts are no longer concentrated on entry-level jobs and recent graduates. (If you doubt this, go to the “careers” link on any company website and look for a job opening that doesn’t require prior experience.) Now companies must be good at hiring across most levels, because the candidates they want are already doing the job somewhere else. These people don’t need training, so they may be ready to contribute right away, but they are much harder to find.

The second reason hiring is so difficult is that retention has become tough: Companies hire from their competitors and vice versa, so they have to keep replacing people who leave. Census and

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that 95% of hiring is done to fill existing positions. Most of those vacancies are caused by voluntary turnover. LinkedIn data indicates that the most common reason employees consider a position elsewhere is career advancement— which is surely related to employers’ not promoting to fill vacancies.

Reasons Employers find the Hiring Process Difficult Essay

PLACE THE ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET A PERFECT SCORE!!!