Evaluating Your Hiring Strategy
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We’ve all heard the adage about change and its motivations…People change when the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of doing something different. Hiring is a lot like that. In fact, the fundamentals of mutual change are a pillar of strategic hiring and you wouldn’t be hiring anyone if there wasn’t a need for something to change!
We could investigate many tributaries to the river of hiring topics that employ change management principles, but let’s isolate one: When do you know the time has come to address your hiring strategy?
Lifecycle Hiring Costs
The obvious corollary for pain in business is cost, so let’s start there. Total cost to hire is a popular HR topic, but do we really understand it at an actionable level? Furthermore, how well do we grasp the costs of leaving a position open? When transactable hiring costs along with employee development costs are high relative to functional productivity it is time to ask hard questions about your hiring strategy. If you are brave enough to look for direct and implicit costs associated with functions unfilled or poorly filled in your organizations even more compelling reasons to change might emerge.
Opportunity Cost
Missed opportunities are everywhere in companies and many are self-inflicted, directly related to who we did or didn’t hire. When it’s a known missed sale we can put a dollar figure on it, but what about the unknown missed opportunities that get lost in sales support or ineffective marketing? How do you value the idea that leads to better processes, products or services if the person who has that idea never makes it to your staff?
We can and should count the value of known missed opportunities but if we know our business model well we can also place an educated value on the opportunities that could be realized if we had the best people in our key functional areas.
Unmanaged Risk
If you run a business, you know that risk carries a price. Actuarial science is well established for this very reason. What risks are incurred in your business by having positions unfilled or ineffectively filled? How much risk could you defer if your bench strength was deeper behind your key employees?
If there were easy answers to all these questions, then you would have already purchased an off the shelf solution to better hiring. We all know that there aren’t because the people we hire and the people who hire them are anything but precision instruments. Actual direct hiring costs dictate that your hiring strategies for mainstream positions need to be sourced internally – it is an important sign of a healthy company. Healthy companies, however, also fully grasp their life cycle costs, opportunities and risks for key roles in their company. That kind of knowledge makes it easy to identify the kind of pain that triggers a change in your basic hiring approach to solve one of a kind issues or difficult to fill key roles.
If you are ready for some fresh ideas in your hiring plan for key positions, Corrigo is ready to help! Your business may share common qualities with others in the industry, but your drivers of success are unique. Together we can build a custom approach to sustainable hiring solutions for immediate impact and long-term retention.
