In the HR world, our job is people – their jobs, their income, and yes, even their engagement at work. We’d like to think that when people come to the office, they come to actually work, to contribute to their team and organizational goals, and ultimately just to “be engaged”. However, whether we like it or not, employees have a life outside of work, and chances are, they care about that life with their family and friends a whole lot more than the 8+ hours a day they spend at the office. That is the life where they are able to create their own goals, set their own priorities, and manage their own work load.
The mistake that many companies make is thinking of their employees simply as cogs in the great clock of overall organizational success, handing out orders and rules, tasks and projects, drowning employees in the miserable world of red tape and company policies. This “dual life” of employees, according to Mr. Jacob Morgan at Forbes, is the root cause of employee disengagement. The clash between being the master of one’s self in one life, to becoming a mindless replaceable cog in another life, taking orders from managers simply to collect a paycheck, can make anyone a disengaged employee. As Mr. Morgan says, “It’s no wonder that the majority of employees around the world don’t like their jobs and there is one key reason for that. Work practices, attitudes, values, strategies, technologies, and ways of working are evolving and changing at a rapid pace. whereas organizations remain stagnant when it comes to adapting to these changes.”
Organizations don’t think of their employees as living, breathing people – and it has to be the mission of HR to start this revolution of thinking, starting with the manager level, and working all the way to the top.
There are different levels of disengagement, and each comes with its own set of risks. There are those that are simply “not engaged”. In the U.S. and Canada, according to a survey by Gallup, a staggering 54% of employees are not engaged, with the numbers steadily rising. Employees who are not engaged are those that go through the motions but lack motivation and innovation. They make no effort to contribute to organizational goals, or improve their own contributions, and are essentially just leeches on the company’s profit and goals. Even more threatening are the “actively disengaged” employees. Luckily, they make up a smaller number, about 18% of the workforce, and the number has started to drop. The damage they can do, however, is not minimized. These employees harbor bitter feelings towards their company for one reason or another, and actively sabotage projects or undermine their coworkers.
Whether or not the statistics are true for every organization, it is clear that the problem needs be addressed immediately. The good news is that most companies are already fairly successful even with these disengaged employees… Imagine what they could accomplish if they could turn even half of those employees into engaged employees! So what can we do to start turning the tides?
Engagement starts at the top. Employees need to see that their leaders are actively engaged so that they have someone to look up to and follow.
Mission and vision statements are a way of living. They aren’t simply words to mindlessly spit out to clients or investors. Employees need to understand what they mean in the way they do their everyday jobs.
Create harmony between the “dual lives” of the employees. If the babysitter isn’t able to pick up their children from school, they shouldn’t be punished for having to leave early for their family. They shouldn’t have to choose sides between work and family.
Communication is key. Employees want to receive feedback and direction from their leaders. If not, they assume their work isn’t valuable to the company, and they will simply stop trying.
Invest in your employees’ future careers. Employees not only want to know that their work is appreciated, but that they can grow in their position. Creating development plans, and actively working towards grooming each employee as a future leader will give them the motivation and vision of the future that they need to excel.
With all this in mind, HR is burdened with the task of turning these statistics around and creating a fully engaged workforce. It’s not going to happen overnight, but simply making it a priority is a huge step. Just one employee that is converted from being actively disengaged to engaged can make a world of difference.
We are always looking to grow and expand our knowledge of the industry and have come to depend on these excellent profiles for professional and relevant content. Here our are best picks for interesting content, great articles, and uniqueness! Give them a follow!1) Judy Fort2) Steve Browne3) Workology4) HR Zone5) Mark Stelzner6) Laurie Ruettimann7) Traci Deveau8) Beth Kanter
Is Employee Loyalty a Thing of the Past?Did you know 51 percent of workers who currently have a job are either actively seeking a new job or are open to the idea? People are simply not as loyal to their companies as they used to be. New research from CareerBuilder suggests that by the age of 35, a quarter of workers will have held 5 jobs or more.
There is more competition than ever to find, hire, and keep the best resources that are key to executing successful projects and engagements for your clients. So how do you retain your best talent?
Keeping Employees EngagedEmployee engagement is the emotional and functional commitment that an employee has to his or her organization. Employees are more engaged, and loyal to their organization when they feel valued, believe their work matters, and when they feel they have supportive supervisors.
$11 billion is lost annually because of employee turnover.
Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202%.
71% of all employees are not fully engaged.
Developing Employees and Planning for the FutureThe most valuable employees are always considering career opportunities. Existing employees want to know if they have a way to grow and advance within the company. If they don’t see evidence they can move up in the organization, or feel underappreciated, they leave.
Of course, there is a better approach to keeping employees engaged. It takes a combination of such things such as performance management, career management, and succession planning.
Having a Performance Management and Career Development system in place ensures that top performers get the visibility and recognition they desire, which helps to increase loyalty, reduce turnover, and cut down costs of replacing key employees.Schedule a Demo Now and Get a $15 Amazon Gift Card
Let us put away the myths and the misconceptions around Social Recruiting – that partaking in Social Recruiting will attract and add to the amount of unqualified applicants already in the recruiter’s inbox. If anything, Social Recruiting helps attract more qualified applicants and it helps single out the best talent. How, you ask? Let’s simply start by looking over some key stats to begin our appreciation and love for Social Recruiting:
93% of Recruiters review a candidate’s social profile (Source). This gives recruiters a more personal view of the candidate and can help them determine whether or not they will be a good fit for the company culture.
73% of companies have successfully hired using social media (Source). The ease of use that comes from social recruiting has benefited companies that more and more of them are following this trend. They are able to put forward a more personal view of the company, and are able to provide easier ways to apply for a position online.
42% of companies say that the quality of candidates has improved because of social recruiting (Source). These benefits often stem from employee’s referring their friends and family members to the job postings online, LinkedIn being the largest network that people use for social recruiting and applications.
With this rise in Social Recruiting and the numbers that show an increasing demand for this method,what is the future for Social Recruiting? How should companies successfully apply this to their current strategy?
The Industry Future:
According to SourceCon, for the success and strength of Social Recruiting to continue to flourish as it is right now, recruiters need to develop a relationship with the people applying to the jobs. This might require talking to the applicants during off business hours like the weekend and after work, since this is when they are most likely available if they are currently employed.
To help recruiters with this, our companies should create an easy to use social recruiting atmosphere, an example being more mobile recruiting functionalities. Creating a more accessible way for recruiters and applicants will help with the development of your company’s social recruiting needs and is a crucial investment to the company.
Another investment to look into besides mobile recruiting is Employee Advocacy programs. Employee Advocacy is the new social recruiting trend that is taking over when it comes to bringing in highly qualified candidates. To better understand what an Employee Advocacy Program is, Bambu gives an easy to follow definition. They are employees who:
Generate positive exposure and raise awareness for a brand through digital media or offline channels
Recommend a company’s products or services to a friend or family member
Represent the best interests of the company both internally and externally
Can help build employee ownership of the organization
Are experts on your product or service and can be a credible spokesperson for your company
So, why wouldn’t we want our employees to talk about how great your company culture is and your business’ success via social media? How the employees perceive and talk about your company via social has a great impact on how the outside word sees your company and ultimately who will want to apply. The best employee advocacy programs help bring in the right outside talent that is both qualified and fits with the employee culture. This takes a huge load off the recruiter, providing them with a pool of qualified candidates right at their fingertips, candidates who already want to work for your company since they have heard so many great things about you.
Interested in hearing more about Social Recruiting? Listen to our webinar for more key statistics and the steps you need to become Social Recruiting savvy.
In last month’s blog post on Part 1 about KPI’s, we covered five crucial recruiting metrics that will help take your HR team to the next level. In addition to those five, however, we’ve compiled a few more that will allow you to be smarter about where you are focusing your recruiting efforts and judge the effectiveness of those efforts.
Qualified Applicants per Requisition
Qualified applicants per requisition is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your sourcing channels. It takes into account not simply the total number of applicants for a position, but, more specifically, the number of qualified applicants. One source may produce hundreds of applications, but perhaps only ten of the applicants actually made it beyond the screening questions or the minimum requirements, while a different source may produce only a few applicants, but a higher percentage of them become qualified candidates.
Once you know which sources provide the greater percentage of qualified applicants, you can focus your energy and resources on these channels. This saves companies from wasting time or money on expensive job boards when perhaps they receive their best candidates from employee referrals or social media sites.
The way that you determine what a qualified applicant means will vary based on the specific requirements that you establish for each requisition, but it is important to establish an average over all requisitions for a specific time period. The metrics to pay attention to are the number of total applicants, the number screened in, the number hired, the ratio of screened in to applied, and finally the percentage of the total hires from each source. Ultimately, qualified applicants are the only ones that matter and the ones that you will want to keep in contact with for future opportunities.
Recruiter Efficiency
Today, with technology changing and systems being put in place to help with Big Data, and the ability to monitor every aspect of the recruiting process, companies now have the ability to monitor and measure recruiter efficiency.
Recruiter efficiency takes into account several metrics, but really comes down to how effective a recruiter is at finding the most qualified candidate in the shortest amount of time, and ensuring that they are someone who will not only accept the company’s offer, but will become a valuable asset to that company.
This metric is very obviously tied to the bottom line, and thus becomes a highly scrutinized metric all the way up to the executive level. The level of recruiter efficiency can be directly tied to the cost of hire for any given position, and thus to the overall performance of a company’s recruiting strategy.
The following factors should be considered to determine one recruiter’s efficiency versus another’s:
Open requisitions assigned to them
Pending requisitions
Requisitions on hold
Requisitions in approval
Requisitions filled
Average days to fill
A successful recruiter will know the best sources for each requisition, will be able to realistically portray the company’s needs, and provide the organization with employees that will become top performers and contribute to a high retention rate.
Cost per Hire
For most companies, everything still comes down to the bottom line, which is why “Cost of Hire” remains one of the most important metrics to track in HR’s recruiting efforts. It is crucial to know exactly how much it is costing your organization to hire each position, and where you may be losing money. HR needs to be able to show executives cost-effectiveness when it comes to a recruiting strategy.
It is not uncommon to hear that the cost of hiring someone is more expensive than a full year’s salary for that position, and there are many articles that back up this claim (How much does it cost companies to lose employees?, The Cost Of Hiring A New Employee, You make $70k but cost your boss $88k, etc.). While not all of the costs are related directly to recruiting a new hire, there are many recruiting decisions that impact the overall cost. That is why it is crucial to know exactly how much it is costing your organization to hire each position, and where you may be losing money.
Cost of hire takes into account factors, which of course will vary based on the position being hired for.
Knowing what to measure and when to measure it helps define your HR team as a crucial addition to the company’s success. Gone are the days of simply posting job opportunities on your company website, and hoping for the best. Building a strategy, being smarter about where you are finding candidates, and knowing how effective your recruiters are will determine the future of your organization’s talent. When it comes to recruiting, there are dozens of metrics that you could report on, but we have picked out just the top five most commonly used to focus on in Part 1 of this post, with another five coming in Part 2.
1 – Time to Start
Time to Start refers to the amount of time it takes to bring a new hire on board from the moment that you first publicize the open position.
It is important to distinguish that this means the time until a new hire’s first day on the job, not the day they accept the offer. This is probably the most important recruiting metric to focus on as it relies on the efficiency of the recruiters and the sourcing channels used, but also determines the success of your overall recruiting strategy. Job vacancies within an organization can mean a loss of productivity until that position is filled, so the longer the time to hire, the longer your organization is lacking in that area.
Of course, the time to fill is going to vary based on the job level and perhaps the skill set that is required. As time goes on, however, HR should be able to determine an average time frame across all positions and work towards reducing that time.
2 – Retention Rate
Employee retention is an important metric for many reasons. Not only does it show how successful your recruiting efforts are in finding qualified candidates, but is also a great indicator of the overall health of an organization. For now, we will focus on what the retention rate can tell us about recruiting efforts.
If your organization has a hard time retaining people for longer than a year after their hire date, you may be hiring the wrong type of candidate. Once you have determined the cost per hire for each position, it’s no wonder that the retention rate is such an important metric. Your company could be bleeding money with this unnecessary turnover. The cost of replacing an employee can be upwards of two times their salary! (Article from the Center for American Progress)
So, as with any problem, the first step is to identify whether or not your organization has a reasonable retention rate based on your industry’s standards as this can vary widely by industry.
Then, rather than trying to look at retention rates for all positions across all levels of the organization, it will be more insightful to analyze by sections. For example, you can look at the turnover rate for a specific role. If one role is causing turnover every year, maybe you need to take a look at the responsibilities of that role. Are there unrealistic expectations or unattainable goals? Another way to look at the data is turnover by pay grade or even by department. In this way, you can determine if the retention problem is company-wide, if it’s in a certain department because of a bad manager, etc.
Ultimately, measuring the retention rate will allow you to pinpoint whether or not the issue is a recruiting one. To quote an article from Forbes, “The best recruitment strategy is a solid retention strategy and this has to start at the top.”
3 – Applicant Satisfaction
While related to the employee retention rate, it is important to look at applicant satisfaction on its own to ensure that your recruiting efforts are placing applicants into positions where they feel they can grow and excel.
The best way to measure this is simply to have a standardized new hire survey, and then use performance reviews as another chance for employees to express how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with their job. Surveys can include questions on the hiring process, on-boarding, and overall job satisfaction. These metrics will help you determine how positive an applicant’s experience is from the moment a recruiter reaches out to them. This allows a company to take a step back and look at their processes from an outsider’s perspective, and shed some light on how they are portraying their organization to applicants versus what they experience when they are hired.
In today’s social world, this firsthand experience and testimonial is as important to a company’s reputation and messaging as any other marketing effort. The real goal is highlighting where a change needs to occur internally.
Is there an opportunity for more training for not just the interview process, but the competencies of employees? Is there a reason for employee dissatisfaction with the company that can be fixed to help retain top talent? It may be as simple as the job descriptions need to be revised. But it may be the job, the role, or the company direction that may need to be refocused, clarified or redirected. These are just some of the insights that can be gained by using applicant satisfaction company’s self-reflection.
4 – Sourcing Channel
Sourcing channel or source of hire simply refers to the efficacy of the different job boards or media a company uses to publicize its current job openings. The reason for tracking this metric is simple – there are hundreds of options for sourcing candidates, but depending on your industry or your specific organization, certain sources will prove to be more effective or provide higher quality candidates than others.
Talk about sourcing channels comes up often when thinking about Big Data – gathering the information above, you are able to combine this data to see the big picture and support your sourcing choices. As noted by David Bernstein on HR.com, “Big Data analysis also enables the employer to measure the effectiveness of their recruitment campaigns in real time and make necessary adjustments—sooner rather than later—to improve performance.” Not only do we need to take a look at what we’ve done in the past that worked, but what are we doing now that isn’t working? And how might we shift our resources towards more effective sources?
5 – Quality of Hire
It will take some time to determine the quality of a new hire, but the longer the employee is at the company, the easier it will be to establish. This should take into account not only performance ratings, but also their potential. Over time, you will be able to see a trend in their performance reviews, and determine their overall worth to the organization. This metric can then be linked to the sourcing channels to help determine where the highest quality candidates originated from, as well as the time to hire so recruiters can get a sense of how long it takes to find the right candidate.
The formula for Quality of Hire should be comprised of recruitment-focused quality measures and post-hire contribution / performance quality. The factors that contribute the data for each side of this metric can differ from one organization to the next. Deltek’s Quality of Hire report plots recruitment efficacy and directly correlates this to post-hire performance appraisal scores.
Quality of hire may sound rather subjective and difficult to determine, but nevertheless is one of the most important metrics. Because the cost per hire and retention rate are constantly scrutinized, it is important to find quality hires that are going to stay with your company for a long time, thus diminishing the need for another costly hire down the road.
Because of its organizational impact, quality of hire is a more important metric to track than time to fill or cost per hire.
For more recruiting KPIs, keep an eye out for Part 2 of this blog post coming soon!
You may also find our Top 10 Recruiting Metrics Cheat Sheet to be helpful in your efforts to streamline your recruiting plans in 2017.
