Set a high bar for applicants during your recruitment process.
What would you do if you had several thousand jobs to hire for and received two million job applications from around the world? That’s what happens each year at Google. In response, the company created efficient processes that allowed them to sort through the growing tsunami of applicants and quickly identify top applicants to hire.
What works for Google will work for you. In this article, Expr3ss! shares four simple principles that
“…can help even the smallest team to do much, much better at hiring”
Lazlo Bock, Senior VP, People Operations, Google
How Google Cut Hiring Time & Costs
In its infancy, staffing and recruitment demands gobbled up time at Google like Pac-Man. In an average week, managers spent 25% of their hours on hiring and top executives spent nearly 50%. As Google grew, its forward-thinking executives knew they needed to gain control of the cost of a new hire.
For the next several years, Google conducted extensive research and experimentation to codify the process of hiring exceptional people into a near science.
Here are the strategies that worked.
Four Foundational Principles of Successful Recruitment
With a world of opportunities to choose from, top applicants can pick and choose among offers just as their potential employers do. What can you do to ensure that the best and the brightest have you on their short list?
- Keep Your Recruiting Standards High – Don’t compromise. Set a high bar for prospects during your recruitment process and reject applicants who do not meet your standards at the get-go.
- Take a First-Person Approach to Recruitment – Avoid using third-party job boards and their generic presentation of applications. At Expr3ss!, we give our clients a customised online recruitment platform that makes it easy to find applicants whose skills and attitude are the right match for specific roles as well as corporate culture.
- Involve More People Now & Later – It’s wise to include subordinates and peers alike in the recruitment process and in periodically assessing the work of the new hire.
- Give Top Applicants a Reason to Sign On – At Google, when Jonathan Rosenberg spoke with highly desirable applicants who were on the fence about casting in their lot with the tech giant, he would tell them, “You get to work with these people” superstars such as Olympic athletes and the inventor of JavaScript.
Something to think about!
Ch33rs!