Hiring and recruitment have become increasingly challenging in the face of a fiercely competitive workforce and economic uncertainty. HR teams also struggle with recruitment budget constraints, which further complicates the hiring process. So, you must ensure you’re maximizing ROI in recruitment.
These situations have prompted hiring managers to reassess the core of their talent acquisition strategies. Generative AI has become increasingly vital as a recruitment tool, enabling enterprises to scale and refine JDs that convert. Thus, maximizing ROI in recruitment.
The first step in boosting recruitment ROI is informed decision-making for every job opening. Your hiring team should assess the current hiring landscape and take measured steps toward progress.
Maximizing ROI in Recruitment: Strategy #1 – Focus on Recruitment Metrics
Now more than ever, it has become critical for your recruiting and hiring team to focus on talent acquisition key performance indicators (KPIs). Tracking these tangible figures offers your team an accurate idea of strategies that work and areas for improvement. It is advantageous for hiring teams to focus on the most essential KPIs for shaping effective recruitment strategies. And this goes a long way in maximizing ROI in recruitment.
While recruitment strategies may differ among hiring teams and organizations, they should generally focus on the following metrics:
Employee lifetime value (ELTV)
A company’s ELTV determines the long-term quality of hire based on an employee’s company contributions. Your ELTV values also help your company refine HR decision-making by justifying the budgets invested in talent development. The ELTV is one of the top metrics to look for since it determines the total value an employee brings to your enterprise.
Cost-per-hire
The cost-per-hire in your recruitment campaign shows how much it costs to bring in a new employee. So, this includes expenses for finding, hiring, and interviewing candidates, as well as fees for recruitment agencies. According to the Academy To Innovate HR (AIHR), you calculate the cost per hire by adding together all the internal and external recruiting costs and then dividing by the total number of hires.
Job acceptance rates
These figures refer to the ratio of jobs accepted to the total positions offered. A low job acceptance rate usually indicates issues with specific stages in the talent acquisition pipeline. Possible causes of poor job offer acceptance rates include salary disputes and poorly structured interviews.
Application completion rate
The metric determines the percentage of potential hires who complete the job application process. Lengthy interviews, biased JDs, and technical issues experienced during job search may result in poor application completion and recruitment ROI.
Your hiring team needs to clearly define and track important measurements to make sure they meet industry and compliance standards. Measuring your recruitment process is important to keep your efforts clear and measurable. This helps make sure you have the right strategies to help with maximizing ROI in recruitment.
Maximizing ROI in Recruitment: Strategy #2 – Optimize Career Progression
A systematic career progression pathway provides hires with clear expectations in their roles and responsibilities. A well-thought-out plan gives employees confidence in their placements, motivating them to hit personal goals and organizational quotas. You can refine your career progression by implementing the following measures in the recruitment process:
Providing employee testimonials during onboarding – Your company could include talks conducted by employees with similar experiences as your new hire. These sessions could consist of a walkthrough of the challenges experienced in a role, benefits, professional fulfillment, and prerequisites for progression. You could also publish these testimonials on your company’s official social media pages for enhanced visibility.
Fine-tuning Your JD—Your JD is the gateway that connects potential employees/job seekers with your organization. It serves as a strategic platform for outlining the career progression for a particular vacancy. For example, you could explicitly communicate that your company provides candidates with progression to senior and leadership roles or interdepartmental positions.
Prioritize Employee Training – Training is a critical component of career progression initiatives. An industry survey revealed that more than two-thirds of remote workers seek additional training. These are essential statistics, considering the continuous trend of hybrid and remote talent arrangements.
A focus on career progression provides employees with the trust and confidence that your enterprise prioritizes their needs and interest. This is essential especially when the workforce navigates a volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) world that requires high adaptability.
Maximizing ROI in Recruitment: Strategy #3 – Leverage Work Culture
An enterprise is more likely to hire a top-performing employee if hires align themselves with organizational values, defined by your culture. For that reason, 71% of job seekers reportedly consider details of company culture ‘very’ or ‘extremely important’ in a job description.
Your JD should clearly reflect company values, goals, mission statements, and workplace characteristics such as DEI-friendly settings and sustainability efforts. These features help your team with maximizing ROI in recruitment.
Promoting your culture narrows the job candidate search, catering to target audiences who resonate with your company values. These unique details can prove highly advantageous as differentiators against industry competitors.
Consider trimming work culture descriptions to succinct statements that define your company’s characteristics at a glance. It is also strategic to place your culture description in the right JD section for the added impact.
For example, you could emphasize company culture in the responsibilities section by describing a workplace that focuses on continuous learning and on-the-job training. Similarly, your JD could outline how a specific role directly contributes to the advancement of your company’s corporate responsibilities.
Your recruitment team can also get candidates more interested by putting a short description of your company culture at the top of your JDs. So, this will quickly show the personality and background of your organization. For example, you could include a brief history of your company’s achievements and your commitment to specific industry goals or diversity and inclusion.
Check For Culture Add with Structured Interviews
You should further fine-tune recruitment by following up with a structured two-level interview process. The initial screening could involve a remote meeting where your hiring teams can gauge an applicant’s mannerisms, communication skills, and professional attitude.
Your recruiters can then move qualified applicants to in-person interviews. These interviews will take a closer look at the candidate’s experience and skills to see if they fit with your company’s culture. It’s important not to use initial screenings instead of in-person interviews. In-person interviews are still crucial for finding out if a candidate has the key skills you need.
Doing so determines an individual’s commitment, values, and abilities to thrive within your organizational environment. It is also important to ensure that your team enforces unbiased interview measures to avoid interview biases that could affect your talent acquisition decisions.
An inclusive talent-shortlisting approach may include:
- Conducting interviews with standardized questions based on the relevance and requirements of a role while ensuring objective background checks. These measures prevent interviewers from going off-topic and engaging in familiarity biases, in effect, maximizing ROI in recruitment.
- Systematize applicant scoring guides. A standard scale enables interviewers to rate and rank candidates fairly in response to standardized questions. Ideally, these guides should involve competency-based assessments to determine the relevant skills and knowledge to fulfill job demands.
- Constantly reviewing interview processes to keep them updated with the latest HR, industry, and DEIB guidelines. Doing so prevents the unconscious filtering of qualified candidates based on their background.
Maximizing ROI in Recruitment: Strategy #4 – Make DEIB a Company-Wide Effort
When companies hire fairly, they get a team that’s diverse, strong, and gets more done. So, this helps make hiring more worthwhile. But, some companies still face push-back against their DEIB efforts. Your company can deal with this by making DEIB a big priority for everyone in the organization.
HR managers should lead by example by adopting inclusive language throughout company communication channels. For example, teams could involve a conscious use of inclusive language in routine meetings, customer engagements, team communications, company job boards/websites, and JDs.
A company-driven approach to DEIB establishes greater empathy among employees for a more harmonious culture. These efforts enable your enterprise to deter perceived threats to a hire’s individual and social identity.
Open and clear communication within the company, along with regular campaigns about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), show that different viewpoints matter. So, it includes people from different backgrounds in discussions from all parts of the company. These efforts stop hurtful actions and also motivate everyone to do their best, no matter where they come from.
Recognize Different DEIB Perspectives
On a deeper level, it is also essential to recognize that various groups have differing sentiments on the DEIB subject. Workforce surveys indicate that 78% of the workforce values working in a workforce that prioritizes diversity and inclusion. However, women are more likely than men to work at an organization that prioritizes diversity and inclusion (86% vs. 72%).
Similarly, respondents have different levels of satisfaction with existing DEIB efforts in their organization according to their race. Your recruitment and hiring team should partner with various employee resource groups (ERGs) to identify workplace trends and challenges from multiple perspectives.
These partnerships help improve your job description by making the orientation process better with helpful advice. ERGs offer support and resources to help new hires feel connected and understand the company better. So, this approach to hiring helps employees grow and improves the return on investment in recruiting.
Maximizing ROI in Recruitment: Strategy # 5 – Enhance Your Job Descriptions with AI
The quality of your JD has a significant impact on applicant response and ROI in recruitment. An effective JD should communicate a role’s primary perks and expectations while maintaining unbiased and appealing content.
Enterprises face the issue of optimizing JDs in mass hiring campaigns. Large-scale recruitment makes it harder for hiring managers to ensure that JD content remains consistent and impactful.
Improve Your Quality of Hire with Text Analyzer
Ongig’s Text Analyzer platform streamlines these challenging recruitment processes through the precision of a proven AI algorithm. The Text Analyzer’s user-friendly interface expedites JD creation either from scratch or by vetting current descriptions.
Text Analyzer generates quality JDs in a shorter time based on your job title. Doing so generates a template based on the title, which you can conveniently tweak according to your hiring needs. The analyzer reveals JD details, including exclusionary words, readability, and biases that repel the best talent.
An Indeed Survey revealed that 52% of job seekers attribute the quality of a job advert as very or highly Influential on their decision to apply for a job. The quality of job postings includes its formatting, readability, and inclusiveness factors.
For instance, an internal Ongig research discovered that a JD’s ideal number of bullet points is 7 or less. However, these numbers could differ according to the position (e.g., expanding for more technical vacancies).
Text Analyzer’s templates check against every job listing section prioritized by job seekers. These include the job summary, DEI statement, mission statements, about us, compensation, and role requirements.
Text Analyzer makes sure your job listings have a consistent format. So, this helps your hiring team create and keep a library of job descriptions that are easy for candidates to understand. Therefore, with Text Analyzer, you can quickly add job descriptions to your applicant tracking systems using its simple API. Thus, making the hiring process faster.
Watch our Text Analyzer tutorial for detailed steps to streamline your JDs at scale.
The Bottomline – Raise Retention With Optimized Recruitment
Effective recruitment with AI support elevates the quality of hire, employee engagement, and retention. Now is a crucial time in the digital age for enterprises to implement data-driven decisions that reliably engage high-quality candidates for every available role.
Finding the right folks through better recruitment ads creates a good atmosphere where everyone can do well. So, when you use fair and facts-based hiring methods, it sets up a place where new hires are committed to sticking around. This also helps keep more people on board, which is crucial for your business to thrive in a tough job market.
Why I Wrote This:
Ongig’s Text Analyzer empowers hiring managers and employers with automated tools for eliminating biased and unappealing job listings. Our algorithm finds inefficiencies in the sourcing process and maximizes your ROI in recruitment. So, your enterprise can consistently expand talent pool outreach and attract potential candidates from diverse backgrounds. Request a demo of Ongig’s Text Analyzer, today!
Shout-outs:
- AIHR – Cost per Hire: Definition, Formula, and Calculation, By Erik van Vulpen
- Growth Force – How Maximize Profit And ROI From Your People
- Forbes – To Retain Employees, Help Them Grow And Develop, By Neena Newberry
- AIHR – 8 Best Practices For Remote Training at Your Organization, By Shani Jay
- Digital Leadership – VUCA World – Meaning, Examples And Management Steps, By Stefan F.Dieffenbacher
- Konker, LinkedIn – Job descriptions tell, job adverts sell!
- Indeed – How to Improve Your Job Post by Thinking Like a Job Seeker
- By Aaron Cleavinger – The Hiring Process: Your Secret Weapon or Your Achilles Heel?
- Gartner – How to Navigate Pushback to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Efforts, By Trisha Rai and Caitlin Dutkiewicz
- Business News Daily – Hiring for Cultural Fit? Here’s What to Look For, By Skye Schooley
- By Neelie Verlinden – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging At Work: A 2024 Guide
- By Laura Wronski, CNBC|SurveyMonkey Workforce Happiness Index: April 2021
