5 Tools to Boost Your Quality of Hire in 2017

Big data, artificial intelligence, automation, video technology: These are just some of the topics that recruiting leaders are talking about today. Individually, they all stand to impact the recruitment sector in profound ways over the coming years. Collectively, they can also be used to improve one of the most important metrics in recruitment – quality of hire.

At industry events and in recruitment publications, improving quality of hire is a goal that's gaining momentum. It's being talked about more, and we increasingly feel we're developing the technologies to address this challenge.

Improving quality of hire is a multifaceted issue. It is critical that we identify the character traits and skill sets that are essential to successful hires by looking at data collected on our greatest successes to date. Then, we need to identify the candidates who meet this criteria and nurture relationships with them. We need to perfect our screening processes to ensure we build the strongest possible short lists. To maximize employee happiness and retention, we must also ensure that the hires we make are good cultural fits. Finally, we need to build onboarding processes that integrate our hires as effectively as possible.

With all the above in mind, here are five tools you can use today to help your organization bolster its quality of hire and gain a competitive advantage over other employers in your industry:

1. To Improve Collaboration: Talenytics

Without doubt, one of the biggest challenges in recruitment is getting hiring managers and recruiters to collaborate to produce successful outcomes. Within your company, hiring managers and their colleagues will know whom their most successful team members are, but they won't necessarily understand how this information relates back to their profiles as candidates.

To improve your company's quality of hire, you need to bridge this gap between high-performing employees and candidate profiles in order to zero in on the indicators that a given applicant will be successful.

Talenytics tackles this problem head-on. Drawing on input from hiring stakeholders, it produces a graphical hiring brief that is transparent and clearly understood within the business. Applicants can then be assessed against this brief and decisions about where compromises need to be made can be arrived at scientifically rather than through the recruiter's instincts. Uniquely, Talenytics also monitors the performance of new hires against the brief for 12 months and relates this back to the candidate profiles.

Not only does this approach ensure that the short list of candidates is more likely to win over hiring managers, but it also means that, over time, your company can build up a set of candidate profiles that hiring stakeholders can use to identify the types of candidates they should hire.

2. To Nurture and Engage Your Talent Pipeline: Candidate.ID

A strong short list of candidates results from effective candidate sourcing and attraction, plus the conversion rates your recruitment team enjoys when approaching candidates and progressing them through the hiring process. In today's candidate-strapped market, it is vital to build relationships with candidates before attempting to engage them in a hiring conversation.

Candidate.ID's talent pipeline platform manages and optimizes every tactic used to find, attract, engage, and nurture candidates. Using a unique scoring algorithm, it identifies which candidates within your talent pipeline are ready for a hiring conversation. In the company's words, it "is the difference between net fishing and spearfishing." By getting more of the candidates who would make quality hires into your recruitment process, Candidate.ID can play a key role in increasing your organization's quality of hire.

3. To Ensure Cultural Fit: JOBVIDDY

The more informed a candidate is about your company's values, culture, and work environment, the more likely they are to become a long-term hire for your business. One increasingly important element in achieving this kind of hire is the use of video to give candidates much richer insights into life at your company.

JOBVIDDY makes it possible for any recruitment team to add immersive and interactive video content to their job ads and hiring campaigns. In addition to helping you hire better cultural fits for your company, embracing video content is also likely to increase application rates and reduce drop-out rates during the interview process.

4. To Improve Candidate Screening: HireVue

Imagine that your recruitment team had the resources to interview every single candidate who applied to your company. You would undoubtedly find that many candidates with weak resumes turned out to impress you enough to warrant further consideration via their interviews. That's just the nature of recruitment: too many applicants and not enough time to review them all as thoroughly as you'd like.

Now consider all the time you invest in conducting interviews that proves to be fruitless – those interviews in which you realize during the first couple of minutes that the candidate is not right for your role (or the candidate realizes you are not right for them).

Through video interviewing technology, HireVue can help recruitment teams tackle these two issues. The platform offers better insights about your applicants before you decide to move forward with them, and it allows you to spend less time on full-blowin interviews with candidates who aren't going to succeed in the process. The result is a stronger set of candidates making it to final round of interviews – and recruiters having more of their time freed up to engage and nurture the strongest candidates in the pipeline.

5. To Ensure Onboarding Success: Talmundo

When it comes to improving quality of hire, making the right hire is only part of the problem. Your onboarding process can materially impact – positively or negatively – how a new hire feels about your company, which in turn impacts the length of time they stay at your organization.

This is where Talmundo fits in. Its mobile app focuses on three key elements of successful onboarding:

- Engaging and exciting new hires: Starting a new job is exciting. Make sure you build on this sense of excitement from the moment your new hire accepts the job offer. Keep excitement levels high by sharing relevant and engaging content about the job, the company, and the new hire's colleagues.

- Training and informing new hires: You want to make sure new hires are aware of your company's policies, procedures, and any other critical role-related information. You also want to get these administrative tasks out of the way as quickly as possible so that your new hire retains their enthusiasm and excitement for the challenges that lie ahead.

- Connecting and interacting with new hires: By inviting new hires to share quick intro videos with their future teammates, you ensure a smooth induction into the team. You also want to check in with them regularly to see how their first weeks and months are going.

It used to be said that quality of hire was impossible to measure. In reality, we simply didn't have the tools we needed to do so. With the data, insights, and capabilities of the tools listed above, you'll have all the resources you need to change your hiring practices in ways that promote quality of hire.

Tony Restell is the founder of social media agency Social-Hire.com. You can find Tony on Twitter, @tonyrestell.