Have you ever waited for a delayed flight without knowing how much time would pass before you were invited to board it? Or have you ever waited for a medical report to come, not knowing anything about the results? The anxiety takes over your mind, and all you do is pace up and down the hallway.
Something similar happens in recruitment when you go out to find hundreds of candidates for your company, not knowing how many positions you can close in a certain period of time.
The most stressful scenario is when you don’t know. It’s the uncertainty that makes us anxious. When putting a job description out there, you might feel more relaxed if you think it’s a long shot or if you’re confident that it’s in the bag.
Our recruiting world has become exceptionally uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. When recruiters post for an open role, there’s no guarantee that a persona can be hired within a certain timeline. There’s a rough idea based on an existing pool of candidates and how much money you can throw on job boards, but there’s no certainty.
On top of that, candidates are interviewing with multiple companies at a time; some are rejecting offers because of the recruiting experiences (long delays in response, poor interview quality, etc.!).
This leads to uncertainty. Hiring managers are not sure if there will be enough people to work on the project in the coming month when their team member’s notice period ends and they leave.
The levels of uncertainty vary with the changing market trend as the recruitment demands change.
1) When growth is high, and attrition is also high, companies hire more people. Unpredictability increases.
2) When growth is high, but attrition is low, the recruitment process faces an uptick
3) When growth is low, but attrition is high, the unpredictability factor depends on notice period duration. Longer durations make hiring more manageable.
4) When both growth and attrition are low, the hiring is less. There’s almost no unpredictability.
These are the 4 main market scenarios that a company will experience.
At each stage, one thing remains constant — people are required to keep the company running. At any stage, the goal of the recruitment team is to hire quality candidates faster and at a salary that’s in line with the company’s policy. Even in the high growth period, no company says you can hire low-quality candidates, or even during high attrition, no company goes out of its budget to hire candidates.
The price for quality talent keeps on changing as markets change. In a high growth period, companies have to spend more compared to when there’s a downturn. Yet, companies strive to find the right candidate at the right price.
The problem statement remains the same — how do we hire quality candidates faster and at a salary we can afford to give?
Over the years, this question has been tackled in a number of ways — internal promotions, hiring through referrals, and such. Special attention has been specially given to trends in the technology industry.
First, there was a run towards data. Everyone was advised to collect all kinds of data, analyze it minutely, quantify everything and then work solely based on the analysis. But in recruitment, we deal with humans and not machines. Data only helped us go as far as checking if our direction was right or not. E.g., whether you are posting your job on the right channels or not.
Then we encountered the buzz about gamification. This entertained people for a while before they realized that it could get engagement, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into hiring. The rise of AI promised to solve all our hiring problems. But we know there’s a long way to go before AI can be solely responsible for hiring humans.
If you want to hire people that join and stay, build systems that give predictable results instead of fads or trends that go and come. Fads don’t do much to hire the right people and simply create the illusion of progress.
At RippleHhire, we call these systems — Recruitment Flywheels.
What is a Recruitment Flywheel?
Similar to the momentum created by a flywheel on a rowing machine, the flywheel effect occurs when minor wins for your business accumulate over time and eventually gain enough momentum that growth almost appears to occur by itself.
So, a recruitment flywheel is a self-sustaining model that generates a steady stream of candidates that join and stay for your brand.
For example, if you have good people joining the company, they are going to perform better in all aspects. This will build a great company culture and attract good candidates.
The wheel demands a lot of work to turn initially, yet the effort does not provide the desired outcomes. But once the flywheel starts turning, the output significantly outweighs the exerted effort.
A flywheel has many branches that allow several individuals to hold on and crank the wheel at the same time to produce speed. These branches are different steps in the recruitment process.
A simple recruitment process looks like this:
Each step has its own inputs, and the output is to move the candidate forward in the recruitment process. The final output is to fill in the open role. Each stage in this process should follow a set of procedures and have a set of rules and tools to give predictable output.
For example, let’s take the first step. The input is your job listing, and the output is a bunch of resumes or emails from interested (and potentially right for the job!) candidates.
Here even if you use AI, gamification, or any upcoming technology, it won’t work if your job description is bad, there’s no process to sort the data you collect from applications, or no easy way to share the job description with others via social media, or email.
The tactics may change, but the foundation systems remain the same. For example, we know employee referrals work wonders in filling up open roles. It gets quality candidates that know the company culture a little bit, and hence they stay for a long time period.
Here’s how BYJU’s leveraged it and created a dedicated account on LinkedIn to promote it:
New trends or fads are usually expensive. They require investment without any guarantee of the desired outcomes. Systems, on the other hand, are built step by step. You can dial down the inputs to your system or increase them based on your desired output. That’s why we advocate building recruitment flywheels that work for you and give predictable results.
Utilize economic downturns for building flywheels
Economic downturns are not great scenarios for either companies or candidates, but there’s a way to make this time productive and fruitful. Recruiting teams can use this time to build flywheels.
This is the time when one can analyze the kind of growth that is estimated when the economic conditions get better. And based on that, they can estimate the number of people needed to hire. Once that is done, the recruitment process can be made predictable with flywheels.
RippleHire: 10 years of building recruitment flywheels for progressive enterprises
At RippleHire, we have been the recruitment technology partner for numerous companies like Axis, LTI, Hexaware, BYJU, etc. We’ve helped them build a recruitment flywheel right from the application stage to the recruitment stage. The 10 years of research, speaking to both candidates and recruiters, and innovation have been used to build flywheels that help companies hire faster, better-quality candidates at a cost that’s in line with the company’s policies.
As your business grows, it will become apparent that standardized and formal recruiting processes are much better than the ‘spray and pray’ methodology. The stakes would be high, and you won’t be able to afford not to hire people at the right time, at the right price, and before your competitors snatch them.
If you want to build recruiting teams that can confidently take the responsibility of filling up critical roles in your company at scale, check out RippleHire here.
