How to Use a Recruitment Scorecard

Watch the RPOA webinar and see takeaways below

How to Assess Your Hiring Process

{4:29} The hiring process involves more than just a job application. An organization has a lot of options in how to structure their hiring process and what steps to include in it. Not all steps are necessary or impactful.

PRO TIP: Any step, not mandated by law, that does not provide a useful decision point, or disproportionately knocks qualified candidates out of the running should be removed.

Using the recruitment scorecard gives employers a chance to look at themselves in the mirror. No one is getting in trouble here. That’s not what the scorecard is about. But using this tool to assess the current state of your hiring process helps your organization identify where the gaps or where are the improvement areas that will elevate your talent acquisition process to its best state.

What we often see is that employers aren’t aware that there’s room for improvement in their hiring process. And sometimes it can be jarring for a team to realize they haven’t been using an optimized process — and it may have been hurting their performance.

That’s where the recruitment scorecard becomes truly valuable. It gives teams an opportunity to pause, reflect and think more about what can we improve, less about who to blame. That’s also where change management becomes important, and what we help employers manage, too. It’s not a small thing to recognize the need to change, upgrade and improve how you recruit and hire people.

A partner, like Advanced RPO, can provide an organization with an outsider’s perspective on what needs to be improved in your hiring process, and then what steps need to happen next to realize that better process.

Questions to ask about your hiring process

{5:44} In the webinar, you’ll see a sampling of questions that helps organizations assess the current state of their hiring process and recruiting effectiveness.

Simply recognizing whether your team follows best practices — ex: do you have a standard hiring process for all roles and is that process documented? — can help rally everyone around the assessment and create a drive to improve how you execute.

Answering these questions will also give you keys to why you’re experiencing certain stumbling blocks in your hiring performance. Using the recruitment scorecard, you might uncover inefficiencies that are slowing your process down and have made you miss out on top candidates. When your team see what best practices you’re not following, you can quickly prioritize what needs to change and start measuring its impact on your performance.

ATS Configuration Best Practices

{10:34} ATS configuration is the backbone of all things talent acquisition. It’s your recruitment command center. It’s essential you ensure appropriate steps and statuses are built in from the get-go to support efficient recruiting, compliance, and reporting measures. How your application tracking system is configured makes or breaks how well it will perform — and how well your team can perform, too.

When Advanced RPO works with a client to configure and implement an ATS, we first take a look at how the team currently functions with the ATS and how it’s setup.

{10:34} ATS configuration is the backbone of all things talent acquisition. It’s your recruitment command center. It’s essential you ensure appropriate steps and statuses are built in from the get-go to support efficient recruiting, compliance, and reporting measures. How your application tracking system is configured makes or breaks how well it will perform — and how well your team can perform, too.

When Advanced RPO works with a client to configure and implement an ATS, we first take a look at how the team currently functions with the ATS and how it’s setup.

Two common ATS mistakes

{11:46} The most common mistake we see in ATS configuration is underutilization — not enough steps and statuses. In this case, the ATS isn’t working hard enough because it isn’t configured to help as much as it could. Flipside: we often see organizations configure their ATS with far too many steps and statuses. Over-congfiguration leads to confusion and cluttered environment. That begets mistakes and duplicating work.

In each case, you’ll see an underutilized tool that’s meant to accelerate your TA function not delivering business value, supporting recruitment process nor improving the candidate experience. Read more about ATS configuration pitfalls.

Job Posting Optimization

{16:45} Job postings are too often undervalued and overlooked in the recruitment process. Using the recruitment scorecard to evaluate your approach to creating and promoting job posts can give your organization a sense of whether you’re nailing this essential step — or losing potential candidates by missing the mark.

{18:10} For an organization, a job post is the equivalent of a candidate resume, in reverse. Employers have about 15-30 seconds to grab a job seeker’s attention. Take the time to evaluate whether your job postings appeal to candidates and provide enough information to allow them to make an informed decision.

The order your information is in, how it is worded, and how clear and concise your message is impacts how candidates react to it. Your job postings need to make it clear and easy to understand why people want to work for you and should want to learn more about the role.

{20:25} At Advanced RPO, we not only help clients audit their own job postings and learn from best practices, but we provide market research, too.

Understanding how your competitors are communicating their job postings, who’s posting salaries, what benefits they offer and where they’re promoting jobs can give your organization a baseline for what your candidates expect.

Pay transparency and clarity on remote vs. on-site work can give you an advantage as an employer, especially when your market is being murky about it. Candidates want employers to be upfront about what it’s like to work for you. Transparency on pay and office requirements can set you apart from competitors who aren’t doing it.