The new year is just around the corner, and that means now is the perfect time to get a jumpstart on your organization’s New Year’s resolutions. The last quarter of the year can usher in a bit of a lull for a lot of industries, and usually as business slows, so does hiring. So, as Q4 winds down and you begin ramping up for Q1, now is a great time to plan your hiring strategy for the coming year.
The first step to taking advantage of this time is to evaluate what you accomplished this year. You may want to start by assessing the productivity and overall quality of your new hires. When you measure their success in an objective, standardized way, you can compare information from employee to employee and see their growth over time. You can also look at company-wide hiring metrics such as your company’s rate of employee turnover or average time-to-hire. By defining some success metrics early on, you’ll have a much easier time planning realistic goals around what you want to improve.
Once you know what works (and what doesn’t work) in your hiring process, it’s time to think about what you can do better. Think of these goals as your organization’s hiring resolutions. Maybe you want to improve overall quality-of-hire. Or you may wish to polish some of the metrics mentioned above, like your turnover rate or time-to hire. You can even start as simply as planning out how many people you’re looking to hire in the next year. Whatever you’re looking to accomplish, now is a great time to lay out the framework to achieve your objectives.
So you’ve got your data from the past year, you have your hiring goals for the new year, and now you need a plan for how you and your team are going to accomplish them. Depending on what you’re hoping to do, you may only want to make some minor tweaks to your hiring process, or you might want to revamp it entirely. One of the quickest and easiest ways to help you and your team reach your hiring goals is by incorporating pre-employment testing into the hiring process. Testing offers a scientific way to assess your candidates’ cognitive aptitude, personality, and learned skills, providing you with valuable, predictive information to use when making your hiring decisions. In fact, cognitive aptitude is one of the most predictive means of measuring future success in a job. Companies that use testing are able to increase productivity and decrease employee turnover by hiring the right people from the start. In addition, modern, cloud-based pre-employment testing platforms can be implemented at any step of the hiring process. This way, it can offer you data on your candidates quickly without disrupting the parts of your process that work. You can fill positions with quality talent faster, reducing your time-to-hire and increasing productivity.
The end of the year is here, so chances are that you’re drawing up your budgets for next year. That means now is an ideal time to factor in the cost of any new hiring initiatives you’d like to incorporate, even if you don’t plan on hiring immediately. Fortunately, the cost of pre-employment testing is a small fraction of the cost of a bad hire, let alone the time spent wading through a sea of resumes. You can use this time to research vendors and plan what your hiring procedure will look like before you start collecting applications. By thinking about these expenses now, you give yourself the freedom to either spend any leftover budget you have or plan for hiring costs later in the year.
