In the modern business ecosystem, what are today’s hiring best practices?
HR thought leader Josh Bersin recently wrote about the seven practices of high-impact HR, which include:
- Designing better employee experiences
- Leveraging HR technology
- Leading corporate digital transformation
- Understanding/supporting agile and team-centric org models
- Working with leadership to craft a culture of trust and accountability
- Designing the HR function as a network of teams, breaking down silos
- Continuously developing your HR talent
These are all noble goals for HR, but there’s another aspect to this equation: Bersin notes how busy and stressed most workers are feeling.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American employees has lost on average a full week of vacation since 2000. 40% of U.S. workers currently find work “highly stressful.”
Here’s the problem with best practices: we have seven very strong goals that HR teams should be achieving.
But where is the time to achieve them if we are losing vacation time and feeling more stressed?
The priority puzzle
The path to “finding the time” is usually about defining the priorities of the team, department, and organization clearly.
Unfortunately, 67% of senior managers can’t name the priorities of the CEO, and 95% of employees don’t understand the strategy of their company.
More effective priority-setting can lead us to better hiring practices, but it’s not enough.
We also need to be using the right process and tools to enable us to do our jobs better.
Technology can help achieve hiring best practices
Bersin lists leveraging technology as a best practice.
When we say “leverage technology,” we’re usually talking about freeing up time.
A recruiter should be working on speaking to the best candidates, getting more context on their careers, and trying to blend candidate experience into employee experience (which, when done correctly, reduces turnover).
What does a recruiter spend so much of their time doing, though?
Sourcing and screening.
There’s less time for value-add activities and they feel stressed.
This is where AI recruiting software and other new technologies can help, reducing time to hire, increasing candidate quality, and providing better context when recruiting passive candidates.
If tech does the repetitive work and humans do the relationship-building work, the system works better.
People are less stressed and more connected to what they’re doing, and the machines and algorithms are doing what they were made for.
Important to remember overall
We can talk about “how to get HR a seat at the table” or “hiring best practices” endlessly.
It will never happen if people feel busy with what they’re already doing.
You need to remove some of the work and the stress, or new initiatives won’t move forward.
Without using technology to find ways to reduce the workload already on our plates, all these HR practices driven by decades of research won’t actually be initiated.
If you truly want your hiring to be next-generation, you need a way to reduce work and stress via tech.