The Problem with Current Hiring Technology: Quantity over Quality Overlooks Deeper Candidate Alignment
In today's fast-paced business environment, hiring the right talent swiftly is crucial. However, the urgency to fill positions quickly is often at the expense of finding the right fit. When it’s time to hire, some companies can afford to work with recruiters, but as that can be costly, instead many companies turn to mainstream hiring platforms that intentionally deliver a large volume of applicants.
The prevailing approach promised by these platforms is centered around producing an increasing volume of applicants, with many platforms promising rapid results through technology-driven solutions.
However, this emphasis on quantity often sacrifices quality, overlooking critical aspects of successful hiring: deeper alignment between the candidate, the job, the team, and the organization. This oversight can lead to significant, harmful challenges, from poor job engagement to high turnover rates. Let’s take a closer look at the problems of designing for quantity over quality.
The Quantity over Quality Trap
Current hiring technologies create an illusion of success by flooding a company with resumes.
Making a bigger haystack without adding more needles just over burdens hiring managers, leading them to rely on tools like keyword matching and AI filters. However, this approach is problematic for several reasons:
Quantity at the Expense of Quality: A large number of applicants does not guarantee that the right individual is among them. Instead, companies end up digging through a bigger haystack, spending valuable time sifting through unqualified candidates, adding critical delays to the hiring process.
Lack of Differentiation and Diversity: When you’re promised more qualified candidates, big platforms rely on overly simplistic tools, filtering candidates based on superficial criteria like keyword matches, and previous job titles, which tend to favor conventional profiles and exclude non-traditional experiences or more diverse backgrounds.
Increased Turnover: Candidates selected primarily on role requirements might not align with the company’s culture or team dynamics, leading to disengagement and a higher likelihood of leaving the organization. Given that the direct cost of replacing an employee is roughly 50-60% of their salary, and the overall cost to the organization can range from 90-200%, this is an all-too-common pitfall worth avoiding.
Poor Engagement: When we hire to match a candidate with a job description, we overlook the deeper alignment of matching candidates with the role, the team, and the organization. This oversight causes many new hires to struggle in connecting with their colleagues, the broader organizational mission, and the purpose of their role. This lack of engagement can reduce productivity and morale.
Existing “Solutions" and Their Failings
In response to these challenges, several solutions have emerged, such as AI-driven resume screening and automated interview processes. However, these tools often do little more than speed up existing, flawed processes, only ensuring more ineffective results, faster.
Rather than addressing the root issues, they exacerbate them by automating biases and perpetuating ineffective hiring practices. These solutions continue to prioritize quantity over quality, leading to a cycle of ineffective hiring and missed opportunities for true talent. While these approaches are tempting with promises of efficiency, they comes with several critical drawbacks:
Superficial Screening: Keyword-based systems may filter out unqualified candidates, but they also overlook essential factors like cultural fit, values, and long-term potential. This approach favors those who can game the system, often at the expense of genuinely qualified candidates who may not use the right buzzwords.
Overlooking Interpersonal Skills: Attributes like communication, teamwork, leadership, adaptability, learning, and problem-solving are rarely captured by keywords. As a result, candidates with strong interpersonal skills, who could be great fits for the team, are often excluded from consideration in favor of quantitative matches.
Perpetuating Bias: Keyword matching systems tend to favor candidates who meet traditional standards, such as specific degrees or industry-specific jargon, which often align with the backgrounds of existing employees. This perpetuates a lack of diversity, as those who don't fit these molds are systematically excluded, simply because they don’t know the magic words to include on their resumes.
The Importance of Deeper Alignment
For a truly effective hiring process, it’s essential to look beyond immediate role requirements and consider how well a candidate aligns with not only the job, but also the team, and the organization.
While skills and abilities are crucial, hiring for engagement and long-term success requires a more holistic approach, factoring in much more about an applicant than their capabilities, and much more about the opportunity than just performance goals.
Here’s why deeper alignment matters:
Cultural Fit/Cultural Add: Candidates who share the company’s values and vision are more likely to thrive long term. Good cultural alignment can foster a sense of belonging and loyalty, again reducing turnover and enhancing overall job satisfaction.
Team Dynamics: Each team has its unique chemistry. Ensuring a candidate fits well within the team’s working style and interpersonal relationships can lead to more effective collaboration and a more harmonious work environment, which has direct implications on productivity.
Long-Term Engagement: When candidates feel aligned with the company's mission and goals, they are more motivated and engaged. This alignment can translate into better performance and a greater willingness to go the extra mile.
Holistic Evaluation: A comprehensive hiring approach considers not just experience and technical skills but also interpersonal skills, potential for growth, and adaptability. This holistic evaluation can uncover candidates who may not “match all the keywords” but possess the qualities needed to excel in the role, on the team, and within the organization.
Rapid Skills Evolution: With the fast-paced advancements in technology, the “half-life” of skills is shorter than ever. This requires a commitment to lifelong learning and continuous development. Hiring solely based on current skills can be shortsighted. As workplaces evolve, the ability to adapt, learn, and grow within the company becomes paramount.
Moving Forward: A Balanced Approach
To address the shortcomings of traditional hiring platforms, companies need to adopt a more balanced approach that combines role requirements with deeper alignment strategies. Here are some steps to consider:
Enhanced Screening Tools: Use assessment tools that evaluate both technical skills and cultural fit. Psychometric tests, behavioral interviews, and situational judgment tests can provide a more rounded view of a candidate's suitability.
Structured Interviews: Develop interview processes that assess not only skills and experience but also values, work styles and preferences, and interpersonal abilities. Involve team members in the interview process to gauge potential team dynamics.
Long-Term Potential: Look for candidates with the potential to grow within the organization. Invest in training and development programs to help new hires align with the company’s evolving needs and culture. When an applicant matches with 100% of the skills needed for a role, there’s little room for growth. Without that challenge, disengagement can fester more quickly.
Thoughtful Onboarding and Continuous Feedback: When a new employee joins a team, everything in that organization is new to them. Design a thoughtful process to introduce them to the company, the team they’ll be working with, and the norms and expectations. Implement systems to gather feedback from new hires and their teams regularly. This feedback can help refine the hiring and onboarding processes and ensure they remain aligned with the company's goals and values.
By focusing on deeper alignment across the role, the team, and the organization, companies can create a more engaged, productive, and loyal workforce. While efficiency is important in hiring, it should not come at the expense of finding candidates who truly resonate with the job, the team, and the organization.
The future of hiring lies in a more thoughtful, balanced approach that values quality over quantity. Handprint was created with this in mind - as a new way to hire for the future of work.
The Effectiveness of Handprint's New Way to Hire
Handprint.io is designed for a completely new way of hiring, integrating the balanced approach above and working, not to fix, but to reinvent hiring as you know it.
We’re not just talk. Mightybytes, a founding B-Corp, serves as a powerful case study of its effectiveness. The founder, Tim Frick, had a Director-level role open for 2 years without much luck on traditional platforms and even values-driven platforms like BWork. Within 30 days on Handprint.io, he found the right fit.
While other platforms generated 84 applicants, Handprint brought in just 4. Despite this smaller volume, the numbers here prove that quality will always win over quantity. 2 out of the 4 Handprint applicants moved on to second interviews, compared to just 1 out of the 84 from other platforms. The final offer was extended to a Handprint candidate.
Take a deeper look:
50% of Handprint applicants (2/4) moved on to second interviews compared to 1.2% (1/84) of candidates from other platforms
25% (1/4) of Handprint applicants received an offer for the role, compared to 0% (0/84)
Small in numbers, but mighty in results.
