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Common hiring process produces 85% disengaged employees

You are doing a great job, got your project funded or your business roaring and now you need new employees. Well done!

Future is already here, but not evenly distributed.

But what happens next (in many cases) can only be described as “Back to the past”. Science has brought us artificial intelligence, improved medicine and a ticket to Mars. But when it comes to hiring, many people ignore the results science has produced in the field of hiring. For that reason I would like to discuss some scientific findings and how to use these science-hacks for your advantage.

The common structure of a hiring process.

  1. Companies normally publish their job offerings on their website or a portal or engage a headhunter / recruiting agency.
  2. Then the applicants send in their CV or github / medium handle.
  3. Someone pre-screens the applicants,
  4. You have telephone interviews with the long list,
  5. You have personal interviews with the short list which are also being screened by SMEs (either by talks, in-office test days or test works)
  6. And then you decide who you like most and make offer

This process might sound familiar to many of us. And let’s be honest. Although hiring is the most important task for a company, many people involved in the hiring process are in no way trained to do interviews, screen applications or actually decide what is “a good candidate”.

So what would be the problem, if the hiring process is flawed? Well, this leads in the end to a high number of dissatisfied employees, drop outs during the trial period or a generally high churn rate. And if you think that a headhunter might easily get 20.000 Euros for a filled position, I assume people want to make sure that the money is not wasted. Furthermore Gallup showed in a global survey that 85% of all employees are disengaged in their job. That means that 85% of the employees do not fit into the companies they work in. That is horribly bad! And it is a clear sign that something is wrong in the way that people are hired in companies. If you think about it. The whole hiring process is designed for the sole purpose of testing, if a person will fit into your company. If the fit is good, the person will feel engaged. If it is bad, the person will underperform, disturb the well-being of your team, quit internally, be fired or leave the company. But with 85% of the employees feeling disenganged, it seems that -please excuse my directness – “letting a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at an applicants’ board” would yield a better result.

In the next section, we will look in detail at eye-opening scientific findings to the pre-screening phase.

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