Welcome to a new year which brings with it all the old challenges from last year! Whilst a promised vaccine brings a glimmer of hope in the battle against Covid-19, industry’s rocky path out of a global downturn inevitably has twists and turns ahead.
Whatever your plans are for 2021, we wanted to start off by sharing some achievable resolutions that you can actually put in place to help you attain more efficient and successful recruiting.
1. Update your remote working policy
Last year, you probably hastily scribbled a remote working policy in a knee-jerk reaction to enforced WFH guidance. Or perhaps you already had a policy in place and just tweaked it to include a Zoom user manual. However, remote working and flexible arrangements are here to stay, as we outlined in our blog last month.
You’ll need to revisit your policy with a view to addressing what will be a long-term norm rather than a temporary fix. We recommend you make sure you include these elements as a minimum:
Outline who can and who can’t work from home
Not all roles are suitable for home working and this needs to be clearly stipulated, along with reasons why. You might want to also include which locations are considered acceptable, for example, working from a beach in Jamaica will have time difference implications not to mention video calling challenges. Staff shouldn’t rely on remote working instead of taking annual leave or allowing other distractions to take over.
Confirm acceptable hours during which staff should be available
You’ll probably want to maintain a degree of flexibility, and you might even amend this for each team or individual, but having a guide in place as to what’s acceptable is important.
Set feedback timelines and methods
Keeping in touch is vital if staff are dispersed, and regular opportunities to give feedback will allow progress to be measured and any issues addressed.
Consider company security
Are company possessions covered by insurance when in someone’s home? Are your cyber security measures sufficient to protect offsite data and increased risks from hacking and cyber threats? Does a person’s role involve access to confidential information and how is that be managed in a busy household or coffee shop?
2. Validate objectivity and transparency in your decisions
Recent times have welcomed greater open mindedness in society with increased awareness of the LGBTQ+ movement, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. You need to be able to prove that the HR decisions you take are objectively based on data-driven information and not gut instinct or personal preferences.
Harnessing the differences in people helps make organisations become more successful, more innovative, more skilled and better able to cater to their diverse clients’ needs.
A talent assessment platform can help immensely here – it removes bias, either conscious or otherwise, from your decision-making processes and promotes impartial, unprejudiced and unemotional judgements.
This in turn means you can justify your choices to internal staff or external candidates and be assured that you’re not discriminating against any age, gender, sexuality or nationality. Take a look at Thomas’ resources and webinar series to help you avoid bias and recruit for wider diversity and inclusion.
3. Look inside
Recruiting is more than just an outward-looking exercise, sometimes just what you need might be right under your nose. Organisations often fail to contemplate the obvious choice when hiring – considering internal recruitment should definitely be amongst your new year resolutions.
Using talent that you already have in the business makes sense on many levels. With a talent management system, you may be able to save the cost of an external hire and you’ll definitely save on onboarding costs. It’s good for staff development too – if an employee is ripe for promotion or just ready for a change, internal redeployment could be the answer.
Here, again, a talent assessment platform is of great value. Using a tool like Thomas, you can create your ideal job profile before you even look for your first candidate. Match applications against your profile using a simple star rating to make it easy to shortlist candidates for interviews. This also makes it much easier to explain to an unsuccessful candidate why they weren’t offered the job, and allows for constructive feedback as to which areas they may wish to develop – another HR box ticked!
4. Maximise your ROI
It’s common for organisations to invest in HR tech but not use it to its maximum potential. If your organisation has paid for a talent assessment platform, make sure you understand exactly what it can and can’t be used for, and apply it to every appropriate situation.
Using your Thomas tools will enable you to plan tailor-made onboarding strategies for any new starters, making for faster integration into the business and a shorter journey to them adding measurable value. Successful onboarding has been shown to result in higher productivity and longer tenure. Using assessments to understand a person’s strengths and limitations also help these initial strategies to be amalgamated into effective development plans.
Once you’ve got started with Thomas, ongoing communication with the experts in our Customer Success team will help you get the most out of your investment. Thomas is with you at every step of your HR programme and our tools add value to each stage of the employee lifecycle. Our years of experience and unquestionable grounding in science will assist you in all your people management decisions through 2021.
Read our Manifesto to understand how Thomas can improve business operations and profitability and contact us to understand more about our assessments.
