Regardless of size, geography or industry, every organisation requires exceptional talent that is both motivated and focused to deliver on customer promises. Yet, it is getting harder to recruit and retain talented, high performing employees. The Harvard Business Review states that as much as 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions. Do you know how much getting it wrong affects your bottom line?
When considering the costs associated with recruiting and on-boarding new employees, making the wrong decision will result in a massive impact for an organisation. The cost of hiring a new employee extends far beyond their monthly salary. Job advertisements, time associated with screening and shortlisting potential hires, administration and placement fees all rack up the Rands, and that’s before the new recruit even enters the company.
In my experience, it costs an organisation 200% of a senior hires’ annual salary to on board them, this includes recruitment fees, renumeration, back office administration, training and team time. It’s very expensive to replace people.
But bad hires extend beyond the monetary cost of bringing new people into your organisation. A survey among CFO’s suggests the biggest costs associated with a bad hire are not even financially related. Degraded staff morale, decrease in productivity and loss in revenue rank higher than fiscal expenses, and the worrying thing is they are all contagious.
The impact to an organisation of making a bad hiring decision is 50% of an employee’s annual salary.
Bad hires can create a domino effect within your organisation, eradicating inadequate employees is a timely, therefore costly, undertaking. Realising you’ve made a bad hire takes time, and in the months that lead up to the employees last day, your corporate culture could be severely disrupted.
Disengaged employees are likely to place strain on the rest of your workforce, while apathy and negativity may spread through your offices before the employee’s departure. This could result in the loss of more employees, creating a constant need to hire new people.
This is why quality recruitment methods are imperative.
We live in a world where technological revolutions are constantly changing the way we do business, and advances in recruitment technologies are reducing the chances of making a bad hire. Through science and technology, HR professionals can now make informed decisions when making new hires, based on both culture and skillset.
The vision is to find a way to change the talent management landscape by reducing bad hires from the get-go. We wanted to make the process of recruitment and people management more effective, helping companies find and manage the right people with the right skill-set and culture-fit; manage the career progression of employees; and ultimately lower the risk of attrition.
Using next-gen technology, potential employees are scientifically profiled, screened, shortlisted and ranked against culture fit, attrition risk and performance requirements resulting in 95% accuracy in candidate recommendations.
The focus isn’t just on making good hires, it’s on retaining them too.
While bad hires will always cost a company, a good hire does the opposite. Through AI recruitment solutions, candidate potential is ranked, thus forecasting the candidate’s growth opportunity within the organisation. This decreases the need for future hires, especially in more senior roles, as current employees who are attuned with company culture move up the ranks.
Jason Davies, the Africa Head of Leadership, Learning, Talent and Resourcing at Barclay’s Africa Group and Juan Swartz is the co-founder of Pivotal Talent.