Recruit for Success: The Role of Employee Recruitment in Enhancing Performance Management Processes

If employees are an organization's greatest asset, then recruitment carries a significant weight for the potential success of a company. Beyond sourcing employees whose skill set matches the requirements of vacant roles, recruitment is about finding the right people who will drive your organization toward success. The quality of your workforce and employee engagement are intrinsically linked to profitability, and recruiting the right talent is the first step in managing their performance effectively.

Gallup data would agree, with a recent study finding companies with engaged workforces have higher earnings per share (EPS).

The connection between recruitment and performance management is critical to the health of any company, recruitment being the foundation upon which high-performance organizations are built. By leveraging technology for strategic recruitment, HR teams can transform their recruitment processes and unlock long-term performance management success.

How Recruitment Affects Performance Management

Recruitment and performance management are more intertwined than you might think. The individuals you bring into your organization through recruitment play a pivotal role in achieving your performance management goals.

Let’s take a look at a non-exhaustive list of the various ways in which recruitment affects performance management:

Skillset

The skills and qualifications of new hires directly influence their ability to meet job requirements and contribute to achieving performance goals.

Training

When the best candidates are chosen for a position, organizations spend less time and resources training those employees.

Engagement

Strong culture fits boost employee engagement which lends itself to higher productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

Retention

Well equipped and engaged employees tend to reduce employee turnover rates, mitigating the need for constant replacements that disrupt workflows and hinder productivity. Allowing HR and employees to partake in a consistent performance management cycle.

The Importance of Effective Recruitment

There’s doing a job and then there’s doing a job well. Effective recruitment is not achieved simply by filling vacancies within an organization, but instead by sourcing qualified talent at the intersection of skillset and culture fit; without this organizational goals are at risk of dying on the vine.

Identifying the right talent

As we previously stated, there are 2 main criteria when it comes to finding the ‘right’ talent. The first is of course determining candidates to possess the appropriate experience and skillset to perform the demands of a role. The latter is slightly more tricky to recruit for. Culture fit consists of a combination of personality, communication skills and style, values and goals, and overall attitude and demeanor. While skills can be trained, culture fit is something that individuals either possess or don’t.

Skills and qualifications

Recruiting individuals with the right skills and qualifications is essential for ensuring that they can meet the demands of their roles. One of the many challenges of recruiting is knowing exactly what skills and level of experience any given role requires, while also leaving room for employees to grow within their job title.

Cultural fit

Finding candidates who align with your organization's culture can foster a positive work environment and better performance. While finding the most qualified candidates may ensure they can deliver on the technical aspects of a role, if they aren’t a good fit with company values and culture, organizations are at risk of a breakdown in collaboration, engagement, and overall employee satisfaction.

The Costs of Poor Recruitment

Poor recruitment decisions can lead to costly turnover—a study by SHRM found the average cost of replacing an employee to be 6 to 9 months of the departing employee's salary— lower productivity, and increased training expenses.

The quality of recruits directly influences the effectiveness of performance management efforts and can have lasting effects on the innovation, profitability, and culture of an organization.

Turnover rates

Whether it’s over or under-qualification or poor culture fit, ineffective recruitment practices can lead to costly turnover rates for organizations. While it’s essential to leave room to grow within any role, employees who lack the basic skills to perform their job functions struggle to complete their workload and often suffer from low morale and signs of burnout. Whereas overqualified employees can experience a quick drop in engagement, lacking the necessary challenges required to maintain interest in their role.

A lack of connection between an employee and their organizational culture can lead to breakdowns in communication, a loss of engagement, and misalignment with organizational goals which deeply affect performance and ultimately lead to resignation or termination.

Training expenses

Hiring employees who lack the necessary skills may necessitate extensive training, draining resources and employee morale. Understandably that any new hire requires an onboarding process to learn the ins and outs of their respective role. However, when too large of a skill gap is present, the time to productivity for a new hire greatly increases. The need for extensive training can be a costly resource for organizations and burdens existing teams with additional labor.

Leveraging Technology for Recruitment

The competing priorities of recruitment can be time consuming and difficult to execute when performing unassisted. Embracing technology through automation can streamline the recruitment process, saving precious time and resources while improving the quality of hires.

With the emergence of AI-powered tools for hiring, HR teams can not only automate the various manual tasks of the recruitment process but leverage technology to screen candidates in a matter of minutes.

HRIS tools such as Omni do exactly that. By automating the end-to-end employee lifecycle, Omni significantly reduces HR’s administrative workload by automating key recruitment tasks such as job posting, scheduling interviews, and sending offer letters. Powered by Manatal’s candidate tracking and data management capabilities, Omni empowers recruiters to manage the recruitment process under one platform, easily tracking applications, screening candidates for skill set matches, and reducing the time it takes recruiters to search for the perfect candidate.

Leveraging this technology allows for more precise candidate sourcing and frees recruiters time to focus on the strategic aspects of recruitment, like determining culture fit to make for more impactful hiring and stronger performance management throughout the employee lifecycle.

Key Metrics to Determine Recruitment and Performance Management Success

Understanding the components of strong recruitment and performance management practices is only half of the equation. Data tells the rest of the story to allow teams to measure the success of their efforts. There are several metrics organizations can track to determine the effectiveness of their processes.

Tracking employee retention

High employee retention rates indicate many factors within an organization, successful recruitment, effective performance management, and a strong organizational culture at the top. When employees are engaged, well trained, and a good fit for their roles, the likelihood of their company loyalty increases.

Time to Productivity (TTP)

Time to productivity (TTP) measures how long it takes a new employee to become fully integrated with their team and functional in their job. TTP will look different for each role so it’s important to determine what the benchmarks are for each employee to accurately measure their TTP. A successful recruitment and onboarding process will have employees trained and up to speed so they can contribute to company goals promptly. If your new hires are generally producing a low TTP, it’s an indicator that their skillset may not be a good fit for the role, and/or an organization’s onboarding process needs some work.

Performance Metrics

Performance metrics provide objective data to help determine the success of an organization's recruitment and performance management process. This data will allow HR managers the insight needed to determine strengths and weaknesses and assess whether an employee’s output aligns with business goals.

Similar to measuring TTP, low-performance metrics early on in a new hire’s time can be a sign of a lack of alignment in hiring, poor training, or lack of support, and indicate the need for improvement in recruitment and onboarding processes.

Gathering feedback from employees

Feedback from employees can provide insights into areas where recruitment and performance management can be enhanced. Employee surveys are a great way to get first-hand feedback from employees on their recruitment and performance management experiences.

Surveys should consist of clear, concise, and easy-to-understand employee satisfaction survey questions that are specific to the organization’s goal. Questions should be both closed and open-ended to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback. HR can analyze the results by looking for patterns or trends to identify areas of improvement, and use feedback to make changes to processes and improve the experience for employees.

Build a High-Performance Culture

Recruitment isn't just an HR task; it's a strategic imperative for an organization's success. The right people, recruited effectively, can transform performance management efforts and generate lasting results. By understanding the role recruitment plays in performance management, how to measure effective processes, and leveraging technology such as Manatal and Omni into recruitment and performance management practices, companies can create high-performing teams that drive innovation and build lasting brands.

Strategic recruitment is a cornerstone for high-performance organizations. Book a demo with the Manatal team today to learn how our technology can offer a smart, efficient, and user-friendly experience that addresses all your recruitment challenges.