How Do I Know If My Hiring Strategy Is Actually Effective?

If your boss asked you whether your hiring strategy is working or not, would you be able to confidently say yes? Would you have concrete items to reference that would back up your response? With all of the things you have on the go, it might be difficult to determine if your hiring strategy is actually delivering results. But if you don’t, you might be forced to answer your boss’ question unfavourably. Try getting a pulse on the following items to stay on the safe side:

1) Turnover

How many employees left your company in the past year? How about the year before that? Is that number increasing, decreasing, or remaining steady? Turnover is the most important metric when assessing the effectiveness of your hiring strategy, since it’s often one of the highest costs. If you’re only going to measure one number, this would be it. Lucky for you, it’s not difficult to track!

2) Feedback

If you want to know if your hiring strategy is working, just ask your employees. If they’re happy with their jobs and the people they work with, then something must be going right. Whether you chat with them informally or use a formal survey like these ones from SurveyMonkey, it’s important to know whether employees a) feel like they’ve been placed in a position that they’re well-suited for, and b) feel like they can rely on those around them to do their part. If you made a wrong hire (or, God forbid, several wrong hires), you’d likely hear about it here. Then, you’d be able to dig deeper and find out where the process isn’t working as smoothly as it could be. Building trust and communication around your hiring and employee retention initiatives is absolutely critical, and this is a great way to put that into practice while getting more buy-in for your initiatives.

3) Business Goals

You hire people to run the business – so if the business is running well, then you’re probably putting the right people in place! If the business isn’t hitting its goals, it could be a people issue. For example, if your salespeople aren’t selling well, your support team is receiving a lot of bad reviews, or your product team is making a bunch of critical errors, then something should be investigated. Don’t be too quick to blame it on your hiring strategy – there are other factors at play as well, like coaching and development. It could also be a process issue rather than a people one, but it’s definitely worth some examination.

Sometimes it’s the simple things that we lose sight of when we’re swamped with so much else. The great news is that these items are either easy to measure or might already be monitored by the company. Next time you get a chance to catch your breath, check on these three things to see if your hiring strategy is working for you. By demonstrating that your strategies are delivering measurable value, you’ll be gaining the trust and support of higher-ups and key decision makers in your company. As you enhance your hiring and retention strategies, those influencers will become more and more important – so why not start building up that trust today?