Clearly, appointing the wrong candidate for a job is a costly mistake if you run a business.
With productivity in the UK lagging behind many developed nations, we sought to understand how recruiting impacts business growth by commissioning an independent survey of key decision makers in the hope we’d help unlock the country’s productivity puzzle. Please click here to download your full copy of the survey and report.
Our findings tell us that companies in the UK are compromising on candidate quality almost as a matter of routine, with nine out of ten (91%) of respondents admitting they have made a compromise during the last year.
This one statement, supported by the revelation that as many as one in three (30%) appointments during the last 12 months were described by employers as “less than ideal for the role,” is having a dramatic impact on business growth, productivity, and the wider UK economy.
“Any panic hire is a mistake,” said John Treharne, CEO of The Gym Group. “If you haven’t got the right candidate at the end of a long and tedious process then don’t panic – simply repeat the process! Sure, you’ll be under pressure from the recruitment agency, your HR Director, the Board and even colleagues to fill the role. The real skill is to hold your nerve and make the right appointment…”
But it’s a Catch-22 for businesses that waste the little time they do have in finding a candidate they then have to replace, or dedicate more time and money training and line-managing in the long run. It’s at best ineffective, and at worse a huge drain on resources.
With c.700,000 vacancies filled in the UK each year, and an average of six candidates interviewed for every role, each for an hour, companies in the UK will spend 4.2 million hours recruiting over the next 12 months, only to compromise on quality and hire an unsuitable candidate 30% of the time.
Alarmingly, the 4.2 million hours spent interviewing do not represent even half of the overall time it takes to complete the recruitment process. More time (52%) is spent meeting, briefing and negotiating with recruitment agencies, and then reviewing and shortlisting CVs. That’s 8.7 million hours invested in recruiting, of which 2.6 million hours (30%) are wasted… nearly 10,000 man hours per day (9,650).
This is hitting UK productivity hard and strangling the economy’s growth. But it doesn’t need to. We’re living in a digital age where innovative tools enable us to be more efficient and competitive. By replacing improvisation within the recruitment process with innovation, companies can reduce the time spent reviewing CVs and briefing/managing recruitment agencies, in order to focus on what is most important to them: interviewing and selecting the right candidates that will grow their business.
