The process of hiring employees is extremely important for any company. It is the main component of measuring such indicators as a company’s retention and employee turnover ratios and often determines the whole HR department’s performance effectiveness. The employees are usually hired by using specific tests that evaluate their job-related skills, besides the common interviews. If an employee leaves the company, it can create stress and additional burden on work processes. Therefore, employees of the HR department usually carefully monitor such indicators as the time to fill, time to hire, and selection ratio (Armstrong & Taylor, 2020). This paper aims to evaluate the hiring process using the case scenario.
Who and What to Consider
According to the case-related data, the reception specialist decided to leave the company and provided a two-week notice. Hence, as an HR specialist, I need first to consider publishing the job vacancy that very day. For such cases, I may have prepared templates for every position in the company, revisited occasionally (Scepura, 2020). I also must look for the appropriate application test and interview questions, which can also be systematized by using the set of templates. I will have to inform the CEO and employees whose work will be impacted by the hiring process.
Who Is Impacted
In the hotel environment, there is usually a team of two to six receptionists who work in shifts and are directed by the senior receptionist or receptionist manager. As the team works in shifts, if I do not hire a new person within 14 days, other receptionists will have to work with less time for rest. This may eventually influence the quality of services provided to customers. The training process will also impact the receptionist team, as they will probably participate in ‘mirror training’ when new employees learn from the more experienced.
Time to Fill
The actual time to fill this position is 13 days, with 8 days between the vacancy published and the applicant approach interview and 5 days between the interview and job offer acceptance. Time to fill is a critical metric, as, if not met, the whole working process can be paralyzed or overloaded (Altinay et al., 2019). If I do not hire a new person within the limited time, the team will have to face work overloads, such as working longer hours or working without weekends. Importantly, work overloads eventually impact the employees’ intentions to leave and are a critical element of work-related stress factors.
Hiring Process
Although the average historical time-to-hire timeline for the hotel is 23 days, I managed to hire an employee within only 13 days. To reach this result I included the skills test in the job vacancy so that during one week after initial publication I had time to check if the applicant showed proper skills for the position. Historically, the tests were done after the interview with the applicant, which slowed down the hiring process. In other words, a decision was made to refuse personal communication with all candidates to save time for those who meet the needs of the vacancy, which should not have any negative consequences for the company.
HR Metrics
Among the mentioned metrics of employee retention, employee turnover, time to fill, time to hire, and selection ratio, the latter seems to be the most important. It reflects the quality of the selection process and can be seen as a comprehensive description of the demand for vacancies and the popularity of the company’s potential job applicants. If the selection ratio approaches zero, this is a good indicator, because the metric is calculated as the number of hired candidates divided by the total number of candidates.
Thus, the hiring process was critically evaluated using the case scenario. The expected 13-day time-to-fill ratio is favorable for the company, although the HR department will need to reconsider some approaches throughout the hiring process to make it more effective. In particular, the tests should be performed by candidates in the first stage of selection, before the chosen applicants go through the soft-skills targeted interview.
References
Altinay, L., Dai, Y. D., Chang, J., Lee, C. H., Zhuang, W. L., & Liu, Y. C. (2019). How to facilitate hotel employees’ work engagement: The roles of leader-member exchange, role overload and job security. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
Armstrong, M., & Taylor, S. (2020). Chapter 28: Recruitment and selection. In Armstrong’s handbook of human resource management practice (15th ed.).
Scepura, R. C. (2020). The challenges with pre-employment testing and potential hiring bias. Nurse Leader, 18(2), 151-156.