What Can You Learn from Facebook’s Billion Dollar Hiring Mistake?
By now, you’ve probably heard that Facebook purchased the instant-messaging firm WhatsApp for an astounding $19 billion.
What you may not have heard, however, is the disastrous recruiting back story.
A few years ago, WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton actually applied for jobs with Facebook – and were rejected. While nobody can be absolutely sure that these men would’ve developed the instant-messaging app while working for Facebook, one could easily argue that the hiring oversight cost the social media giant billions.
How can you protect your company from a recruiting disaster like this? Here are four important recruiting tips to improve your process – and your hiring results:
- Quantify what hiring “misses” really cost your company.
Beyond knowing the vacancy costs of a key position, work with your financial team to quantify: the impact on revenue hiring oversights create; the business lost to competitors who hire top performers you don’t; the revenue lost when you hire poor performers. When you understand how much hiring oversights cost your company, you can intelligently decide how much attention, time and money to devote to addressing them. - Identify the weak spots in your recruiting process.
Meet with recruiters and hiring managers to identify where your process breaks down. Is your application process too cumbersome? Are great candidates being weeded out by an ATS? Does lack of training or interviewer inconsistency hamper your ability to spot potential high performers? Do you take too long to make hiring decisions, once the field has been narrowed? Once you identify your weak spots, take immediate action to shore up your processes. - Shorten your time-to-hire.
The best candidates are not on the job market for long. The longer your hiring process takes, the more time applicants have to explore other job options – and the more opportunities employers have to poach your top candidates. Consider combining first and second round interviews into a single event, or streamlining your post-interview decision-making. Do whatever you can to accelerate recruiting (without sacrificing quality), so fewer candidates drop out during the process. - Work with a national recruiting firm.
A recruiting firm like PrideStaff specializes in identifying top talent. We can recruit higher quality applicants, shorten your time-to-hire, handle the time-consuming administrative burdens of recruiting and screening, and consistently deliver exceptional performers. Best of all? You only pay a fee if you hire a candidate we refer, and we guarantee our results. Learn more about PrideStaff’s On Target fulfillment process today, or contact your local PrideStaff office today to get started.
