5 hiring challenges a structured hiring process solves for European talent teams

5 mins, 11 secs read time

If you’ve ever tried to hire in Europe, chances are you’re no stranger to the challenges that come with fishing in such a diverse and unique talent pool. In a highly competitive market, finding top talent – while reducing hiring bias, solidifying your employer branding and expediting your time-to-hire – can create additional pressure on a busy talent team.

In this post you’ll learn how a structured hiring process helps you win in today’s competitive hiring landscape and solve some of these challenges head on.

What is structured hiring?

Structured hiring is an approach to hiring where consistency, fairness and alignment are woven into all stages of the recruitment process. It follows four standardized recruitment steps for evaluating candidates based on specific criteria and using consistent methods throughout the hiring process.

Challenge #1: Reducing hiring bias

Europe is the epitome of cultural diversity. This makes reducing unconscious bias and promoting diverse and inclusive hiring (DE&I) in the recruitment process both a challenge and a priority. Enter structured hiring.

How structured hiring reduces hiring bias:

Structured hiring ensures that all candidates are consistently assessed using the same rubric throughout the interview process. It also incorporates interview tools like candidate scorecards and anonymized assessments to empower hiring teams to make more fair and equitable candidate comparisons. Finally, by gathering insight into all stages of the hiring process, structured hiring gives hiring teams more visibility to make better hiring decisions based on data, not intuition.

Challenge #2: Winning with employer branding

Talent shortages in industries like tech, science and healthcare fuel the competition for talent in Europe. With multiple organizations hungry for their unique skills, candidates now care about your employer branding more than ever – and that’s where you get to make that dazzling first impression.

According to LinkedIn, companies with strong employer branding see a 50% decrease in cost-per-hire and are able to hire employees 1-2 times faster than their competition. Now that’s a benefit every European organization, regardless of its size or industry, can see positive results from.

How structured hiring helps your employer branding:

Structured hiring elevates your employer branding by ensuring a great candidate experience and demonstrating professionalism and commitment to fairness. This, in return, helps you attract quality candidates while embracing efficiency.

Challenge #3: Improving quality-of-hire

Speaking of quality-of-hire, did you know that:

• In the UK, a poor hire at mid-manager level with a salary of £42,000 can cost a business over £132,000 in the UK, according to a report from the Recruitment & Employment Confederation
• The US Department of Labor also estimates that the cost of a poor hire can equal 30% of the employer’s potential first year earnings
• Four in 10 UK employers (39%) say that the interviewing and assessment skills of their staff should be improved, according to the same report from the Recruitment & Employment Confederation

How structured hiring improves quality-of-hire:

Structured hiring is the antidote to mis-hiring. With the entire framework built on the ideal candidate’s success profile, which is clearly defined during the initial “role kickoff” step, all consequent steps of the recruitment process are customized to thoroughly assess for it. This significantly reduces the chances for a skill mismatch and ensures that all hiring stakeholders understand what is expected and how candidates will be evaluated.

The final result? A perfect match.

ROI of structured hiring on quality-of-hire:

According to Wired, structured interviews can predict performance about 26% of the time, more accurately than unstructured interviews (14%) or background checks (7%).

Challenge #4: Speeding up time-to-hire

Recruiters need to move fast to hire candidates in Europe, especially when recruiting for niche roles. While labour laws and market dynamics in some European countries can make this extra challenging, structured hiring accelerates various interview stages to make up for intractable waiting periods.

How structured hiring speeds up time-to-hire:

Structured hiring facilitates hiring team collaboration and expedites candidate feedback while allowing recruiters to see when candidates are stuck in an interview stage for longer periods of time. This reduces the need for extended deliberation and helps your team make faster and more informed hiring decisions.

Discover how HubSpot doubled its employee base with 1,000 new hires and four new global offices to meet a need for speed – all in just three years, by partnering with Greenhouse – here.

Challenge #5: Leveraging recruitment data effectively

Great companies look to data to make informed business decisions – and hiring is no exception. However, according to Devoteam, most European businesses are still at the starting point when it comes to being data-driven.

How structured hiring promotes data-driven recruitment:

Structured hiring is data-driven at its core. It consistently collects data across all stages of the hiring process, helping hiring teams to quickly identify bottlenecks and pivot as needed. Such rich recruiting reporting gives hiring teams better insight into hiring trends, helping them refine evaluation criteria and adjust their recruitment process to get measurably better at hiring.

Here are some of the most popular recruitment metrics we’ve seen our customers at Greenhouse leverage by adopting our software’s structured hiring process:

1. Time-to-hire and hiring speed
2. Offer acceptance rate
3. Offer pass-through rate
4. DEI reporting
5. Quality-of-hire

Choosing the right hiring software

Choosing hiring software like Greenhouse with the structured hiring process at its core elevates your recruitment process to hiring excellence, especially when it’s both customizable and scalable to meet your unique hiring needs.

We also understand the linguistic challenges European companies can face when operating in multiple countries. That’s why the majority of Greenhouse is now available in six languages – English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese – making structured hiring more clear, enjoyable and seamless for our customers.

Interested in learning more about how to improve your recruitment process and make confident hiring decisions with structured hiring? Download our guide How to be an effective assessor of talent.

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