Taking Time for Recruitment Selection
On May 6, the Nikkei newspaper published an article titled "Slow and Steady Wins the Race in New Graduate Recruitment: Inefficiency Prevents Mismatches." While minimizing time and streamlining business processes is a crucial proposition for us, this article highlights cases where companies are taking their time with recruitment activities.
Here is an excerpt from the article.
Recruitment selection for university students scheduled to graduate in the spring of 2025 will be lifted in June. With the "seller's market" trend stronger than in previous years, a sense of impatience can be glimpsed among companies.
According to a survey by Recruit, the job offer rate as of April 1 was 58.1%, up 9.7 points from the same month last year. The trend of moving recruitment activities forward is significant. While I understand the desire to secure the planned number of personnel, I am concerned that rushing might increase mismatches. It is time to reconsider the efficiency-oriented batch hiring of new graduates.
Some companies intentionally choose inefficiency. BuySell Technologies, which buys and sells second-hand goods, spends about an hour on one-on-one interviews in its year-round recruitment. They ask about things that caused regret or happy memories during childhood and school years, and discuss the fundamental question of "what do you work for?"
They believe it is necessary to understand the background of an individual's growth and align values in order to have them play an active role in the right position. Sometimes they even respond to consultations from students who break down in tears, confiding their worries about not being able to get job offers from other companies. In the first round of selection for 2024 graduates, seven staff members faced about 2,500 students.
"If it were a deduction-based interview, it might be done in 15 minutes, but with an addition-based approach, there is not enough time," says Shunichi Koizumi, Group Manager of the Human Resources Strategy Office at the company.
U-NEXT HOLDINGS has been reforming its recruitment since the 2019 graduate intake. They ask students to submit self-promotion videos instead of entry sheets. Students can choose their interviewers, and even if they fail the final interview, they can try again. Based on the idea that companies and students are equal, they disclose the number of people who passed each selection stage and those who accepted job offers on their website as needed.
"Originally, we should be looking at the individuality of students, but is it okay to continue with conventional recruitment activities? This is also a message to Japanese society." This is how Daiga Nomura, General Manager of the Recruitment Strategy Department, describes his company's efforts.
Hitachi, which is introducing a job-based personnel system, also aims to improve the accuracy of matching in new graduate recruitment. In addition to job-specific recruitment, they are expanding recruitment through referrals from new employees and others. In the final selection for administrative positions for 2024 graduates, they gave students a theme and had them give presentations. It is said that students' own goals became clearer, and the number of declined job offers decreased by 10%.
They are also active in long-term internships where students experience work for about two weeks. Although the burden on the host departments is significant, the human resources department went around explaining the necessity and effectiveness, and they accepted 930 students in fiscal year 2023. More than 20% of students who experienced long-term internships in fiscal year 2022 were hired.
"Hitachi is still often thought of by students as a JTC (Traditional Japanese Company). This is an opportunity to let them know that we have changed significantly over the past decade, starting with the evolution of human resource management." Hisaharu Okawara, General Manager of the Human Resources and Labor Division, points out this benefit of internships.
It is difficult to assess the skills and aptitude of many students in a short period of time through batch hiring. Diversifying recruitment methods and taking the time to do so leads to reducing mismatches.
"Quality" and "quantity" are the most representative trade-offs in the various activities we engage in.
The more time (quantity) we spend on the recruitment process for each individual candidate, the higher the quality of identifying talent that fits our company. On the other hand, if we minimize the time spent on recruitment judgment per person, we can use that time for activities to gather more candidates or meet and judge them. We cannot spend an infinite amount of time on one candidate.
There is no fixed correct answer as to how much time should be spent on the recruitment process per person, butI think the following should be considered as indicators for the quality of recruitment selection results.
・Is the hired talent capable of performing well at our company after joining?
(High matching rate)
・Did the talent who received a job offer actually join the company?
(Low decline rate)
・Does the actual work environment and job content match what was imagined before joining? Even if they were different, is the person convinced and does a certain number remain appropriately?
(Low turnover rate)
Even if you reduce recruitment time as much as possible and efficiently secure the number of hires, it does not mean much if one or more of the above results are poor.
Conversely, for example, even if you spend twice as much time on one candidate as previous recruitment activities and only make half the number of job offers, if the 50% decline rate becomes zero, that can be said to be a superior method. This is because it is assumed that the overall multiplication of "quality" × "quantity" will increase, as the same number of people are secured while the matching rate and turnover rate improve.
From the examples in the article,I feel that there are elements that cannot be covered by ways of doing things like "cost performance" or "time performance," and this is especially true for interpersonal initiatives.
By investing the quantity of the intermediate process called time, it may be positive in terms of the quantity or quality of what is finally obtained. I think this is a perspective I would like to look back on in my daily activities, not just in recruitment.
In addition, I think the examples in the article can be called social contribution activities for talent who are about to start their professional lives. Even if they do not eventually join the company, it provides an opportunity to deepen self-discovery and becomes a trigger to make their professional life better.
I think many companies are exploring social contribution activities, but I feel that there are many things that can become a help to that by changing the way of doing things that are already being worked on, such as internships and recruitment activities.
The job offer rate for university students was in the low 60% range as of October 1, when job hunting activities generally end, around 2000, which was called the employment ice age. In the article at the beginning, it seems that the job offer rate is already about the same, 58.1%, as of April 1 of this year, before the recruitment selection is lifted. You can see how much of a seller's market it is in recruitment activities.
From the article, I also feel again the necessity of continuing to update how we face the recruitment market as a company.
<Summary>
Think about selection using the keyword "quality" × "quantity".