The objective of the hiring process is simple: to bring in a person who has the right combination of skills, experience, potential and attitudes to best meet the requirements of the job. At least, it's simple on paper. The reality is that taking on a new hire is a risky business, with no guarantees that the charming candidate with the dazzling CV will actually perform well.

Some human capital executives argue that the safest option is to hire based on industry experience, while others lean towards hiring candidates who display an innovative mindset and has growth potential.

"To ensure the highest probability of success for both parties – that is, the employer and the employee – it's important that the prospective employee understands the job requirements, and that the employer finds the person who best fits those requirements," says Lindiwe Sebesho, Managing Director Designate at Remchannel.

"From my experience, companies who hire with a view of a combination of experience, skills, potential, attitude, and anything that the role requires for the person to be successful, usually make the best hires," she adds. "It's not an either/or. In my view, it's a combination."

Experience vs potential

Effective hiring practices are deeply important in a tough economy where the war for talent is especially fierce and staff turnover remains relatively high.

Remchannel's October 2022 Salary and Wage Movement survey recorded overall labour turnover at 21.4%. Although that came down to 16.6% by the April 2023 survey, the fact remains that overall labour turnover across the organisations surveyed has not dipped below 15% – that's three out of every 20 employees' resignation – since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

The disruptive effects of the pandemic have reshaped recruitment, prompting reward specialists like Sebesho to call for the hiring process to be completely re-engineered.

"Hiring trends indicate that hiring based on a candidate's wealth of experience remains important because it assumes that the candidate will hit the ground running and won't take too much time getting to know the organisation and the job to be done," she says.

"That's great, but in today's world, the skills and experience that people have are often very short-term because there's so much change in the environment and the manner in which work is done is constantly influenced by new technologies. If companies don't consider their future skills requirements and focus on past experience – which is a reflection of what the candidate has done in the past – the hiring process may miss out on a candidate who has the potential to learn future requirements and future skills."

Another cross in the experienced-candidate cons column is that companies sometimes focus on experience because they are trying to replace a person who has done the job very well in the past. "In this case," she says, 'the job spec ends up being customised to the previous incumbent and does not appreciate the value that a new employee could bring in terms of fresh thinking, future-focused ways of doing things, newer technology, and so on, all of which come with the rapidly changing environment.”

Hiring a candidate based entirely on their potential and eagerness to learn is also a misstep, Sebesho warns. "The pro is you've got somebody who comes excited, has the right energy, is willing to learn, easily adapts to the new skills requirements, applies fresh perspectives and tries things out," she says.

"The challenge, however, is that they would require a lot more hand-holding, guidance and coaching. You would need the organisation or the hiring manager to have the patience to help that employee appreciate key lessons from the past or current practices and merge those with the energy and skills they bring to do their job very well over the long term."

Creating an employment value proposition

The key to striking that balance, and in fostering an environment that encourages creativity among experienced staff while enabling inexperienced staff to grow and develop, lies in crafting what Sebesho calls “a meaningful employment value proposition”.

"It's about the full life cycle of the employment relationship," she says. "Building this relationship should not be limited to the hiring process. It should extend to making sure that new hires are properly onboarded, held accountable through clear performance objectives, enabled to performance through the appropriate learning and development, rewarded fairly for the work they do and incentivised appropriately for exceptional performance. The same amount of effort invested in explaining an employment offer when hiring should be invested throughout the employment life cycle to ensure that employees feel they work in an environment that appreciates them and the contribution they make. This drives talent retention.”

This employer/employee relationship, she adds, is ultimately about creating an environment and a reward offering that encourages top performance so that the right level of value can be created and shared with various stakeholders.

"Those stakeholders include shareholders who put their money and trust in the organisation, and most importantly the customers who spend their money buying the organisation's product and services."

The hiring process is the start of the relationship – but Sebesho emphasises it’s a journey. "That's why it's so important that the employment value proposition comes to life throughout the talent management lifecycle," she concludes. "And it must be brought to bear by the organisational leadership, who create the experience around what all these things mean in the context of the business strategy." 

Remchannel will publish the next Salary and Wage Movement Survey in October 2023. To get more information, please email surveys@remchannel.com