Amid the pandemic, companies need to be very strategic when looking to bring in new talent to help revamp their company. Making a new hire that won’t positively impact a company’s bottom line can majorly cause issues for a company down the road (a bad new hire can cost a company $17,000 on average). One way to mitigate new hiring mistakes is to give the company CFO a seat at the hiring decision table. Here are ways CFOs can use past financial data and connect it with candidate résumés to help inform smart business hiring decisions.
Post-pandemic strategy. Companies now are challenged to find new ways to operate smarter and more efficiently, while seeking to re-hire and maintain a safe, productive, and enthusiastic workforce.
However, creating an enticing benefits package is not enough to survive in the post-pandemic world. Employers need to restructure their hiring process to accommodate candidates following Covid-19. The pandemic created a contactless society and therefore eliminated in-person interviews. So to continue to bring in new talent, employers should adopt new technologies and incorporate them into the hiring process. A recent survey said 66% of people would work remotely if given the chance. Companies should strive to normalize online video interviews and train current employees on how to operate technological tools. If companies fail to digitize their recruiting process, they will lose many potential workers along the way.
Mitigating hiring mistakes. The CFO can be a valuable partner to HR teams during a time when hiring comes with numerous challenges and risks. CFOs can provide hard metrics that the HR department may lack, which can be combined with technology to power data-driven recruitment and HR analytics. This creates a more objective hiring process that increases hiring rate accuracy and saves employers thousands of dollars.
With many companies valuing the opinions of the team and HR employees, the hiring process becomes biased with everyone valuing different traits or skills. And for some industries, the pressure to hire, and hire quickly, is on!
CFOs can replace the concept of hiring with your gut feeling with hiring based on hard analytics by providing data. Additionally, CFOs can assist the HR department with budgeting by providing financial data for all the different hiring channels. With the data, the HR department can assess which methods were the most effective and learn to effectively manage their budget.
CFOs can also help the talent organization better balance total costs of staffing. By understanding the impacts of turnover (costs and lost revenue), they can help design better strategies to select and retain the best workforce.
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Advising HR. While HR is more familiar with the recruiting process, a CFO can easily identify the company’s trajectory and its financial stance by simply analyzing the company’s financial data. Having that bird’s-eye view on the effectiveness of a company’s hiring strategy makes it easy to spot flaws in the hiring process. A CFO should help guide the HR department to increase workforce and productivity trends when taking part in strategic workforce planning and predictive workforce analytics. The ability to analyze data and translate the numbers into actionable steps is something the CFO should augment.
With a CFO’s insight on a company’s financial situation and awareness of external factors, the HR department can also make more conscious financial decisions and budget accordingly. PwC found that 59% of US finance leaders saw the potential second wave of Covid-19 as a threat to financial recovery. This shared knowledge drove HR departments to opt for low-cost or free benefits, such as on-demand pay. Employers need to reconcile their current financial situation and find creative solutions without an overbearing price tag.
Connecting the dots. CFOs can leverage historic performance, current conditions and the longer-term strategy to help companies optimize human capital investments. If companies know what kind of potential employees to look for, they don’t need to expend as much energy and resources to quickly fill up a vacant position. This method also reduces unnecessary financial costs, giving companies the financial flexibility to allocate the funds to strengthen different areas of the company.
An employer’s growth is dependent on recruitment and retention. CFOs need to work in tandem with the company’s HR department to find effective, cost saving benefits that not only draw the best candidates to its workforce but retain them for the long term as well.