May 9, 2023

Companies are willing to allow ethical moonlighting.

IT companies are understandably concerned about employees becoming unproductive due to moonlighting distractions. However, there is no consensus among companies on how to handle this issue. Some large companies are taking a hard stance, while others are reluctantly accepting it. This leaves employees confused, wondering if staying honest and loyal is really the smart thing to do. There is a need for a consensus so that all companies can adopt a common code of conduct and clearly communicate it to their employees.

In April 2023, we conducted a survey with the objective of determining if companies are willing to allow, condone, or encourage certain activities that could be considered “ethical moonlighting.” This article presents the results of that survey

Target Sample Population

Before discussing the findings of the survey, it is important to consider the sample population that was used for the survey. The sample population had some biases that were influenced by location, network reach, and seniority of rank.

It is worth noting that 37% (22/60) of the survey participants preferred to remain anonymous, indicating their reluctance to be transparent about this sensitive issue. One participant even expressed his fear that having a policy on moonlighting would make it “official.”

The pie charts represent 63% of the sample population whose identities are known. Based on the pie charts, the conclusions of the report should be viewed as the opinions of companies that are:

Based in Pune (18/38) or Bengaluru (6/38): The problem of moonlighting is likely to be more prevalent in companies located in large cities, where employees may work from home

Represented by CXOs (22/38) or Founders (10/38): This survey mainly captures the perspective of top management in companies. Employees at lower levels may have a different point of view.

Mainly small (20/38) and mid-sized (9/38): Smaller companies are more likely to take a lenient approach to moonlighting. This survey excludes large companies that are more likely to take a hard stand.

An earlier article on sunlighting vs moonlighting

In the past, the author had written an article on the topic of “sunlighting” vs “moonlighting” in Forbes Technology council. The term “sunlighting” was used to describe ethical moonlighting. The author had also conducted two separate surveys on LinkedIn, where employees felt that they owned their time beyond eight hours, while employers seemed to have reluctantly accepted it. Only 21% of the companies surveyed felt the need to have a strict policy on moonlighting.

These surveys and the conversations that followed the publication of the article have led us to believe that there is a possibility of finding a common ground where companies and employees can collaboratively define what is considered ethical and what is not. One possible outcome could be the development of guidelines for companies to create their own policies. However, why is there a need for such guidelines or a code of conduct? Although we did ask this question in the survey, here is what we think about it.

There is a reason to open this can of worms

Many companies, some of whom have chosen to remain anonymous, feel that having a policy would be seen as giving tacit permission for moonlighting. However, we have our own perspective on this matter. Keeping quiet will only do more harm than good. Ambiguity leads to confusion and a lack of trust.

On one hand honest and loyal employees might feel short-changed as they see others doing what can be called as “unethical moonlighting” going unpunished. “You can do it as long as you are not caught doing it” – leads to an unhealthy game of police and thieves. Only 38% would escalate such instances to the management as seen in one of the LinkedIn Surveys.

Transparency is the foundation of trust. Any company that is ambiguous or silent on this topic will leave employees guessing. Eventually, everyone will make convenient assumptions. What appears innocuous to employees could be very harmful to the company’s business. A lack of explicit policy could allow a middle manager to deliberately overlook a billable employee who is known to be engaging in moonlighting. Shallow revenue goals may take precedence over deeper issues concerning the company’s legal obligations, data security, and business risks.

Do they have a policy?

When asked, it turned out that very few companies have an explicit written policy (5/60), and all of them assume that all moonlighting is unethical. There were a few companies (7/60) that have a tacit understanding (which may or may not be written) that certain types of moonlighting are allowed.

Most companies (27/60) prefer to deal with moonlighting by using standard clauses in the appointment letter. However, we have a few questions: When was the appointment letter issued? Was moonlighting as prevalent then as it is today? Does the appointment letter mention the term “moonlighting”?

Another significant group (20/60) assumes that everyone knows that “moonlighting” is not allowed, which seems like an excuse not to have a written policy. Therefore, the answer is, “NO, MOST COMPANIES DO NOT HAVE A POLICY.

Are they willing to change? (Do they want to have a policy?)

On one hand, most companies have shied away from having an explicit policy. On the other hand, the majority of them want to have a policy and want to change. Of the sample, 21 out of 60 felt that it is hard to implement, but it is worth the effort. Eleven out of 60 felt that it must be done as it is the need of the day. Only 6 out of 60 felt that there is no need to discuss it. This means that 90% of the sample felt the need for a change, but they are wary of their ability to implement it. It is easy to make rules, but hard to ensure compliance. Fifteen out of 60 are concerned about whether employees will be transparent about it. This is a very valid concern, so we decided to ask the employees. Please see their responses in the following section

Would employees be open and transparent?

It turns out that 50% of the employees who responded to the survey are willing to collaborate by allowing companies to directly or indirectly monitor their activities. Employees cannot have the freedom to work on external projects and job security in their day jobs unless they are open and transparent. Transparency is the foundation of trust, and trust can be further strengthened by linking performance to pay.

Companies need not micromanage as they are assured of getting their money’s worth. Pay for performance can be managed in two ways:

No change in the base pay, but a pay cut if the performance drops.
Lower base pay plus an incentive based on performance.

There can be a combination of the two. Some companies can start using smart contracts to manage pay.

What is allowed and what is not?

As the first step towards starting the process of collaboration, we asked the companies if they would consider “condoning” or “encouraging” certain types of “ethical moonlighting”. As discussed in the opening paragraphs of this article, the sample was mainly composed of small and mid-sized companies from Pune, with a few from Bengaluru and Hyderabad

Conclusion

As you can see from the table and chart above, there are many innocuous activities based on hobbies or sports that companies encourage. Moreover, there are other activities that can be encouraged because they complement the skills required for the job – for example, conducting meetups or hackathons. These activities not only help employees upskill, but they may also enhance the company’s brand image.

There are unmet skill needs within the company that can be met by doing “internal moonlighting”. Many companies would encourage it as it would not only help them win their clients’ confidence but also build a culture of cross-pollination and free flow of ideas.

Teaching is the best form of learning, and organizations that employ good teachers benefit from their mentorship both within and outside the company. Employees love companies that help them build their skills, and they become brand advocates. It’s no wonder that, as per the survey, many companies would encourage “ethical moonlighting” that involves teaching.

Finally, it would be heartening to see companies open up and write explicit policies that state what is allowed and what is not. This will start a new era of trust, transparency, and ethical behavior.

June 29, 2020

Remote hiring opens up new opportunities for IT employees & companies post Covid-19

WFH

Initially we weren’t happy being forced to work from home for months. But, now that it has become the new normal, most of us would hate to give up our ability to control location or working hours. There are advantages and disadvantages. First let’s take a look at the advantages.

Better productivity

There are many surveys including the one conducted by the author in his company which point to an increase in productivity. The pie chart shows how our employees thought their productivity had changed.

Two main reasons why our employees thought they had become more productive while working from home were –

Better work life balance – more family time.
No commute. Saves time and energy.

Research conducted by RescueTime also concurs with our observations.

“The data shows us that people who work from home are more productive” – RescueTime

Credit: RescueTime

Better Quality of life

As mentioned earlier, our employees experienced better work life balance while working from home. Those who had ageing parents or families that needed their attention could move to their home-towns. This move had 2 benefits

Being closer to their parents and family.
Being away from the urban epicenters of the pandemic.

Also as per the survey done by RescueTime , most of the employees felt satisfied that they were able to complete their work well within 8 hours.

Credit: RescueTime

Career reset

As per a news article in “Livemint” – “Faced with projected fall in revenues and a complete hiring freeze, several IT services companies in India are working on re-skilling initiatives for employees to reduce time spent by employees, waiting for the next client project”

“According to estimates, the online education market in India was valued at ₹39 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach ₹360.3 billion by 2024. “

Last few months have seen unprecedented growth in online training programs, webinars, workshops, online consulting or counselling sessions etc. Many prudent engineers are using this as an opportunity to reset their careers. Recent upsurge has given rise to economies of scale which has made these opportunities extremely affordable.

This observation is further reinforced by the actual demand reported by Udemy.

A comprehensive look at online learning and teaching around the world and the findings reveal significantly increased demand globally across every segment:

425% increase in enrolments for consumers
55% increase in course creation by instructors
80% increase in usage from businesses and governments

Cross company mentorship chains

Online training programs are complimented by e-mentoring which has also seen an upsurge.

There are thousands of mentors and many more mentees on various e-mentoring platforms. The following article lists 20 such platforms.

Here’s what Lis Merrick of CoachMentoring of UK had to say in her article titled transition mentoring to enable your employees to thrive in a pandemic.

“the greatest gift an employer can give at this time is a mentor to support through these incredulous changes in our lives caused by the Covid-19 virus.” -Lis Merrick

Downsides

The new normal also has had its disadvantages for some. When old models get disrupted it does affect those who aren’t ready for it.

As per a news article “Benched IT Employees In Cognizant, Hexaware Forced To Resign; Capgemini Cancelling Earned Leaves”

Given the level of uncertainty in the corporate jobs, professionals would tend to work as freelancers or gig-workers.

Geeks are becoming gigworkers

Gigs or teams working on interesting projects could potentially evolve from groups of like minded geeks being co-mentored or being co-tutored in an online program. These new relationships could cut across geographical or company boundaries.

As per a recent article published in The Economic Times

“25-30% of workforce in sectors such as internet business companies, IT, ITES, startups, hospitality, quick-service restaurants (QSR), retail and logistics will get converted to freelance roles over a period of time “

U.B. Rao (COO) at Infosys in an interview says

“Infosys, which employs freelancers, or “gig workers”, expects the so-called “gig economy” coders to constitute 35% of the industry’s workforce in future.”

Notice period

One of the biggest pain points felt by the the IT managers is the long 60 to 90 day notice period that a candidate is required to serve. Hiring readily available freelancers could bring some relief.

Soon some companies would realise the futility of retaining resigned employees who aren’t in the company – both physically and mentally. Signs of this change are already appearing as seen in this article.
“ICICI Bank has issued a notice to a few of its employees reducing their notice period from 90 days to 30 days”

Project based

The day of jobs as we know them in the IT industry are coming to an end.

Companies have started reducing employees on the bench (meaning professionals waiting for projects). Now , they would outsource projects based specific and sometimes specialised work to gig workers. Progressive among the companies would build a force of gig-workers and mentor them by pairing them with senior professionals within the company, thus preparing them for upcoming projects.

Seth Godin has extolled the virtues of working on a project versus doing a job in this article

“Doing a job makes us defensive, it limits our thinking.”

“Working on a project opens the door to possibility.”

As per my experience , candidates prefer being hired for specific project work. However companies don’t always keep their word to the dismay of some candidates who discover that they aren’t assigned to the same or any project.

New contracts

The loosely termed appointment letters are due to be replaced by contracts that specify the exact project for which the employee or the freelancer is being hired.

These contracts will be formalisation of the understanding that already exists between gig workers. They will be quite different from the fixed bid contracts between freelancers and their employers who don’t have any prior trust relationship. (e.g. the contracts on e-lance or get-a-coder)

No comfort zone

Neither command and control nor “micromanagement” but the peer pressure exerted by their fellow gig workers would stop them from getting in their comfort zone. By definition gigs are small teams which would make it impossible for its team members to hide non performance.

Geography is history

Specialists are accessible

Some specialised “niche” skills are never needed in large numbers. These skills aren’t obviously available in all geographies. Now its become possible to remotely tap these key skills by involving them as gig workers.

No office needed

Virtual teams can be formed without a physical office address. This means that such gigs are going to form quickly increasing the need to match project requirements with individual skills like speed dating.

Conclusion

There is an unmet need for a software platform that

Quickly matches project requirements and technical skills and justifies the recommendation and ranking based on an unbiased metric for suitability.
Such a platform would equally easily match “project work“ with a “gig worker” as well as a “job” with a “candidate”
This platform must give an excellent candidate experience to impress remotely located candidates who are unaware of the company’s brand. Features such as providing instant feedback with career advice the rejected candidates and ability to engage the star performers are essential.
Trust relationship with recruiting agencies in remote locations should be quickly formed by transparently sharing the actual status of the referred candidates.
The platform should have the ability to do a preliminary technical assessment of niche skills which are new to the company.
Allows the company to measure the performance of remote recruiters and recruitment agencies.

Those of you who want to see a tool that satisfies the above criteria can request a demo here

May 29, 2020

Remote Hiring – A Paradigm Shift

Remote Hiring

Covid-19 pandemic has pushed many companies beyond the tipping point to adopt remote working as the new normal. Remote working is quite easy and natural for the knowledge workers – especially those working in the field of software development. This article focuses on how remote working has impacted hiring software engineers and the demands that it puts on the hiring tool being used by the companies.

Accountability and transparency

Talent acquisition managers would no longer have their teams of recruiters next to them. They would feel disconnected and helpless due to the lack of visibility. This feeling would be even more acutely felt while working under time pressure. They will, on a daily basis, need to know what their teams of recruiters have been doing. There has to be a proper measure of performance. E.g. if a recruiter gathers a lot of missing information which results in rejection of the candidate, then the recruiter should be get recognized for saving the time of all the stake holders and for preventing a potential bad hire. Companies should use tools that have proper metrics to measure the performance of their remote teams. In addition to the conventional quantitative metrics such as number of candidates sourced, screened and tested, companies should focus on qualitative measures such as average suitability score. The tool must judiciously assign importance to various selection criteria while determining suitability.

Removing bias and getting feedback

Personal biases introduced by likes and dislikes get discovered in face to face interactions. Decisionmakers subconsciously apply corrections to arrive at an unbiased decision. We need to have a mechanism to remove biases and look at one version of truth in a remote team. A tool that has a metric associated with each selection criterion lends itself well for such a mechanism.

Such a tool would also allow companies to assign relative importance to these selection criteria by assigning weightages. The rationale behind assigning numerical weightages to these selection criteria while calculating the suitability score can be shared with the hiring managers. In fact, hiring managers should be encouraged to fine tune the requirements by refining these weightages. Changing weightages for a reason could be a way to capture and convert verbose feedback into meaningful numbers.

Technical Assessment

Most companies administer technical tests to assess programming skills. Some of the companies are using on-line technical tests. The pandemic situation has made it virtually mandatory to conduct the technical assessments on-line. Technical assessment can be a quick test with a few MCQs or a grueling code sharing and pairing session. Given the time and attention needed by an expert interviewer to do the later, it might make sense to use the former as a filter. Mobile based gamified tech quiz can make it easy and light for the candidates. There is a bit of a resistance from the senior candidates to undergo online tests. One way to get them to agree is to explain the shortage of technical panels to do a deep dive coding session with each and every candidate. Most of them see the merit of a quick and light quiz as compared to a telephonic round by a non-technical or a semi-technical interviewer.

It is highly desirable for the tool to ensure full video proctoring to avoid cheating. Also the questions that get asked should be picked from a large question bank to avoid repetition. Also the tool should automatically delete questions that everyone can answer or those that no one can answer.

Overcommunication and Collaboration

There’s no watercooler or cafeteria in the virtual world. Information that used to flow unhindered through these social interactions needs to flow even more rapidly to compensate for the lack of attention and context.

There are many tools that capture the first level of information. E.g. A candidate was rejected in an interview or another candidate submitted his quiz. However it lacks the next level of detail or the color. Why was the candidate rejected? Was he not as good at SQL server as we had assessed? Did the other candidate score well? How long did he take to complete the quiz?

There are many questions which don’t get asked because of the social and physical distance. E.g. a TA Manager won’t bump into a hiring manager and casually ask how he is finding the quality of candidates? Or there is no opportunity for a recruiter to ask why a candidate was rejected? Companies should acquire a tool that proactively answers such questions. Every piece of information needs to be supported by next level of data- ready to provide the detail should someone ask. The tool must provide a reason why a candidate should be considered for a job. The tool must tell why the candidate who was top ranked suddenly went down. The tool must encourage the hiring managers proper feedback and advice to the rejected candidates.

Companies should acquire a hiring tool that captures important events and alerts all the interested stakeholders using popular channels like WhatsApp and Skype. It’s also important to make these events actionable by providing links from the message to the appropriate page in the application.

There are multiple people collaborating to get work done. The agency sponsoring the candidate, the hiring manager, competing candidates and the recruiter should be alerted when the candidate successfully completes and submits the technical quiz. The interviewee candidate, the recruiter and the agency would be interested when the interviewer submits her feedback. The prolific alerts for all events would keep all the stakeholders abreast of the situation.

Employer Branding

The hiring tool should more than make up for the absence of handshakes and smiles, by providing a world class candidate experience. E.g. even rejected candidates should get proper feedback and valuable career advice. There’s nothing more frustrating than lack of communication that follows the interview. Providing proper feedback with current standing of the candidature in terms of the rank would make your company look very professional and enhance the employer brand value in the larger candidate population.

Conclusion: What has changed and how hiring tools should adapt?

Here are some challenges that hiring tools will need to address

Remote interviews have already become the norm. Now companies need to get more information about the candidates from all possible channels to make up for the lack of face to face interaction.
Companies need to identify gaps in the information shared by the candidate in her resume and get all such missing information from the candidate
Remote hiring is not only about remote interviewing. Companies need to remotely collaborate with all the stake holders including the recruiters, talent acquisition managers, hiring managers, interviewers, vendors and candidates.
Our tool must present a consistent view of not only the jobs and applicants – but also the status of each applicant in terms of her suitability, rank and interest to all the stakeholders.
Stakeholders should find easy answers to questions like why candidate X is more suitable than candidate Y and what Y should do to improve her ranking. This will help them drive the process to accurately identify the suitable candidates to minimize waste and disappointment.
To make up for the lack of warmth afforded by in person interviews, Companies need to go an extra mile to provide not only proper feedback but also some advice to the rejected candidates.

You could request a demonstration of Rezoomex- a hiring tool that promises to address all these challenges

January 28, 2020

AI spells better times ahead for the subject matter experts

It is commonly believed that AI will empower the employees who are willing to learn – others will find it hard to keep their jobs. But there’s an even bigger opportunity for the subject matter experts. They will not only learn the changes being brought about by AI , but permanently enrich their jobs by becoming the trainers and administrators of the AI apps.

Firstly, let us understand why a human being – no matter whether she is a subject matter expert or not, is needed to train the modern AI systems.

Human-in-the-loop systems

Humans will be instrumental in building what are known as human-in-the-loop systems.

As per this article by Mothi Venkatesh human-in-the-loop system combines “Supervised Machine Learning” and “Active Learning”. I am reproducing the definition from the article.

HITL=SML+AL

Supervised ML, curated (labelled) data sets used by ML experts to train algorithms by adjusting parameters, in order to make accurate predictions for incoming data.

Active Learning, the data is taken, trained, tuned, tested and more data is fed back into the algorithm to make it smarter, more confident, and more accurate. This approach–especially feeding data back into a classifier is called active learning.

It is obvious that we need a human being where the confidence level in the algorithm is low due to insufficient training data or the risk associated with an inaccurate inference is very high. But why would we need a subject matter expert. They are not just another “human” augmenting the algorithm’s artificial intelligence

Subject matter experts as trainers and administrators of AI

This article by Daniel Faggella explains the need for subject matter experts. I am reproducing three ways as written in the article.

Determining the Business Problem an AI Solution Can Solve. For example, let’s say an insurancecompany wants to become more competitive. A high-level employee at the company, who has been in the industry for more than 20 years, may know from experience that clients often complain about the time it takes to process claims.
Determining How AI Can Solve That Business Problem. For example, a marketermight tell a data scientist to make sure the model they build can predict the best price to bid for ad space on Google ad Network without realizing that such an application is nascent in practice and technically challenging. A data scientist would be able to explain this to the marketer, preventing them from promising their team and stakeholders too much.
Maintaining and Updating the System Once It’s Built. Take for example a manufacturingcompany with a large number of heavy machinery to maintain. The subject-matter experts collaborate with data scientists to develop an AI system that gathers data from IoT sensors on the machines to predict the optimal time to do preventive maintenance on them.

MLTrainAdmin

To understand this better we need to take a closer look at how the AI apps work.

Every AI app needs training data that needs to be prepared by a human expert. E.g. we need to have a lot of data about the films and the people who watch those films to intelligently recommend a bunch of films to a new user.
After preparing the training data a data scientist could use this data to train and test an algorithm. He will repeat this step till he finds a suitable algorithm to generate a model that can predict or infer as precisely as the human expert who has prepared the training data in step 1. This step could take several iterations.
Once the algorithm which can most precisely predict , the same can be used to create a model. This model is handed over to the subject matter expert to be used for predictions or inferences.
The SME uses this model for day to day predictions and inferences. He applies his own judgement to decide if the predictions and inferences are precise enough by comparing what the algorithm has predicted or inferred with what the SME would have done.
If the model is not accurately inferring or predicting the SME would override the algorithm and manually assign predicted or inferred values.
This edited data is added as new input data and the same is used to retrain the algorithm. This retraining will ensure better results going forward. Step 4 to 6 are repeated by the SME with no intervention from the data scientist. The SME would really make the application more and more precise. As it becomes more precise it will more closely mimic the expert’s inferences and predictions.

Who can be a subject matter expert.

You don’t have to be highly placed or academically well qualified. There’s nothing better than years of expertise. E.g. a security guard knows how to spot an intruder in a crowd. He can help a data scientist build an automated threat detection system

January 5, 2020

IT hiring as seen by interviewers/hiring managers: Part 2

In this part, we will propose a solution to the problems perceived by the hiring managers as concluded in part 1 of this article. Ideally, there’s no need to have such an elaborate solution if the hiring manager did everything from writing the job description, determining and communicating the selection criteria to conducting the interviews. Practically as we have learned, only 50% of the hiring managers write the job descriptions. Only 64% of them are engaged in determining and communicating the selection criteria and most of the interviews are conducted by interviewers who are not the hiring managers. Hence the need to have a solution that facilitates collaboration and communication.

The diagram below describes the proposed solution. Here are the steps of the solution.

ProposedSolution

Step 1– Hiring manager creates the job description and the software will help him decide the selection criteria based on the JD.

Step 2– A software service applies the selection criteria to the resumes uploaded by the recruiters and computes the suitability scores.

Step 3– Top-rankers based on the suitability score are identified. Recruiters follow up to gather any missing information and administer a technical quiz to each one of them.

Step 4– The technical quiz is a quick, in-camera assessment, conducted on the candidate’s smartphone. The candidate can take the short 20-minute test at her own convenience. Recruiters can ensure authenticity by checking the video recording.

Step 5– Only those few top-rankers who score well in steps 3 and 4 are presented to the interview panel.

Step 6– Feedback from all the interview rounds is processed by the hiring manager and any obvious disconnects between the recruiters and the interviewers can become visible to the hiring manager on the dashboard. E.g. The top-rankers as per steps 3 and 4 get rejected and bottom-rankers get selected.

Step 7– Based on the results as seen on the dashboard the hiring manager can tweak the selection criteria and the technical quiz to align the recruiters’ and the interviewers’ understanding of the requirement.

Let’s take a closer look at the problems identified in the conclusion section of part 1 of this article to understand their magnitude and severity. Let’s also examine if the proposed solution addresses those problems.

Problem 1 : The interviewer is not completely plugged in and it results in a lower hit rate. On an average 3 out of 5 candidates are found to be unsuitable in the face to face interviews. This may be the tip of the iceberg as we are assuming that those who are selected are perfectly suitable. Bad hiring decisions are rarely acknowledged.

Solution 1: Sharing the job description, and the selection criteria with all the interviewers will improve everyone’s understanding of the real requirement. Assigning weights to the selection criteria would further refine this understanding. It will bring cohesion between the job description, the selection criteria, the quiz questions and the interviews in steps 2, 3 and 5.

Problem 2: As already seen in part 1 of this article majority of the interviewers think that they are wasting a lot of their time in the hiring process. On average an interviewer spends 45 minutes per interview.

InterviewTime

Solution 2: Justify to the interviewer the time spent by her by sharing the reason why the candidate deserves to be selected, with specific reference to the weighted selection criteria as stated in steps 2 and 3. This will positively orient the interviewer going into the interview, and keep the preliminary screening process honest.

Problem 3: The recruiters are unwilling to reject candidates at their level. It’s obvious that the recruiters need better tools than preliminary phone screens and tests. Technical tests are inconvenient and time-consuming. Some candidates cheat while appearing for the online tests.

Solution 3: Improve overall quality in the preliminary screening process by doing the following

Recognizing fact-finding work resulting in the rejection of candidates by the recruiters as their value addition. Presently, in most companies, the recruiter gets no credit for rejecting a candidate at her level. We should stop looking at the number of interviews scheduled as the measure of the recruiter’s performance. Recognizing the value of rejection will bring quality consciousness and reduce the stress placed on the interviewers by mindless overcrowding of the recruitment pipeline.
Having some kind of metric to measure the suitability as depicted in step 2. Such a metric will encourage the recruiters to focus their attention on sourcing more suitable candidates. Recognizing average and total suitability scores as measures of the recruiter’s performance would improve the choice and quality of candidates.
Having a lightweight and efficient technical screening in step 4. This would eliminate candidates who can’t answer simple questions on topics that are important.

Problem 4: The formal feedback process is geared to capture the overall impression of the interviewer, but doesn’t help to improve the next batch of candidates. We need to learn and improve by a better understanding of the reasons for rejection.

Solution 4: The interview feedback should require the interviewer to indicate his acceptance or rejection against the commonly shared weighted selection criteria and the reasons for proposing the candidate as suggested in solution to problem 2. This will enable the recruiters and the interviewers to change the selection criteria as needed and capture the reasons for such changes in the interview feedback forms.

Problem 5: Interview feedback is not shared with all the stakeholders. As the purpose of the feedback is more for documenting the reasons for selection, the same is shared with HR and other managers who are supposed to take further action upon the selection of the candidate. The need to share it with the recruiters is not felt. Recruiters often don’t have access to the detailed feedback provided in the system. They have to remain content with short “Selected” or “Rejected” status that shows up in the system. Part of the problem is also because the recruiters rarely state the specific reasons why a candidate deserves to be selected, hence they forfeit their right to know the reasons for rejection.

Solution 5: In step 6- the interview feedback process the interviewer could provide some tips on what the recruiter could have done to reject the candidate at her level. This information can be used by the recruiter to improve her hit rate. With some additional work, the recruiter can also pass on a part of the feedback to the rejected candidates. Useful for the candidate to improve herself. Maintaining this level of transparency will go a long way in building the employer’s brand.