Imagine a situation in real life where the recruiting team and sourcing team of a company sit in a meeting with the HR teams and hiring managers to discuss the kind of candidates they want to bring in. During this meeting, the hiring managers explain to the recruiters about the key requirements and skills that are expected of the candidates for the new job openings.
Do job descriptions always convey the message? Job descriptions are often hard for candidates to understand. Not only candidates but most of the time, recruiters also do not quite decipher what the company wants. The meeting described above is an important part of the hiring process as it gives a chance to the recruiters to exactly determine what the requirements are. When these meetings are successful, there is a proper alignment in the ideas of the recruiter and hiring manager. This ensures that the first step towards hiring has been a success.
The above situation is exactly how Candidate Calibration works. Candidate Calibration is a measurement technology or instrument that works with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to provide results within an acceptable range or domain for shortlisting candidates for further evaluation.
How are Candidates Calibrated in hiring?
Evaluation of candidates takes place throughout the recruiting process but there are certain criteria for shortlisting the candidates for further evaluation. In most cases, candidates are assessed based on three core areas. These areas are being referred to as the ‘Domain’ for Candidate Calibration. What are they?
1. Skills
The skills of a candidate represent what he/she has to offer to the company. The key skills required by a company will depend on the kind of job the candidate is applying for. Good candidates usually highlight their skills as much as possible to market themselves to the employer. However, some common skills make the candidate more attractive in the market –
- Communication
- Leadership
- Team Work
- Problem Solving
2. Work Experience
Candidates use the Work Experience field in resumes to showcase their previous titles, companies, skills acquired, responsibilities, accomplishments, and duration of work. It represents what segment of the industry the candidate holds knowledge about. Work experience is the most important part of a resume. It determines whether the candidate can succeed in the job applied.
In most cases, candidates are calibrated based on the duration of their work experience, how long they have been in the industry and their achievements. This field can contain keywords that align with the job description which helps the employer distinguish between candidates efficiently.
3. Educational Qualifications
Educational Qualification is usually a brief section in the resume which contains information about the candidate’s academic degree, university, and major achievements.
In this field, Candidate Calibration is carried out based on what degree or certificates they hold and from where. It determines the field of work they have knowledge about and how successful they have been in their academic careers.
However, the recent trends indicate that, as candidates acquire more work experience (for example, more than 3 years), the weight of their educational qualification starts becoming lower.
Companies start paying more attention to and give more preference to work experience and skills known. When the work duration goes further high (say, 10+ years), the major determining factor for the candidate becomes their previous work experience (also known as domain knowledge).
Why is Candidate Calibration important to Recruiters?
Some of the most common challenges faced by recruiters today are:
1. Finding the right candidates
This happens when the recruiter does not exactly know what to look for in the huge candidate pipeline. The results of the research depend on how the research has been conducted.
2. Huge candidate pools
An average company receives more than 200 resumes for a single job and more than 50,000 resumes per year. Imagine going through each and every resume one by one and remembering all the details to find the best fit.
3. Time-to-hire
Due to the above two limitations, the time to hire a candidate grows significantly. Shortlisting candidates while going through their experience, educational backgrounds, skills, etc would definitely take a great amount of time. Along these lines, recruiters can only do as much as their abilities allow. They cannot function like robots and have certain limitations. As humans, recruiters cannot
- Have knowledge of all the existing tools and technologies in the market.
- Have knowledge of the detailed domain in depth.
- Acquire information about all existing companies in the world – 120 million companies.
- Have information about all the universities.
- Determine which skills fit which job profiles.
- Have knowledge about all kinds of certifications.
This is where Candidate Calibration comes into play. In this step, you gather all the information about the ideal candidate through sourcing channels based on what the company requires and then prepare a shortlist of those ideal candidates. Recent technologies and advancements have made sure that this process is fully automated and does not require recruiters to manually go through candidate profiles anymore.
Benefits of Candidate Calibration in Recruitment
Some of the various benefits of candidate calibration as a process include:
1. Identify the Best Candidates
The best candidates are only in the market for as long as ten days before they accept an offer. Therefore, it is important to regularly check for the most wanted candidates if a company wants to hire them. This can be achieved using the candidate calibration feature as it you can get a shortlist of the best candidates from the pool whenever necessary, all in a single click.
2. Reduce Time to Hire
When the process of shortlisting and ranking candidates becomes automated and is aided with Artificial Intelligence, the overall time required to make a hire significantly reduces. These tools help recruits to focus on more important subjects like interviewing, onboarding, and training.
3. Simultaneous Hiring Process
No matter how many recruiters you engage, it is always going to be limited during the sourcing and shortlisting of candidates. Calibrating candidates faster help you shortlist for more than one job role at a time. It also shortens the hiring process which improves recruitment productivity.
How does TurboHire’s Candidate Calibration work?
The intelligence of TurboHire makes it possible for human-machine collaborations to come into play. Let us now look into the detailed working process of TurboHire’s Candidate Calibration. The Calibration center at TurboHire has been divided into four components:
- Skills
- Education
- Experience
- Scoring Weightage
The Scoring Weightage component can be customized by the user as per their requirements. It determines how much weightage the company wants to give to the different criteria. It defines the weightage of the overall score calculation.
Candidate Calibration with TurboHire
In the Skills component, users can type keywords and skillsets that they require their candidates to have. The AI-based algorithms then automatically expand the keyword. For example, if you enter SEO, it will be expanded to On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, Technical SEO, etc.
Similarly, the user can select skillsets. A skillset is a collection of various skills that are required for a certain job role. The user encounters a drop-down menu that contains complex skillsets like Growth Marketing, Content Marketing, UX Design, UI design, Sales and Marketing, HR, etc.
The next component, Education deals with the educational background of the candidate. It is again divided into four parts:
- Domain: The field in which the candidate possessed the degree.
- Degree: The degree or certification acquired by the candidate.
- Level: Graduate/Post Graduate/Post Graduate++
- Quality: Tier 1, Tier 2, etc.
Once you select all the required specifications, all the processes will take place automatically to curate a shortlist of the best candidates ranked in order.
The fourth category includes all the details related to the previous work experience of the candidates. It includes details like
- Duration of experience
- Previous job role
- Name of the previous employer
- Industry
- Company Age
- Company Size
Note: There is a checkbox in this category that reads “Give preference to a candidate who has worked in companies similar to TurboHire. Once you check this the algorithm automatically segments TurboHire into B2B and SaaS and starts looking for candidates in MoEngage like companies.
Once you save all your preferences, all the candidates are assigned scores according to your customizations.
You can also click on the scores to determine their justification and view the weightage of the several components. You can similarly generate calibration scorecards for each candidate.
TurboHire’s human-machine API maps you around the candidate database along with the company’s requirements and guides you to end up with the best candidates from the pool.
Now, recruiters can run the following example queries:
- Get me candidates who have worked on tools like Ahrefs (the machine automatically knows Semrush, Woz are the tools of that kind).
- Give me candidates who have studied at Tier 1 Colleges and the machine automatically ranks the candidates according to the quality of education.
Impact of Using Candidate Calibration in Recruitment
Some noteworthy points that come into the picture after using Candidate Calibration:
- Now companies can screen through millions of CVs in just a few minutes and a few clicks.
- Junior recruiters can leverage the domain knowledge that only very experienced recruiters had.
- Senior recruiters can tap into the new and upcoming skills that they might not know about.
The processes described above ensure how easy it has become to compare the qualities of candidates that your company wants. Creating unique candidate calibration score cards lets the recruiter position the exact requirements matching with the hiring managers.
All in all, this process will enable you to save capital, time, and important employee resources. The overall outcome is a beautiful collaboration of humans and machines in finding the best candidates for every job.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) on Candidate Calibration
1. What does Calibration mean?
In simple words, Calibration is the process of determining a result based on certain measurements that have specific domains. The goal of calibration is to discuss the most important criteria that are required to evaluate some entities. In a calibration process, supervisors and managers meet up to discuss their objectives, focus on the prerequisites, and then compare the results.
2. What is interview calibration?
Interview Calibration is a process in which interviewers rate or score candidates based on their performances, following which, all the respective scores are compared to find out the top scorers. This method of calibration determines which candidates are the best fit for the company. It also ensures a compatible candidate experience strategy for all the applicants in the candidate pool.
3. What are the 5 stages of recruitment?
The four stages of recruitment include – (i) Candidate Sourcing (ii) Candidate Screening (iii) Candidate Interview (iv) Decision-making stage in hiring. Following these steps during the recruitment process of a company ensures an efficient and productive recruitment drive. Every stage has its own strategies and methods. Every stage requires special attention of individuals, therefore, aligning these stages with an ATS platform will guarantee a company the best candidates along with reduced time to hire.
4. How to avoid bias in recruitment with Candidate Calibration?
Incorporating an AI-based Applicant Tracking System like TurboHire will reduce human-based bias during recruitment with 100% efficacy. The processes involved in this platform like Candidate Smart Cards, Candidate Ranking, and Candidate Calibration are fully automated and do not give a chance to recruiters to include bias of any kind. The human-machine algorithms evaluate candidates only on the basis of skills, abilities, education, and experience and prepare rankings and shortlists of only the deserving candidates.
5. How to make better hiring decisions with Candidate Calibration?
In order to make better hiring decisions, a company needs to strictly follow the various steps involved in the recruitment process. This includes determining the appropriate requirements, selecting the right sourcing channels, engaging candidates, improving candidate experience, and incorporating an efficient hiring team along with an effective ATS. Companies need to adopt new and advanced methods of hiring rather than sticking to traditional methods to keep up with the rising trends in the industry.
