No Recruitment tool is ineffective unless the Recruiter and no tool can be a substitute for the excellence of a Recruiter

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Let me first answer why I made that statement? Well, whenever I spoke to my friends who are in Recruitment on why their team failed to recruit, the response was like I mentioned below

·         Our salary bands are very low – we could not attract candidates with the salary we are offering

·         We just have one jobsite and we keep seeing the same resumes of those who are already interviewed

·         We do not have social media presence – no Linked account ,no Facebook page

·         We recruit for  very niche skills – not many candidates are available in the market

·         Our recruitment process is flawed – candidate engagement becomes nightmare

And the list goes on – but almost all the time they missed the actual problem that either “we don’t have good recruiters or the organization is not allowing them to channelize their efforts in right direction “

Contrary to the above whenever I asked why you could succeed - there was a simple answer that “we have an excellent set of recruiters”

Now how do we take this problem?  Is the solution to this firing bad recruiters and hiring the best? answer is no. You need to go much deeper than the quick fixes, first start looking at your recruitment mechanism as a stranger to it, pick up the job of cleaning it and make it more flexible, understandable, and practical. To be precise design it to suit the needs, just to suit the needs.

You need to start the job with 3s of recruitment – Strategize, Source and Sell

Strategize:

Service your weapon well in advance to the war – back up every opportunity follow up every challenge

Every recruitment manager needs to withdraw himself from everyday transactional issues sit back and think chronologically – write down the plan

      What are we expected to achieve? Let us say – you need to fill 300 positions in next one year. that is quite a task considering the everyday challenges you will have, now prepare the breakup of the skill sets and at what level you need to hire? Another most important thing is what is your offer decline percentage historically , let us say it is 20%,  add another 5% to it – offer decline percentage is now 25% - which means your team needs to make 300+25% =375 offers in next 9 months , considering average notice period in Indian market 3 months. Keep in mind on the end of 9^th month you complete making 375 offers otherwise you might not be able to onboard them with in time.

375 offers in an year is nothing but you are not going home without making at least one offer a day, considering you will have a day where you might get more than one offer if you are conducting recruitment drives, net 45 offers every month

B)      Consider the resources you have :

Let lion do a job what it is good at and vulture its own: What is your team size? Do you need to recruit more?  what are their strengths and weakness so that you will put them on right Job, most of the managers go wrong here, they will assign equal number of positions and try to balance with equal level of complexity – which is completely wrong, all recruiter are not same, few are good at doing mass hiring on less complex skillsets and junior roles, few are more interested and motivated to work on niche skills.

Are you rich? Or a popper? : look at the budget you have, too what extent you can depend on Consultants? If you can have 30%, go back and set the objective of your team as not greater than 25%, believe me they will achieve. I know of teams who achieved it even when they were recruiting at mad pace – I myself a witness and driver of it.

Don’t succumb to the pressure of time, it will eat you:

I know of managers who made the mistake of driving recruitment through vendors  aggressively to meet the targets and ended up at 40 to 60% vendor dependency at the end of the year – these figures won’t please at the end of the year, be careful  the moment you cut lose the boundaries drawn you will lose control.

You are a hunter you should know where your prey is:

Most interesting and complex job is to identify where are these set of people you want recruit, prepare the target list of companies by location, this target must not be built just based on the availability of skill set you must be cognitive of the fact whether you can afford them skill set+salary ranges matching makes your target list of companies – attack them continuously

Waterfall or agile: define the process of recruitment – it might sound crazy but 99% of the recruitment teams either follow waterfall or agile, I know of companies who are still following waterfall – they built COEs with in recruitment team – Sourcing team, Recruiters, offer management desk, the dangers of this method are you need to have more people in your team to avoid bottle necks ,your recruiters needs to do multiple things , he/she receives resumes from multiple people, they get stuck at recruiters desk  because he/she can’t process resumes at the same pace these multiple channels are sending, to avoid it you need to have sufficient number of recruiters, but you may not need them in the long run – which will result in firing them later  , not advisable hence safest method is agile – let them own the complete process, but you need to optimize it – you might not want your best sourcer waste his time talking to the candidate on offer – then let him source, process till the end and hand over to the recruiter at offer stage ,this puts less pressure on your recruiter too, making an offer not a very time consuming thing.

Source:

It is a challenge too, not just an opportunity - Recruitment management becoming much more complex with the emergence of social media. Today every recruiter has the pressure of recruiting through social media, because your company has spent money on acquiring social media tools for ex: LinkedIn corporate account which costs more than your regular jobsite subscription. So you need to have a comprehensive sourcing strategy which saves your team’s time and quite effective.

Manage the paradox: ‘’Quite a lot of promising candidates does not know there is an opening which suits them, and we are struggling here to recruit”

because they are not just on the jobsites, not all of them are actively or desperately looking for a job change, they are on LinkedIn waiting for a mail from a recruiter, they are on technical communities suggesting solutions to complex problems, they are checking with their friends to let them know if they come across any good opening. How do you reach of these scattered folks, biggest problem is you don’t have time and patience to go to each place and post these openings, it is much more difficult to track resumes coming from various sources because you won’t get to know unless you login to it, time waste

Get yourself a promotion on to PAN from the firesJ.

Buy a recruitment management system OR get an open source tool there are quite a lot of them it is worth it. If you have a tool which enables you to post jobs at different sources with single click and route all applications to once place, it saves golden time worth of 375 offers J

90% of your most promising candidates won’t apply for the job that is not the trend in India, you need to find and talk to them:

Most of the talented, promising candidates won’t apply for  jobs themselves ,not only because they are confident of getting a good job but also because applying for a job is considered to be as submissive as begging in India. I personally wish this trend should wither away to make the job of recruiter little more peaceful. Recruiters also need to be found guilty for it; we never treat a resume reached our inbox without our initiation valuable. Let us not get in to that discussion now. How I do find them?

Recruiter is a wine taster, you don’t have to know the science behind how wine is made – all you need to have is good “tasting buds”

First thing build a keyword document covering all the skills you need to recruit; this will help your entire team including the one who does not understand a particular skill set. All Jobsites and search e engines are like lockers you need to try different combinations of keys. 60% of the Job will be done the moment you spot the right resume so generate as many keywords as possible. Most of the recruiters/sourcing executives go wrong here while trying to understand the technologies, and come up with keywords, they try to develop a deeper understanding, that is not required at all – you are a recruiter, you are not expected to write code- you just need understand high level of it why something will be used – during the course of the time you will much more comfortable. Remember   you job is to find people quickly not becoming a techy J

Once you are done with the first draft of keywords, start sourcing – you should drive your teams in way that they exploit all the job sites so that your consultant will be not paid just for submitting a resume, what your recruiter missed out of laziness. Keep adding more key words to the documents as you progress – do this and see what difference it will bring over a period of one year.

Sell:

Selling is not difficult because you are dealing with human beings with minds and hearts, but because they have smart phones and they have linkedin, Facebook accounts:

Gone are those days where you pick up the phone and keep talking to candidates boasting about your organization and the job, with one click on internet your sales pitch goes for a toss if you lied. So throw away the idea of selling an ice cream to an eskymo, your sales is no more one to one. Every recruitment team  should have a social media strategy, the sum of what is there on the internet is your brand name and that is what exactly your candidate believe, so buckle up create a Facebook page, twitter, have nice reviews on mouth shut glass door, keep posting the achievements of your organization. Go for a Youtube video might costs a 3-4 lakhs but it is worth enough , to be practical 4 lakhs is equal to fee paid to consultants to recruit 4 people.

Know what your selling: Few like bikes, few like cars other few like supersonic, few are non-vegetarians others hate non-veg. So don’t try to speak the same with every candidate, it might result in offer decline later because he is not impressed. Never hesitate to provoke or intimidate a tough candidate I remember few cases where I called a candidate and said: you are wasting your time in your current organization I think you deserve better” Selling is not talking more; it is forcing the candidate to believe you. This will help you to negotiate offer better too.