Why does social media matters a lot for any recruitment team?

Courtesy - Google

Today there are only two types of recruitment teams – one who is supportive of social media usage, talks, eats, breaths LinkedIn and Facebook, the other one who rejects it on the face of it, considers social media is a time waste. In both cases one would like to know the fundamental matrix called - what percentage of your total hires come from social media? You won’t find much difference in the statistics of both the parties. Then why so much of cry and debate happening on the same topic. It is because of the reason that both the sides ignore the intrinsic value addition by social media. As a recruitment team you are always prone to measuring value addition through number of hires, the same cannot be the parameter for measuring social media because of the fundamental reason that none of the most popular social media tool is designed specifically for recruitment, and they have not evolved as full pledged recruitment tools yet.

Intrinsic value addition has more worth than the extrinsic like filling open positions. Creating a pool of potential applicants is more valuable than just hiring one candidate. When you have good online social media presence, when you keep your corporate pages updated you will create a circle of people who keep knowing about your company, they won’t stop there – they will further talk to people spread the message – unconsciously they are your brand ambassadors – this will result in reduced effort in selling the company’s brand to candidates. Imagine a recruiter calling a candidate and getting to hear “I’ve not heard of this company” that whole process gets painful, conversion ratios will be bad, attracting the top talent will be even more painful.

Why I think recruitment teams must pay attention to Social media.

We are living in a world where people Google

The year 1998 changed the way internet is used, from then to now we have a close of everyone who consolidates and gives reliable information about any topic across the world in many languages. You cannot hide what you are doing on the internet; if you hide also others won’t reserve their comments about you. It is not a troublesome research project anymore to know more about a particular company - Google gives you accumulated data about every organization. Now it is the job of recruitment team to make that cumulative data look good.

Now imagine if one is trying to search your company on internet and it only throws just a company web site, your company does not exist for the younger generation. They will be interested to see your Facebook page, Wikipedia, Twitter and what not. If you are not on social media you have not arrived or you are not a company for younger generation. No company can afford to land in this kind of unfortunate situation.

What you say on your Website is no more your brand

When a recruiter calls a candidate, after the call candidates used to get on to the website to know more about the company, the trend is changing candidates now get onto mouthshut.com or Glassdoor.com to see what employees have to say about the company. This is the case even you are the biggest brand in the world, people still would want to see what has been written on social media, candidates will be curious to know about a particular aspect- even if you are Microsoft or a Google, they would still want to know about that particular team they are going to Join. Hence what you are claiming about your company on website will become less valuable than what people had written on these sites.it is a natural law of behavior – people believe a third party’s feedback than your own words.  And another important thing is as an organization you might overlook these sites, but people who worked with or left you will not – they will write their comments in most of the cases they will be writing negative comments to avenge out their frustration, hence it is important to companies to neutralize these dynamics with active social media presence. Otherwise over a period of time you will become a bad organization on the internet and you won’t even realize it. As result organization’s ability to attract best talent will diminish.

Your Job site will give you access to candidates in your country – Social media is boundary less

Any jobsite whether Indian, European, American they will focus on the local markets. We will have access to candidate’s database in a particular region but LinkedIn and Facebook or Twitter has no boundaries, reach is bigger. Whenever you are working on a market intelligence project or hiring for leadership roles the help from LinkedIn is priceless. Jobsites might give you information regarding salary ranges and other stuff, but they can’t do the job of social media sites of providing a hawk eye perspective. Let us take an example – if you would like to know the companies who are doing extensive work in HTML 5: LinkedIn will be a great tool for the same because the moment you search with HTML 5 it will give you details around

• ·         Individuals working on HTML 5
• ·         Consulting firms offering services on HTML 5
• ·         Huge network of individuals working on the same technology
• ·         Groups for HTML 5

All of these details at one place and you will have less problem of fake experience – this can’t be done by any jobsite.

Recruitment teams are reluctant to use social media extensively -because

>They always tend to measure social media in terms of number hires made

>Social media recruitment is slow

>Corporate page subscription fee for sites like LinkedIn are higher than the regular Job sites

But when you compare return on investment it makes more sense to get active on Social media, once we reach the break even point in terms of money rest all will be a great bonus

Take an example if you have spent 4 lakh rupees on LinkedIn subscription all you need to look at whether you were able close positions equaling 3 times of the subscription. If you have done it, you are getting the entire branding for free.

Other social media sites are just for free like Facebook,Twitter it makes sense to make most of it and build a consistent content across all sites. Candidates will depend on websites only for factual information rest all like culture, Performance management, and compensation for all these key details they depend on social media and we all know these aspects play a vital role in candidate’s decision making.

Two crucial aspects HR should focus on - measuring value addition and stop taking undeserved blame

Image courtesy - Google

I was just a college pass out when the most famous (now) critic of HR Mr. Keith H. Hammonds opened up his thoughts on HR professionals and HR as a function to the whole world. I was shocked when I came across this article later, started doubting my decision making skills – did I make right choice by choosing HR as my career? But as time flew I forgot about this like any other young graduate fresh out of college. But now after having spent good time in HR, I strongly feel his criticism is not all true, but there are genuine issues we still need to address and improve on, tragedy is after 8 years of his article we still look the same in few of the areas he wrote about.

It is extremely crucial now that we focus on these areas to sustain this extremely dynamic world where the war for best talent is getting fierce day by day and taking an ugly, brutal shape. The two critical aspects HR should focus on are – creating more value, measuring that value and stop taking undeserved blame.

Does HR really add value? What kind of value is that and how can we measure it?

World called HR and still calls a necessary evil, a bureaucratic setup which kills flexibility and innovation. Few organizations saw and continues see HR as the living system which keeps everything intact, which adds life to organization, which prepares and leads them in to future. As a matter of fact most of the successful companies today have most successful HR department. So then why there are divergent perceptions, where does HR fit in to the pyramid of value addition? Take an example of a mother, who is a “home maker” ( not mean to say mother can’t earn, it is strictly about a home maker) , she ensures everything is in place at home and makes everything available for the family, she guides, consoles, sets up guidelines and code of conduct at home, brings up children, takes very key decisions, helps in decision making, the only thing that misses here is she going out and earning money, it is done by the “father”. So a home maker mother does not earn money on her own but helps the whole family to earn it. I think in an organization’s scenario HR does the same job of home maker (excluding HR consulting, where money generation is directly related), while HR does not earn money on its own it helps the whole organization in doing that. HR helps the organization deliver by delivering in its own area. In business return/Money/Tangible value takes the ultimate priority, where in a family set up there are much more things attached to it than just return/Money/tangible value addition, that is how I think people start perceiving HR as a cost center, non-value adding function. The other side of the coin most of the HR professionals perceive their function as supreme and argue that without HR an organization cannot survive or it will not exist, the fact of the matter is HR exists because of business, and ultimate decision making rests with the business itself, HR for sure will play a key role, but cannot decide what to be done over and above business’s decision, when I say business I meant the one who funds, runs the business with an objective. Coming back to the point - work of HR and its value addition touches every aspect of an organization like the mother at home, so you cannot fit HR at a particular level and spot on the pyramid. It is everywhere. So the parameter for measuring HR value addition should always be what impact its presence will have on the organization rather what felonies its absence can cause.

So when HR is everywhere obviously it becomes extremely difficult to measure its value addition, however we all know what major areas in  HR  makes it as the living blood for the whole system. They are Talent Acquisition, Training & Organization Development, Performance management, HR operations.

Adding bodies or pumping in Talent?

Talent acquisition attracts a great deal of attention whenever somebody wants to evaluate HR effectiveness, but traditionally for years the way we measure recruitment effectiveness by number of positions filled, time taken to hire, source mix  which does not reflect the real value addition of recruitment function. Parameters mentioned earlier reflects activities performed by recruitment team not the value, take an example of driving a car – if you drive a car with a speed of 100 Km per hour and reached a place in 30 mins, that is a great driving performance, not the real value, you will know value when you compare with what is that you wanted to achieve by driving, if you have reached a different destination that of you wanted to reach the effort is mere waste. Hence while measuring the value of recruitment we should get in to the very purpose of recruitment, why do we recruit people? to add great talent in to organization so that we deliver a great service/product. If this is not met, you probably are not recruiting the talent your organization wants, now how can you measure the value here, would you attribute every product success or profitability of the organization to recruitment? Answer is no, there are much more critical aspects which contribute to success and profitability. It is wise to take the data of employees recruited in a year and analyze – what percentage of people left early, how many non-performers you have from this group (for both cases they could be various other reasons why people leave, can’t perform – you would know those reasons for sure – so do not include them while measuring the value of recruitment), how many of these employees are star performers, what percentage of these have been already identified having potential to move in to the next level or perform more difficult job, take feedback from manager against each role he filled in his team, as to check is he able to get the what he wants from this resource, he might have recruited one with an aim of adding a new skill, if that skill is not added, your recruitment failed of course there is a contribution from that respective manager too for that failure. After having done all this exercise identify those areas where recruitment team needs to focus for next year, pat on their back for the areas they have done well.

Performance management – shake its fundamentals; make it fairer, understandable

I have a fundamental problem with the whole idea behind performance management, the entire HR fraternity is in love with bell curve and forced ranking may be because it looks to be scientific and more because it serves various purposes, like it helps identifying and cleaning up bottom-line, it also helps manager to satisfy their vengeance. So essentially with the model what are we expecting from employees, we are clearly telling look folks only 20% of you will make it in to the top performers so you must compete and do better than your colleague. But imagine what happens to the whole team performance, what happens to the organization, that’s where organizations fail and also results in your best guys leaving. Imagine if everybody on Indian cricket team competing to do better than the other rather striving for team’s success, will we ever win? just imagine Sachin Tendulkar and Virat kohli competing to score a run more than the other, that will result in one guy not giving strike to other, will we ever win. Might looks funny but this exactly what happens on the floor, employees look really amicable and helping each other but majority of them will not share the big ones he is working on because he does not want to give share in the salary hike/bonus to his colleague. It is time we re look at the overall philosophy of performance management and change it in a way that drives team’s performance, like let the whole organization decide what are the most valuable deliverables they had for this year – award all of those who are in those projects, couple it with 360 degree performance management for every employee , so that everybody knows and cognitive of the fact that his colleague’s feedback has value so he/she better cooperate and co-exist to succeed, not in way of Quid-pro-co, any way each feedback should be justified with examples and tangible activities. Take feedback from every employee on performance system at the end every performance management cycle. Improve, innovate it consistently.

Training or capability building?

I think this is the most difficult part when it comes to measuring value, like the recruitment most training departments traditionally measure the activity rather than value, you speak to any L&D professional they talk about how many employees participated in a training program, what percentage of total employees they covered in a year, how many hours each employee spent in training which is again a transactional piece. It is like a person going to most sacred place 1000 times and remain as what he was before, you might visit amaranth 1000 times in your life time but what is the use if it does not make you a better human being? Measuring the value of training department should start from asking are we doing the right kind of trainings that organization really needs?Do an objective analysis do not do trainings that does not add value , over a period of time it will reduce the importantance of whole training function altogether, after every training we ask for feedback asking how was the trainer, environment, facilities provided rather asking the important question – where do think this training will help? Which part of your job you will be able to perform better after this training?

Let us go back to the point of how do we identify right set of trainings to be delivered over the next year, take an example of a software firm having a product, at every release which part of the product you will find more bugs? UI side, Database? That is the area you exactly need to focus and get your resources trained. Track individuals who attended training whether he/she able to contribute in a better way in the areas he got trained, does he still needs someone helps even after getting trained? If this happens on a large scale it is time to look at the whole training function and start fixing it.

HR is not changing at the speed the environment it operates in changing, we need to catch up with the pace and keep reinventing ourselves, after all said and done sometimes HR role looks like a wicket keeper in cricket , you catch 99 balls and drop one, the whole stadium stands up and says his wicket keeping skills are bad, the only way to stop this undeserved blame is keep updating ourselves and being proactive before business comes back to us.

The "Csquare" of Recruitment - Providing best experience to your candidates and client leads to the real success

In this post I am not going to discuss about the widely used smart ways of managing, convincing candidates or clients – I would like to bring up the point of how important is it is to make client and candidate experience part of the overall recruitment strategy for the  super success of the recruitment function.

Everybody in recruitment today witnessing the transformation of staffing function in to a much bigger strategic activity, from one of the HR activities to in a way it is emerging as a separate function altogether. As the war for talent gets fierce day by day – it is extremely crucial for every recruitment team to shift their focus towards two important stake holders, who can influence the overall success of the recruitment function. It is time now we start re looking at our efforts towards redefining and enhancing recruitment experience for our client and

candidate.

Recruitment managers and recruiters should not forget the fact that recruitment is a service -irrespective of whether you are in a staffing services company or you are in an in-house recruitment team, it could be a IT services organization or a product development company. We are business enablers – we are not the business and most of the times we represent an organization. As Dave Ulrich said “Value and quality of the service it determined by the receiver not by the giver”. Whenever we start looking at the overall success of recruitment function we consider parameters like source mix, Turnaround time, Conversion ratio, Quality of Data and market intelligence, Offer decline percentage, Employer branding activities and to an extent verbal feedback from your clients which is greatly influenced by that particular moment and personal interactions. We all miss the “candidates” who are the focal point of the entire recruitment process and we also miss “Client” because of who we exist today. Few might argue that we receive feedback from clients/internal business regularly and work on it – but please do understand this is always about one single open position or it could be on why delay is taking place in filling positions etc, but we never receive constructive feedback on overall recruitment nor we put an effort to streamline and put up a robust feedback mechanism.  Now this is the costliest miss – this will lead to the danger of recruitment teams being perceived as transactional pieces. Let us see what needs to done and how that can we bring a paradigm shift in the way your client and candidate perceives recruitment and how it will lead to overall success.

Client: Diagnosis, not post mortem! Recruitment team needs to be proactive to provide better experience – get involved from day 1

Most of the times recruitment teams fail to meet the expectations not because they are not good enough but it is because they don’t really know what business exactly expecting, business or recruitment team alone cannot be blamed for this, in the conventional thinking recruitment is always a support function and comes second. as a result of this recruitment team receives requests to fill once business finalized their budgets, projections and deliverables, business has a deadline for each project to be delivered and to meet these they need people as of yesterday – without people they cannot meet their deliverables. So they push recruitment team and get pushed in return – it will become an ugly web where brick passing happens to and fro. There is flaw here.

There is nothing called closely aligning recruitment strategy to business strategy - recruitment strategy must be part of the business strategy

You have different metrics – Different deadlines – make it one: 

Almost all the time, business wants to deliver things at pace which is different from the pace at recruitment teams aiming to fill positions. See below

Technology team plans to deliver a product in next 2 months but SLA for closing a position for recruitment team still remains 90 days. So what will happen in this case – it will be similar like “operation success but patient dead”, recruitment team will try and fill positions in 90 days, but technical team will not able to ship the as per the plan. Now here we need tackle this problem from two ends – one, Recruitment head must be involved while Technology teams trying to put deadlines in place for their delivery and consider staffing problems to have achievable targets for future. From the other side – for recruitment team SLAs must not be “writing on the wall” – they should be flexible enough to adjust their SLAs as per business requirements – reason is if business fails there is no relevance for anybody’s existence.

Do not forget you are sailing in the same boat:  

Recruitment team often forgets that you and your business are working hard for the same purpose – “they need people more than you”, but when you forget this both sides will end up in an argumentative mode.in my experience so far I did see some serious flaws from business’ side which makes the life of recruitment team really difficult – but as we all know, we are business enablers and we are in service – so diagnose the problem and place reports in front of the business like a doctor – let this decide whether they want to get it fixed or not. If the recruitment team is date driven and come up with solutions, business will agree – reason being the same – they need people more desperately than the recruitment team.

It is not just Recruitment team’s problem – it is Organization’s problem: 
Most of the times recruitment team hides issues from business, It is the biggest mistake, let the business see problems through your eyes. You might not have a great brand name, your business model may not be really appealing to candidates – let business know, give them first-hand information, let them understand your exact issues, then only your client will be able to agree with you and empathize and realize as organization’s problems rather criticizing recruitment team.

Let your client be the owner of you success: 
Not for the sake of it – truly recruitment teams succeeds because of their client, the kind of insight they provide, the amount of time they spent with you play an incredible role in recruitment team’s success.

Never hide failure, shortcomings – I know of recruitment managers who asks their team to hide offer declines from the business till the last moment – by doing so you are losing credibility, no matter how many wonders you might do in the future, your client will not trust you.so let them know the moment you have a bad news.

Provide market intelligence regular, give an update about your competitors, and provide metrics around how you are performing. Let your client know your strategy, take their feedback embed them honestly – communicate the back up plans too – by doing so you are building the trust.

Never ever use the tone of an outsider when you are communicating to your client irrespective of whether they are within your organization or outside. Hard fact recruitment owns the problems of their client – you are solving their problem – hence you are “your client”  

Candidate: he is the solution for the problems you have

That company’s recruiters do not have a clue on what they are looking for!

They made me wait for one hour in the reception!!

I am done with the interview – but never heard back!!!

Interviewer did not have manners- he kept on speaking on his mobile while I was in the interview room!!!!

The above are few comments I have heard from my friends and colleagues who have attended interviews with various companies. It is sad that the most important stakeholders in recruitment process is not treated well. It is astonishing how recruitment team can forget that “the candidate is one who decides their success or failure”. We need to treat each candidate as a guest, I know and worked with few companies where the candidate is pampered starting from providing fine breakfast to pick and drop for the interview. Not all companies can afford to do that, because of the fact that not all of them are rich. To give the finest experience to a candidate you do not have to pamper him with nice lunch or cool drinks always, to be honest that not  is the purpose why candidate visited your place. Hence it is always a bonus to pamper candidates with nice stuff but is not mandatory to provide them great experience.

Provide consistent information about the opening and organization: 

Recruitment team must team make sure that information shared over phone should match with what is written on your careers page and wherever it has been published. Most of the times in a hurry recruiters post a very brief JD on the Jobsites, which will mislead candidates – must be avoided.

Let it be the memorable day:  

Candidate needs to be at his best during the interview , make him feel comfortable, receive them well with warmth, inquire if they want anything, provide them a special closed room for few minutes so that they can unwind themselves from their work related issues.Tell him how long the interview will take, run him through the JD and explain the background of interviewers,If candidate needs to wait for long – this happens when you have interviews lined consecutively, provide them some snacks – nobody likes the feeling of an empty stomach.

Let them know:  

Not telling candidates about the status of their application or interview is the biggest sin, in my view a recruiter who misses this frequently is not fit for his/her role at all. You may not be the only company that the candidate has applied; this status update will help him to take crucial decisions. Make sure you communicate the status – positive/Negative without miss, a recruitment who does this at 100% hit will be the most successful team.

Conduct a Survey with your candidates: 

There are so many free tools available on the internet to conduct surveys; Recruitment should conduct a candidate experience survey every quarter and analyses their shortfall, should implement measure in the next quarter to make it better. Ideally every candidate should be part of this survey. Make candidate experience part recruiter’s KRA, and give it good weightage.

Candidates are the ones who will build your brand – they speak, they write over internet, they refer and recruitment team succeeds.

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

Image courtesy -Istock Photo

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.