Business owners face multiple problems and Pain Points while recruiting the correct individuals for their organisations. People lacking in relevant experience, technical competence, specific qualifications, certifications and soft skills, a list real or perceived goes on.
We have worked with many business owners and identified solutions to three most identified Pain Points in recruiting process today:
Attracting the Traffic: The biggest challenge is still how to drive more traffic to your company. The logical process is that a hiring need is identified, a position is defined and posted, candidates find their way to apply through various sources, the candidate pool is narrowed, then the candidate with the best qualifications and fit is identified. To start with, you must exploit all the following networks of marketing.
- Well optimised job postings
- Make a Career Site
- Add a link to your career site in your email signature
- Add content in the shape of blogs, pictures, videos, slides (Info graphics)
- Use social media
- Use internal communications and referrals
Getting the Quality: Once the candidates are on the career site, the next challenge is converting the right traffic i.e., finding the quality. You can either segregate the quality person from the raw or offer additional benefits to the best one. The quality of the applicant is clearly the superior factor. There are many ways to measure the quality of an applicant before you hire them ranging from simple yes/no analysis to more robust pre-employment screening like:
- They get at least one counter-offer
- They are hard to convince
- They fit your competency profile
- Consider the source and reference
- Skills and Ability Testing – Such tests measure the applicant mastery level of specific skills critical to success
- Competency Profiling – A comparatively new technique but very important
- Personality / Leadership Aptitude Testing –To assess the fit of an applicant into the culture of the organisation
- Background Screening
Conversation with Candidates: The final step is to discover the person fit for your organisation through interviews. Interviews are of various types that range from formal to informal. To find out maximum about a candidate, you may prefer informal interviews. Remember that an applicant will expose more through easy conversations rather than stringent cross-questioning. Any great question can open up the conversation to find out more and more about a candidate. Job conversation is one of the most successful hiring strategies around the world. Candidates normally expect a formal question and are accordingly prepared with specifics. Conversely, an open-ended prompt gets candidates talking about what they are dying to do for your company. This gives you an insight into their passion and what value they can add to your organisation. Easy conversations and not interviews, will give you more insight on what you and the candidate are offering each other and whether you should work together.