As recruiters, we all know one thing for sure: “Recruiting isn’t easy.” And this thought is embedded in our brains. Why? Because we work with people and working with people is as difficult and challenging as quantum physics because of the complexity of the human being. One article on HR recruitment issues highlights that “if the recruitment and retention of new employees were an easy task, businesses wouldn’t hire recruiters and human resources departments would be a thing of the past.” In this context, it seems only appropriate to talk about the perils and pitfalls of recruiting. Here we go!
Recruitment is vast and complex and a specialized recruitment company can help out and keep against the unsuspected risks of international recruiting. For example, one of our clients reaches out to tens of countries on behalf of its own clients in order to ensure their international expansion. What they do is to provide smart solutions for managing their client’s workforce – wherever they are located. Therefore their clients can quickly expand into new global markets, compliantly pay workers, and convert disparate payroll data into a comprehensive view of their workforce costs for better business decisions. But in order to payroll the needed talent, they need to find it first and SourceMatch acts as a recruiting partner for all of these instances.
Recruiting is challenging for professionals and veterans, let alone for companies outside the industry. In today’s entrepreneurial context, many corporations and even medium businesses adopt a multi-tier recruitment model because of the high recruitment volume. This means that different recruitment sub-functions are grouped together in such a manner that achieves efficiency. But still the human resources department of a company usually faces challenges in recruiting new employees even if it adopts this multi-tier structure and the company will come to the inevitable conclusion that it is smarter to outsource parts of the recruitment process. For instance, it is easier for a recruitment company to conduct a nationwide recruitment process because of its ability to tap into an existing network and overcome challenges dependent on the economy.
Recruiting is no kids’ play. Being realistic about the role that needs to be filled means to know exactly what you want. When you put together a job description for a job title, you take into account the essential requirements of the job, the duties the employee will have and the skills required to perform. And this is the point where you can fall into one of the major pitfalls of recruitment: irrelevant or nonstandard job titles and descriptions. This is because job titles and their descriptions are basically keywords; if you use the wrong words you are definitely going to get the wrong talent pool applying for the position, or you will source for the wrong type of candidate profile. The solution here is to think about what type of phrase a job seeker would be likely to search when trying to find their dream job. The key is to put yourself in the shoes of that talented person you are locking and ask yourself if they are searching for these titles and requirements.
Recruiting is tricky, whether you do old school recruiting or technology-driven recruiting. It is tricky because you have to look for hidden things like loyalty, commitment, and conscientiousness. In this regard, the Hiring Managers face different Issues as they need to pick candidates based upon personal characteristics rather than professional competence. It is true that they look at first at profiles or resumes that highlight on purpose skills and performance related to people’s professional knowledge. But these are self-assessments that may indicate an inflated sense of personal achievements. It may also be the case that people do not highlight enough their capabilities thus missing out on opportunities. The approach needed to solve this particular problem is to bring to light hidden capabilities and put them into words and this could be done through well-structured interviews as well as well-targeted behavioral and personality assessments.
Recruiting is all about commitment. Whether it is about the recruiters’ commitment to finding the perfect candidate or about the candidate’s’ commitment to participate in the interview process and get the job. this is especially true in the case of cold calling candidates. Attracting the right people means investing hard work by understanding not only the job you are hiring for but also the way the job may be a good fit for the candidate. And once you understand the job and you start selecting people for the job one thing is clear: you always look for commitment. Unfortunately, it is difficult to fully understand who a candidate is after just one interview. The way to overcome this challenge is by giving candidates situational assignments. For instance, searching for a real job or handling a difficult question from a client. The candidate could decide how he would like to present this. The merit of this technique is that it would show not only skills, but it would also highlight different facets of the candidate’s personality. There are recruiters who even go further than that and invite final candidates to the office to join an informal lunch with the team, to get a sense of how they act in the group. An additional way to see if a candidate has a propensity for commitment is to look if they are dedicated to a cause and how their adherence to the cause looks like.
Finally, recruiting is war. There is an undeniable ongoing ‘War for talent’ on the international labor market. Most of the companies feel that they offer a great work environment. But does it fit the values of the person they want to hire as well? It can often be the case that before signing the job offer or starting work, the candidate goes “missing in action” just because he or she found something better. It is very important to have a strong employer brand that offers attractive opportunities. More than that, the corporate culture and the working environment that the employee will find at the beginning of his journey on the job must fit 100% with what he was presented during the selection process. This correlation between the offer and the reality plays a major role in retention. Authenticity in this regard will ensure that employees will be less likely to leave in the first year.
Due to its nature, recruiting is hard work. At SourceMatch we strive to overcome these hurdles.
Give us a try.
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