Our new Infographic reveals recruiting performance statistics based on a 2018 report by Zogby Analytics (commissioned by Jobvite) in which over 850 hiring professionals were surveyed. What are the most important success metrics for recruiters, or the biggest bottlenecks in the recruitment processes? How about the biggest challenges they face, or the top investments recruiters believe are essential for growing an employer brand?
Top success metrics 31% of the recruiters surveyed argued that the quality of hire is the most important metric for success to be achieved, while retention rate has a 23% rate, time-to-hire – 21% and cost per hire – 7%. The quality of hire (candidates are a great match for the role they are recommended for) remains the most important, and that is why at SourceMatch, we have the right processes and work with the most effective solution for every situation to make sure we deliver an added value to your company, which is greater than the cost of recruiting.
Biggest bottleneck to recruiting The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers can still be improved, as recruiters (50%) admit that working with hiring managers – waiting for them to move candidates through the hiring process or (44%) to review resumes, is the biggest obstacle when it comes to a smooth and sailing recruiting process. Candidates don’t know what’s going on and will many times consider responsiveness through the hiring process as an indication of how they will be treated as employees.
Biggest challenges in hiring Again, the most important factor in hiring is the quality of new hires. And the biggest challenges recruiters face is the lack of skilled and candidates, voted by 67% of surveyed recruiters, followed by 52% that claim it’s the intense competition, and 36% believe it’s the lack of budget. It’s crucial to understand the market before assuming that the requirements of positions are realistic. When talent is scarce, either you pay the price for that or factor that in and adjust requirements and build in the rest of the requirements into training and development.
Top investments for growing an employer brand What are the areas that you need to refocus your attention on in order to grow your employer brand? 47% of votes highlighted Social Media, followed by Company Career Website and only 12% – Advertising. When it comes to Social Media, the most-used channel for recruitment efforts is LinkedIn when trying to reach candidates, with 77%, followed by Facebook – with 63%.
Eventually, no one single measure will have a dramatic immediate effect. However, if you choose a few of them and consistently focus on doing what your brand says you do, then the market will see you walk the talk!
What are the most important success metrics for you? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
Talent, what a tricky little thing! It is hard to find, hard to manage, let alone to retain, but truth be told, a company can’t thrive without it. Companies that are capable to hire talented people are more likely to achieve high success rates that in turn translate into financial gains. In other words, talent is money. Therefore, in the world of HR, talent is put on a pedestal and is viewed as a diamond. Chiseled or in the rough, diamonds are a precious sign of prosperity. It is exactly the same with talent and recruiters know it: if they place talent in the company, that company will prosper beyond its means. And this is why at SourceMatch we refined the ways we search for talent because we understand the impact and value it can have for our clients.
So, talent is important for growth. But the acquisition of high performers takes significant effort and expertise. Imagine you hire a very talented professional and you find yourself in a scenario resembling that joke with the gamer arriving in hell: after he wreaks havoc and destroys everything, he keeps asking where the next level is. Talent combined with pride will not lead to growth, it will create chaos. Or think about how important it is to hire people that do not only have potential but also have a sense of loyalty. You most definitely want to hire people who strive to grow in the environment you offer them. These professionals are not only great team players but when they outgrow their role, they ensure continuity by coaching others on their own development. Identifying personality traits that lead to growth-generating behavior isn’t easy. The recruiting process needs to be tweaked in such a manner that it will generate the best fit for your company. Therefore, many companies after encountering all sorts of hurdles in the recruiting process choose to either outsource it or bring in a partner to assist and advise them. Whether they specialize in recruiting consulting or head-hunting, these partners work with a diverse number of client organizations, using and improving their best practices. Unless they do, they become irrelevant for the purpose of their business existence.
Having said that, we should all agree: companies can have significant benefits by working with recruiting companies. We are talking about the experts of the field who are hacking growth through recruiting. Efficient recruiting companies will help you scale up the recruiting process to generate the same level of quality candidates as before despite the increasing number of positions to fill. They will shed light on how to best show candidates what your organization’s values are. They can help you define aspects of HR you didn’t even know existed. For instance, let’s say that you embark on a hiring initiative and three months later you find yourself desperate to find a fit for a crucial position in your company. You are in the midst of organizational growth and you’re not able to move forward because you don’t have the right people in the right positions. And then you come up with the brilliant idea to bring in a partner to assist with the recruiting efforts. The recruiting company has inbuilt HR automation technology used to process information about the labor market faster. Its recruiters are able to build a list of prospective candidates in a fraction of the time you would on your own. Moreover, they create pipelines that allow them to swift through candidates ending up with those that are suitable for you. The right recruiting partner will act as an extension of your team, expanding your efforts and amplifying what has worked, improving what has not and so on.
There are many skills and there are multiple personalities. And to understand how these intertwine with each other is part of a recruiter’s role. When you identify a candidate for your company and give them a job, you expect them to grow with you. But if their personality and skills are not a match then it can be in your detriment. Our team is trained to recognize what matches your requirements beyond just the job description. But these requirements aren’t just related to candidates’ technical experience and need to also encompass behavioral traits and cultural fit. This is why we’ve developed what we call a “360-degrees look at who the candidates are”. At SourceMatch, we use this approach to assist clients with their hiring needs, so that their decision making is based on reliable information. When you want to grow in the right direction you want to have the depth of knowledge to make the right decisions. SourceMatch has developed its recruiting process so that we focus on what truly matters to our clients, which will be different from organization to organization. That means that we reach the best candidates at the right time within the shortest timeframe while making the client’s job significantly more effective. For instance, one of our clients was looking to fill two positions for a Project Manager role. After several months after we placed the candidates, they came back. They said they would like to continue our collaboration, as the candidates we placed were top performers. We knew how to look for those ingredients that would make someone great not only from a hard skills perspective but more importantly, from a soft skills standpoint.
Someone once had a thought: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They are done by a team of people.” It was Steve Jobs, the creator of the mighty Apple. He was on to something and we believe that it applies to all organizations. Engaging with a recruiting company such as SourceMatch is useful because it provides your business and talent acquisition team with a partner. When companies decide to partner with SourceMatch, they instantly have access to a team that’s committed to their growth by identifying the right talent. Searching and hiring talent isn’t about a transaction but about a relationship. Our purpose is to identify the professionals that you need in order to advance your development strategy. As of that moment, it all comes down to integrating them into your organization, vision and especially making it crystal clear how their work contributes to it.
In today’s market, having access to resources can make a difference in a company’s ability to compete. But more than any other, human resources are crucial in the development of those companies that have a clear strategy for growth, innovation, and impact in their market segments.
Reach out to us to help you do what we know best: recruiting.
In the Infographic below, we’re highlighting 4 hiring trends that you should consider when making a hire in 2019.
Let’s talk about the first one: Artificial Intelligence. AI, as we already noticed, has an impact on the recruiting processes, making them easier to handle. According to studies, 52% of talent acquisition leaders say the hardest part of recruitment is identifying the right candidates from a large applicant pool. Katrina Kibben, Randstad argues that “Any area of recruiting where distinct inputs and outputs occur – like screening, sourcing, and assessments – will largely become automated”.
However, AI requires abilities from a recruiter in order to use the new technologies, so the question remains: are the HR/ talent acquisition department/ recruiters ready for it?
Hiring for potential. Although experience is not to be neglected, it does not equal performance. So why focus your attention on hiring for potential instead of experience? Besides the reduced costs, there are many benefits to what a less experienced but driven candidate might bring to the table, such as adaptability, creative thinking, communication skills, or flexibility. Let’s keep in mind the fact that what used to work in the past, might not work in the future, and hence why adaptability is a key trait.
Work flexibility Why offer flexible hours? Because you want happy and productive employees. Let’s put it this way: If an employee has problems in their personal life, it affects their professional one, and vice-versa. Work-life balance is a direct result of employees’ ability to have a say in how they use their time for work. Needless to say that with flexibility comes great responsibility and openness to staying accountable.
Candidate experience Why is the candidate experience important, you may ask? Monster’s CandE report found that of the candidates who had a positive hiring experience: 1. 62% will increase their relationship with brands products and networks; 2. 78% would refer someone in the future; 3. 62% would apply again.
These trends help us understand how to best adapt to the future of work. They impact the way companies relate to the labor market, what candidates expect from new jobs, and how organizations can create an environment that encourages professionals to attain their full potential. Despite a heavy emphasis on autonomous technology, at SourceMatch we believe that human interaction is by far the one that candidates will remember best from the whole hiring process. So what are you doing to make sure that whether they are selected or not for a job, candidates will have a lasting positive impression of your organization, brand, and employees?
Recruitment: a plus or a minus
One of the important functions of a solid business is the Human Resources department. It deals with aspects such as compensation, benefits, new employees, recruiting, training, organizational development, and culture. It is also meant to act as an adviser to senior staff, providing clarity regarding the impact of their operational, financial and performance planning on people. However, the topic of recruitment attracts considerable attention in most organizations. It is estimated that U.S employers spent in recent years no less than an average of $140 billion annually on recruitment activities. The recruiting process has a direct impact on an organization’s bottom line. Those organizations that excel at it, experience 3.5 times more revenue growth and twice the profit margin as opposed to all other employers who will rather see recruitment as an expense due to the lack of return on investment.
Recruitment is about one common objective
We know that hiring the right employee for the right job isn’t easy and hiring them at the right time can be even more challenging. Employers have the power to decide which type of people they want to hire and what strategic message they’re sending to reach the targeted professionals. Done poorly, an organization’s recruitment efforts will generate job applicants that are unqualified and will miss the highly qualified ones because they were unaware of a job opening. Whether we talk about an organization’s senior management, hiring managers, or recruiters, they all have different expectations when they think about recruiting. Senior management thinks in terms of strategy, growth, and bottom line. Hiring managers will focus on tactics and short to mid-term projects goals. Recruiters will think in terms of identifying possible candidates, assessing their skills, behavioral and cultural fit, as well as making the tight deadlines that come with growth. Despite their apparently different expectations, all stakeholders active in their organization’s recruitment process have one objective: getting the right people on board.
Do your homework
Among the most important factors influencing the recruiting process is the hiring manager’s perception of the candidates that are being presented by the recruiter. Even within the same organization, the hiring managers are the recruiter’s clients. This is why an evaluation of how well recruiters serve the hiring managers’ interests and needs is required.
Here are a few reasons that will lead to the failure of the recruiting process:
a) Recruiters don’t have a good understanding of the type of candidate that hiring managers require;
b) The recruitment process takes too long;
c) Recruiters forget to keep hiring managers updated on the status of the recruitment process;
d) The intense use of the e-mail by the recruiter;
e) No interaction with the hiring manager and lack of proactivity.
Some of these might be the result of poor communications between hiring managers and recruiters. Others may be caused by the fact that hiring managers are unclear about what they need in a new hire. A slow process can be caused by not acting quickly when it comes to reviewing job applications and scheduling interviews. To avoid all these obstacles, recruiters must work directly and closely with the hiring managers to develop a list with realistic expectations for each job opening. The recruiter should take time to understand what the hiring manager appreciates most about the people who are currently doing well in their team. Looking at the current team members and what made them a good fit is useful to determine both tangible and intangible factors influencing the recruitment and hiring processes.
Communication is key
It’s estimated that 80% of recruiters think they understand the requirements of the jobs for which they recruit, and only 39% of hiring managers agree with it. Such a disconnect is detrimental to all parties involved in the recruitment process and can lead to a loss of time and money.
Recruiters are responsible to educate the hiring managers on whether expectations are realistic when correlated with the labor market.
Recruiters should always keep the hiring manager updated about how things are progressing throughout the process and ask for information rather than wait for the hiring manager to contact them. On the contrary, recruiters ought to focus on creating a collaborative process in which all parties are aware of the hiring status, and can at any time connect to the company’s applicant tracking system for most recent updates. Technology has made communication much more accessible and streamlined through smart recruiting software applications that are synchronized across all available platforms.
Recruitment strategies and processes
By communicating the right values in your job advertisements to properly on-board candidates, the recruitment strategies you use can make or break the hiring process. Here are some that you should try.
Your brand is important
Probably the most important element in attracting, hiring and retaining talent is Branding, and it’s the most difficult. In fact, 72% of recruiting leaders around the world agree that branding has a significant impact on employment.
Having a strong employer brand is a great way to attract great applicants. However, it is not easy, it requires a significant investment of time and money.
Introducing an employee recommendation system
Unlike employer branding, starting a program that helps identify potential new hires does not cost you much and can get you results pretty quickly. Here are some benefits that come with this kind of initiative: lower recruitment costs, reach professionals that otherwise might not have applied for your openings, shorter timeframes to fill positions, and in essence less money spent on hiring.
Don’t neglect the passive candidates
Passive candidates can be a real treasure if you take the right approach to reach out to them. Note that most of them don’t have an updated resume or aren’t motivated to apply. The good news is that an estimated 85% of the workforce would gladly change their job for better opportunities. It’s all about portraying them in a way that’s transparent and detailed enough to determine a response.
Focus on publishing an accurate job description
Make sure your job ads are proofread, double-checked and accurate. If you are trying to find the right candidates for your job offer, It’s important that their first impression of your organization and digital presence is a good one.
Improve your job interview
According to LinkedIn research, 83% of candidates had a negative experience during an interview and most wouldn’t have applied for the job had they known. To avoid bad interview experiences ensure that your candidates receive all the information they need about the role, that they’re asked meaningful questions, and that interviewers show genuine interest in understanding their career.
Conclusion
We all are aware of the fact that the world of recruiting is growing rapidly, and while these strategies are helpful this year, it’s very probable that in the years to come these might not be trending anymore. Keep learning, researching and adopting new ways to attract the best talent in the market, since people are key to a company’s ability to thrive among competitors! At the same time, not all these recruitment strategies will work the same for all companies. Our advice, in order to advance your hiring process, try, improve and customize them, and adjust them to your organization’s needs.
Why are recruitment statistics important? Besides the fact that they keep us informed and help us guide our recruiting efforts, they can be powerful tools to improve.
In this statistics representation, we showed in numbers how easy/ hard it is to fill a position in the year 2018. Do you know what passive job seekers are? The following data will be of much help if you do a little research on how to direct your efforts when searching for talent. And the last item in our figures is related to the number of companies that promotes talent within the organization.
U.S. employers encounter difficulties when they want to fill new job openings. The statistics tell us that 50% of U.S. employers reported that it is taking them longer to fill jobs today compared to any other period of time. This trend in human resource speaks about who has the upper hand when it comes to recruiting.
Job seekers hold the strongest influence on the job market. Some decide to pursue jobs based on long-term personal objectives and others will hop from one job to another based on salary alone. In their search of the best talent, recruiters also need to consider candidates who are not actively searching for a job. According to the statistics, 73% of candidates are passive job seekers.
This turns out to be difficult for recruiters because passive candidates are not looking for new job opportunities since there’s typically a good reason: they are competent workers and they are happy with their current role. Convincing them to hop jobs might be difficult. But there are also more optimistic statistics. For example, 79% of organizations are focusing their efforts towards building and promoting their own talent from within, meanwhile only half are recruiting from the external labor pools. Hiring from within their own organizations comes with numerous benefits for employers because it saves up on time and not to mention money. This is an ideal way for organizations to retain talent and to grow organically.
Technology plays a crucial role in advancing efficiency and financial results. According to the 2017 North American Staffing & Recruiting Trends Report, technology adoption is unsurprisingly high: 64% of North American staffing firms use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to track candidate activity and 60% use a customer relationship management (CRM) system for business development. Recruiters want to work smart, not harder. At SourceMatch, it’s this philosophy why we use CATS as our applicant tracking system for all of our recruiting processes.
CATS helps us save time, organize better and structure our recruitment operations in little time. When one of our clients needs 5 new hires in the management department within a short time frame, we trust the automation CATS provides to hire the right people in an efficient manner.
The recruitment workflow in CATS is streamlined and helps us shorten the time it takes from receiving an order to presenting the hiring manager with the best candidates – a huge benefit in the recruiting industry. It’s easy to track and manage candidates through the recruiting process so that team members can see the most up-to-date statuses and quickly move forward with the next interview, the offer, or whatever the next step in the process is.
Thanks to its user-friendly interface, custom dashboards, and numerous integration options, CATS quickly becomes something that just makes sense to us (including our new hires). When we do have a question, we can rely on CATS’ support team for the assistance we need, when we need it.
Many recruiters work on a regular basis with Excel or Google Sheets. Though these do work for simplistic tasks (detailing project status, defining task types, etc.), they lack the intuition of software built for recruiters. CATS is customizable through workflow optimization, job orders dashboard and many more productivity and analytics features. CATS also post your jobs on several job boards (free and some paid) which helps with attracting talent. It is a software built by recruiters, for recruiters, and it shows.
Recruiting has its challenges, but the fact that each experience is different in and of itself helps us improve and become better at what we do. Our experience taught us that regardless of the type of work we are doing, we must always use the right tools in order to succeed. For SourceMatch, CATS is not only the right tool, but it’s also the applicant tracking system we recommend to anyone for their hiring needs.
Red flags are the absence of an early warning system. Of course, the obvious problems are consequences/effects of deeper causes and require reactive solving.
A strong recruiting process, like any business process, can only work well if it’s built with all its stakeholders’ interest in mind: Recruiter (recruitment company), the hiring manager (internal clients or external client company) and candidate – in this chronological order.
When any of the stakeholders are not given enough attention during recruitment you may see scenarios such as:
The recruiter is under a lot of pressure from the client to deliver, cuts corners in the candidate selection process. The client will receive a candidate whose qualifications are at best short of their need. The candidate will have her or his hopes high, expecting the “opportunity of their career”. The recruiter will live with the impression that he’s done a great job for the time he’s been given to find a candidate.
The client makes a recruitment order for a new role with the recruiter and picks a standard job description off the internet. The recruiter might look for a purple squirrel candidate that might not exist, or best-case scenario fits the internet’ job description instead of the real needs of the client. The candidate feels she’s a perfect fit and is surprised during the interview when the client brings up all sorts of questions that are beyond the “internet job description!”
Candidate interviews with the recruiter and provides basic answers to the vague questions that the recruiter asks. The recruiter is unbelievably happy that the candidate is a “perfect match”. The client interviews the candidate and is dumbfounded when they ask the candidate to elaborate on their experience.
These are just some examples, but in our experience, at SourceMatch there are a few guidelines for recruiters, which will help everyone in the process win. Here’s the early warning system for recruiters:
Get to know your client, their trade, their culture, values, the hiring manager, the team where the new hire will work in, tangible and intangible factors, must haves and nice to have. Set the expectation early on with the client that you expect them to “help you” understand who they are and who they are trying to hire. The Job Description is at best 50% of all useful information. Once you have all info, ask the client to confirm in writing that there’s nothing left unsaid about their expectations for the new hire (in essence, that you understand well what they need).
Always strive to exceed client’s expectations when it comes to due diligence for the candidate’s qualifications, experience, skills, behavior, performance, etc. Ask meaningful and detailed questions of your candidates. Ask for real-life examples. Let the candidate know that it’s the only way they can present themselves in a unique way.
Be transparent and honest about the job when you speak with the candidate. If it’s a parallel move for them, don’t make it sound like it’s something else. Be open and let them know of the advantages and challenges of the role at the same time. If they are at a different point in their career than what you expected, don’t oversell the position. Same can be said with candidates that miss the mark on the client’s expectations.
If a client has unrealistic / hard-to-meet expectations regarding the speed of recruiting or available candidates in the talent pool, you must speak up! You need to act as a consultant to the client. Because you are the expert of your trade, you will have unique perspectives that have been tested and validated throughout tens or hundreds of recruiting engagements.
When you present a candidate to the client (ideally over the phone or in person), make sure to show clearly why they were selected, and to what degree they meet/exceed the expectations that were agreed in the first place. Don’t just present a resume, but also let the client about your thought process. This is a tremendous opportunity to act as a consultant to your client.
Time and information will break you regardless if you are disciplined or not. That’s whyyou need to have a system – an applicant tracking system – to follow through your process and to keep you on track, remind you about upcoming calls, meetings, deadlines, tasks, etc.
Always follow up with candidate and clients with regular updates, even if they are negative – i.e. a different candidate has been selected following the in-person interview with the client. When you don’t communicate in the recruitment process, stakeholders will assume the worse.
You may start with these 7-steps early warning system and develop your own version, but thinking proactively about everything that can go wrong will prepare you for most of what can go wrong.
Of course, no one feels comfortable having to choose between the two. And yet, we don’t live in a perfect world and candidates bring different things to the interview table.
To even start thinking this topic through, it’s important we understand what a skill set is and what makes up the cultural fit.
Are skill sets important?
A skill set is a particular category of skills or abilities necessary to perform a job. Skill sets are easy to showcase based on previous jobs, numbers, achievements or in other words quantifiable facts. A good recruiter would have no problem to assess these looking at a resume, through interviews or tests. So why even have any debates when a candidate can fit the job from a skills point of view? After all, they will require less hand-holding, less training, and a shorter ramp-up period in the new job. They are people that hold a certain level of expertise that can just be plugged into an organization and bring immediate results.
What about culture fit?
It’s very tempting for recruiters who spend merely seconds to pick and choose what candidates will make it forward in the selections process. Candidates have complex personalities and unique combinations of upbringing and experiences. When searching for new hires, hiring managers and recruiters want to ensure that the person who’ll join the organization will have preferences, personal and work styles that aren’t far from the hiring organization’s culture. Organizational psychology guru Adrian Furnham offers a definition for the cultural fit in his seminal academic textbook, “The Psychology of Behaviour at Work”: “A fit is where there is congruence between the norms and values of the organization and those of the person.” Asking candidate’s questions such as the following will help you uncover their, likes, dislikes and expectations:
-> Why do you want to work here? -> How would you describe your ideal workplace? -> What makes the work environment frustrating to you? -> Do you prefer working in a team or alone/as a sole contributor? -> Who was your best boss and what made them so great?
It’s critical however you take these questions and customize them to help you compare with your organization’s culture. Some companies are more loose when it comes to time and make results the sole main requirement, some are very eclectic and laid back wanting to foster creativity and outside-the-box thinking, and some that are very formal such as banks and other financial institutions. If he/she is a fit, then they will feel good working for the company’s goals. The importance of cultural fit will reflect on the employee’s productivity. They will also be interested in the results they bring.
So what now?
You do need people to bring the right skills to the table to fulfill their jobs, and you also want a great alignment between the person’s and the organization’s values. However, as mentioned we don’t live in a perfect work: What if you had to choose between the skill set and culture alignment? Culture always comes first.
Culture is the glue that holds an organization together, and the cost of poor culture fit can cost that organization between 50% to 60% of the person’s annual salary. So before you start vetting candidates, it’s critical that you define and articulate the organization’s culture (values, goals, practices, etc.). Only then will the recruiting process highlight the best candidates that fit the culture. Everything considered culture fit should never be at the expense of different personalities, backgrounds, and a diverse workforce.
However, you do need to prioritize. First, make sure the values, ethics, morals, principles, etc. are there. Otherwise, you may find yourself hiring someone who has outstanding skills with a poor cultural fit. They will challenge your organization’s existence at every step of the way, either silently, or vocally. Sometimes it’s useful to have a new and constructive perspective on things. But if you have a culture that has proven time and time again to be beneficial for the organization’s development, for its employees and not the least its customers, then you should stick to it. Someone new who will not integrate with the team and organization will only cause unnecessary friction.
Lastly, in order to decrease the probability that you need to be in such a tough situation to choose between skill set and culture, hire continuously. Always be on the lookout for people who are shining in their current roles, who are delivering value to their customers and enjoy being part of something greater than themselves and their jobs.
To get the best talent for the client, a recruiter will spend the time to evaluate resumes in accordance with the target profile. They will look at the resume components that relate to the candidate’s potential to be successful in the client’s organization. They will try to understand both tangible and intangible facets of a candidate’s background in relation to the client’s requirements for that position. Here are 10 specific areas that recruiters look at:
What kind of organizations, teams, and cultures has the candidate worked in (i.e. corporate vs entrepreneurial, teamwork vs individual/expert consulting focuses work, focused on innovation/continuous improvement, etc.)?
Is there any recent time gap in the resume? Could that kind of gap affect the relevancy of the candidate’s skills for the role they are applying for?
If a candidate has focused on contract work, it may appear like job hopping – clarify whether a job was a contract or not by mentioning it in the resume. It could be that for the current job the client is looking for loyalty to previous employers (i.e. 3+ years average) or for someone who can come in and solve a problem and move on.
Amount and relevancy of quantifiable achievements/facts – i.e. for each job, list top 3 achievements, and top 3 activities you’ve been involved in.
The resume should not be too long (more 3 pages), or too short (less than a page), and with just enough info to strike a good balance between keeping it brief and having enough facts.
If you are a recent graduate, fill in the page with the main school, extracurricular or internship projects that you were involved in – what you did and what were the outcomes.
Resumes must be customized for each role in the sense of emphasizing the skills and expertise relevant to the role that the candidate is applying for.
With today’s tools available online, there’s no reason why a resume would not be verified for grammar and spelling accuracy.
Finally, the resume should be structured in such a way that it’s easy to read, without using difficult or unusual fonts (mainly sans serif fonts are easier to read – such as Arial, Segoe UI or Verdana)
Make sure to insert page numbers if your resume is longer than a page. It makes it easy to follow through multiple pages.
Finally, make sure that the resume shows the real you. After all, a resume is a document that shows not only what you did, but what your potential is for your next employer. Use it wisely!
There’s a question that every company will consider when engaging an outside search partner: “How do we manage this search partner so that we make the best of it?”
We’ll start by stating the most important part of our answer: the fact that an organization has to “manage” a search firm says a lot about the kind of deal and expectations that were set in the first place! If you have to manage a search firm, then we do question whether they are the right fit for you. Their role is not just to find the best candidates, but to act as a consultant that lays out a clear path to hiring the “needle in the haystack” candidate for you. The difference between managing a vendor and being consulted by a firm also can be pictured as (1) a very basic buy and sell agreement, or the latter (2) as two partners working towards a common goal. Anything less than a win-win attitude will lead you to an imbalance of benefits in that relationship.
Before you can talk about tools and processes, you need to clarify the conditions of engaging a search firm. Choosing the right search firm can enable a high return on your investment. That can only happen when communication and transparency are both guaranteed and mutual, which help build trust that doesn’t need to be managed but relied on.
Define what success means for your partnership before starting anything. Aspects such as the conversion of presented candidates into hires, time that a position was opened until a hire is made, cost per hire, etc.
Clearly state your expectation that you need to be in the loop at every stage with clear goals, milestones, and progress. That can take the form of weekly reports and reviews, KPI measurement, as well as feedback from the candidates. Require that both your team and the search firm team act as one. There’s nothing more confusing to candidates than to be passed around by multiple parties in the process of being interviewed/hired for the same role.
Go beyond job descriptions and resumes. Perhaps one of the most costing mistakes is to reduce jobs to job descriptions and candidates to resumes. Every job has different complexities including who the person will interact with, how, when, etc. It will also be subject and cause to the organizational culture – it will either contribute to it or affect it. When it comes to candidates, resumes are a great start, but beyond those 2-3 pages of summarized experience and skills, there’s a human being. A person with aspirations, wishes, dreams, family, and complex personality.
A search firm partner needs to complement what already works in your process. One of the challenges of today’s labor market is to identify enough candidates to go through your hiring process. The unemployment rate has been at its lowest at 3.8% since 2000. That’s particularly true of the top tier professionals. If your current process gives you the right outcome but not fast enough or doesn’t get you enough hires, then engaging a search partner to help at the top of the funnel can provide you with what you need.
Use technology to fit and improve your own processes. Software tools support all of the above, but important nevertheless. We have seen status updates in ATS client portals, as well as simple and clear-cut summaries delivered via email that worked for everyone involved. A search partner has to provide the client with a few options and go for the one that best reflects the communication preference of the client. So whether the client organization asks the search firm to use their ATS or the firm’s ATS, or both, is really dependent on the terms of the deal. For instance, a client organization might want to and agree with the search firm to access all candidate profiles that were sourced in the process, not just the ones that were shortlisted or even hired.
To summarize: engage with partners, not vendors, set the right expectations upfront, keep them accountable, have them provide you with options and recommendations.
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