Right Recruitment - 7 Steps to Right Recruitment

This article is my effort to share my experience with the fellow recruiters.

 

After spending around 5 years in Staffing and Recruiting; I learned that attrition rate in all the companies are increasing day by day. The managements of many companies are not being able to retain their permanent employees and it results in decrease of the overall performance of the organization.

 

After thinking on this issue, I came to one conclusion: The attrition or turnover of the employees start from the very first step and that is Recruitment. If the recruitment is not right, there are more chances for an employee to leave the organization in a very short time.

 

One should take a lot much care while recruiting a permanent employee and should not only emphasize on technical skills. Even if one has to compromise little with the technical skills of a candidate to make sure he stays with the company for a long time, he should do that.

 

There are n number of factors which can give the hint whether the person will stay long with the company or he will run away soon!! Based on my experience, below I am listing few points which should be taken care while recruiting a permanent employee. These are my views and opinions based on my experience and readers are welcome to comment or criticize..:)

 

7 Steps for Right Recruitment

 

1. Understanding the Requirement

Make sure you have understood the requirement very well. You should not only look at the technical requirements but also try to understand the entire environment and situation of the vacancy. Why the vacancy is there? Is it a new vacancy or a replacement? If it is a replacement, what are reasons the previous employee on that position left the job or shifted or promoted?

 

2. Analyzing the position and team situation

After understanding the requirement, make sure you analyze the team environment and situation where the vacancy is open. Figure out the size of the team one has to work with. For example, if the team size of the position is 10 people, and if the incumbent has never worked in such team size, he wont be able to get adjusted easily. There are people who only gets adjusted with small teams and there are also professionals who can only work in big teams. This is the case with leading and management positions as well. If you try to hire a person who has led a team of 100 people and if he has to lead a team of only 5 people, there are always chances that he will be not satisfied and not get adjusted in the environment.

 

One also needs to check what kind of person the incumbent has to work with. Who is his supervisor; what kind of attitude he has and so on. In most of the cases, the study has found that an employee leaves because of his supervisor. Ultimately, the supervisor is the person who deals with him directly!!

 

3. Sourcing the right person

After analyzing the above two steps, now is the time to look for a right person. Match the technical skills, match the above two criteria and then call him for the interview. Salary is always an important criteria so never forget to match what he expects, what he has drawn, what is he drawing and what you can offer.

 

4. Gathering basic information

Many recruiters find it silly to gather the basic information about the candidate. However, this is where they make a big mistake. Basic information like birth place, current location, family background, marital status, hobbies etc. make a big difference. These are the details which can help a recruiter to figure out the candidate's current situation, his attitude, his hidden talents and skills and many more.

 

For example, if you have sourced a candidate who is female, recently married; there are chances for her to ask for maternity leave and the organization has to suffer. If you have a candidate who is relocating himself from his native location to a distant place, there are chances that if he gets a good opportunity in his native, he will accept it and run away. Similarly, if you find out the hobbies of a candidate you can figure out little about his attitude. If a candidate has been a soccer player in past, he may prove to be a good team member. If he is tennis player, he may like to work independently and so on..

 

So next time you interview someone, make sure you gather the basic information.

 

5. Interviewing

I will not discuss about the common things we ask while interviewing a candidate. Most of the recruiters or interviewers know what he has to check. But there are some other factors which need to be considered while interviewing. These are not the questions but hints we can get while interviewing.

- Body Language

- Facial expressions

- Speech

- Attitude

- Habits

 

6. Presenting profiles to management

It is very important for a recruiter to see how he is presenting the profile to the management. Once a recruiter has shortlisted one profile, he should wait for few more to get shortlisted. A recruiter should always give choices to the management and not just one resume. The management should have a chance to compare at least 3-4 profiles for a position. So make sure, you always present at least 3-4 resumes for a position to your management.

 

7. Recruiter as a sales person

I always consider a recruiter as a sales person. He is actually selling jobs to a right candidate and again selling the right candidate to the management. The sales always include after sales service. Always make sure you update the candidates and management about the latest status and keep both of them updated and posted.

 

Recruiter - A Strategic partner of an Organization

There was a time when Organizations used to recruit people by outsourcing their needs to Agencies or through references and good will. But look today, the entire scenario has changed.

 

Now organizations have their own Recruiting Divisions were 5-15 recruiters work specifically to source the right talent. Companies are still outsourcing their hiring needs to Agencies but in-house recruiters have become an essential component of the Business Life Cycle and Organizational Structure. Recruiters in a way have become Strategic Partners of the organization.

 

There was a time when a Single HR person used to handle all the HR Department's process but today it has changed. Recruiters are hired for a very specialized function of recruiting. The demand of Recruiters has increased especially in Information Technology and Software Industry. The high demand of professionals in mass value has increased the need of a specialized profile that can help in Recruiting effectively and promptly. Today the deadline to recruit people has trimmed out drastically. Organization wants to get somebody recruited on an urgent basis to meet their deadlines and as a result the deadline for a recruiter has become shorter sometimes of just couple hours. This shows the importance of a recruiter in today's corporate world.

 

However, not all recruiters are capable of meeting these short deadlines. The education on Human Resource Management is still limited to the General HR issues. The importance of Recruiting Function in the courses offered in the institutes is very less. In today's corporate scenario, the profile of an HR Professional has average 70% of recruiting functions and rest of other HR functions considering that the company has only one HR guy to perform all the functions.

 

I strongly believe that today it has become essential to train and educate HR professionals who have more portion of recruiting function in their profile and those who really wants to build their career in recruiting field. There is a need to educate them to "How to Recruit Effectively".

 

The corporate should take initiatives to impart specialized Recruiting Trainings to their HR and Recruiting professionals which will eventually help the organization to recruit the manpower at a faster speed and skilled employees.

 

 

 

A Complacent employee in an organisation never helps

Tom Dumez, vice president (HR) of Kent Records, discussed employee engagement at a conference in the US. Excerpts: "Let me challenge you with some statistics. Did you know that 46% of employees are either reactively or actively disengaged, have misguided loyalty, or are actually there mostly to negatively impact your business? These employees cost us way too much money year after year, yet we usually keep them because they have been here so long. Why do most companies historically hold onto the 'fat' for so long, instead of trimming it?"

In an era where talks on cost cutting measures are more than just whispers in the office aisles and have moved beyond the water cooler chats, it's surprising that complacency still exists. But it's a malaise every workplace is stricken with. 

Sandeep Choudhary, regional practice leader at Aon Hewitt, a human resource consulting major, doesn't mince words when he calls it a disease. "Generally speaking, everyone's intelligent, obedient and fit for a particular job considering they have fulfilled the requirement spelt out by an organisation. What differentiates the complacent from the driven is the initiative," he says. 

It's this lack of initiative, which Dumez termed 'fat' and Choudhary 'disease' that has led to companies take employee engagement seriously. Case in point: National Thermal Power Corporation. The old-world mammoth has quite a few initiatives in place to address and avoid complacency. Among others, it sponsors employees for full time BE, MTech and PGDBM programmes in reputed institutes. "This helps give a fresh start to their careers and avoid mid-career slump," says an NTPC spokesperson.

Disease Alert 
In the workplace, complacency can be defined as a sense of comfort coupled with a lack of interest in addressing key organizational issues or areas that need improvement and growth. Mid-career is the operative word here, as most employees who get disengaged fall in the mid-level management. 

Companies are realizing the importance of keeping the employees engaged. Take for instance, ONGC that has launched Gyandhara e-learning programme last year where online certification courses were provided to field executives. "Studies have shown that lack of required abilities and skills cause disengagement. Such factors can be addressed through HR interventions," says an ONGC spokesperson. 

Even private institutions are recognizing the need for such interventions. Sunil Goel, director, Globalhunt, an executive search firm notes that New Age businesses like IT, BPO, financial services and also other MNCs have significantly brought down employee complacency levels. 

"Many organisations have idle workforce, which they don't optimize and utilize properly. Invariably, some become complacent," he points out. The tricky bit: employees don't even recognize when they get infected. Complacency stops you from putting in your best and the quality of work inevitably suffers. 

 

Courtesy by: http://mailer.timesjobs.com/tech01/Mailers/HRDialogue/oct11/landing/in_focus.html

 

Wish you Happy Diwali and prosperous New Year....

 

 

 

 

Happy Diwali and prosperous New year !

 

The Six Attitudes Leaders Take Towards Social Media

Slowly but surely, business leaders are shifting their attitude toward social media — from seeing it as a threat to discovering its very real opportunities.

And their attitude matters, a lot. Social media is about people, not technology. Its business value does not come from social software or a snazzy website, even one with 800 million users. Its value stems from how business leaders, from senior executives to managers, use it to foster new collaborative behaviors that materially improve business performance.

Leadership attitudes, and the organizational culture they spawn, are critical to social media success. They are among a company's most fundamental social media assets — or liabilities. Here are the six basic categories that business leader attitudes toward social media fall into:

Folly:
Leaders with this attitude consider social media a source of entertainment with little or no business value, and they typically ignore it. Where a folly attitude prevails, the approach to a social media strategy must emphasize direct business value tightly tied to well-known and recognized organizational goals or challenges — and it must avoid flabby value statements around improved collaboration and stronger relationships.

Fearful:
Fearful leaders see social media as a threat to productivity, intellectual capital, privacy, management authority, regulatory compliance and a host of other things, and often discourage and even prohibit its use. This attitude can reduce the potential risk, but it also stifles any possible business value. To counteract fear, the strategic approach should focus on relatively low-risk initiatives, even if other, higher-risk opportunities might offer greater business value.

Flippant:
These leaders may not ignore or fear social media, but they don't take it seriously, either. This typically leads to a technology-centric approach where the company simply provides access to social media and hopes that business value will spontaneously emerge. This rarely bears fruit. Important in countering this attitude is convincing leadership that purpose matters, and that they should progress beyond the technology and identify good purposes for social media — causes that are strong enough to catalyze and mobilize communities of people to act in a way that delivers value to the community and the organization.

Formulating:
Formulating leaders recognize both the potential value of social media as well as the need to be more organized and strategic in its use. The right approach here should build on this positive foundation, emphasizing the broader strategic value of social media and mass collaboration, with a succinctly expressed set of business opportunities that (1) demonstrates social media's potential impact across many areas of the business, and (2) is strong enough to capture the attention of the most senior leaders.

Forging:
In companies where leaders have a forging attitude, the whole organization is starting to develop competence in using social media to assemble, nurture and gain business value from communities. To keep progressing, leaders should recognize previous successes, capitalize on growing momentum, advocate continued evolution and increase investments. They should also promote additional grassroots social media efforts as critical in becoming a highly collaborative social organization.

Fusing:
This is the most advanced attitude, and still rare. Fusing leaders treat community collaboration as an integral part of the organization's work, ingrained in how people think and behave. This is a description of a social organization, and in such organizations the need for an explicit vision and strategy subsides — all business strategy and execution already include community collaboration where it's appropriate.

How do most leaders shape up? Right now, our analysis indicates that leaders of most organizations have yet to progress to the Formulating stage, which accounts for the high social media failure rate. We know treating social media as strategic can lead to tangible business value and competitive advantage, so the goal is for business leaders to move quickly past the Folly, Fearful, and Flippant stages and get right to Formulating. Ignoring social media, or throwing it over the fence to Marketing or IT could create serious business risk.

Where does your organization stand?

 

Mind the genie in the lamp.

There once was a very poor man, who woke up hungry with only 1 rupee left in his pocket. He decides to go to the market and see if his rupee can buy him some left over fruit. At the market he meets a fancy clothed man behind a table with a beautiful oil lamp on it, and a sign that reads "1 rupee". The poor man can't believe his eyes, and asks the man what the catch is. It's true, the lamp only costs 1 rupee, the man says. And he explains that in the lamp there lives a genie, who fulfills all your desires. "Then why do you sell it?", the poor man wants to know. "Well, the genie is always active and rather impatient", it is explained. "And if you don't pay attention to him, he'll start taking things away again". "Well OK", the poor man says. "Since I don't have much to lose I will buy it from you".

 

When he arrives back home, he rubs the lamp and the genie appears. "How can I serve you, master?", he asks. "Prepare me a meal worthy of a king", the poor man commands. Within a second the genie serves an opulous meal with 87 courses. The poor man is delighted, but when he wants to start eating, the genie asks again - "And how can I serve you master?" Keeping in mind that the genie can also take away all the goodies, the poor man commands: "Build me a beautiful castle, suitable for a maharaja!" Only a few seconds pass by, and the man now finds himself in a beautiful palace. He likes to explore it, but there comes the genie again, asking "How can I serve you, master?" Every wish is immediately fulfilled, and when ignored, the genie takes away everything.

 

The poor man is annoyed and goes to the village sage, where he explains his problem. After a silent conversation, the poor man steps to the genie and says: 'Genie, build me a large pole and stick it in the ground". The genie immediately builds a pole and sticks it in the ground. "Now genie, I want you to climb up and down the pole, over and over again". The genie starts climbing right away. And now the man has time to eat his meal, explore his palace and do other things. When he and the sage go to see what the genie is doing, they see that he has fallen asleep next to the pole. "And so it is with the thinking genie of every man", explains the sage. "It is restless in its desire to satisfy every desire, and fragments our being. The pole is a tool called a 'mantra'. By repeating it over and over again, our restless mind is kept busy until it gets so bored that it falls asleep. And this way our true self can enjoy the world."

Lesson: you are more than your mind - don't worry and enjoy your self