Recruiting Strategy:-

Recruiters today recruit with multiple intentions. The first one is to fill positions with any available candidates and thereby close their targets. However the real challenge comes for them when it comes to source, recruit and hire Achievers. They are the tough kind and have a lot of expectations which have to be catered to before joining a company’s talent bar.

Hiring achievers is a challenge for any recruiter as they are very hard to find. They Have more counteroffers and have a higher expectational demand before joining. However to break the Achiever recruiting pattern, there are a few strategies which are to be borne in mind by the recruiter himself, if he is to placate him in a new position.

The first step that goes is to understand the Classic Achiever Pattern and differentiate his skill set pattern, and how he reacts to situations which are suddenly given before him to comprehend.

Based upon the circumstances, the achiever can either go the extra mile or get it resolved or either makes excuses and backs out.

As a result of the above, the Achiever tends to get promoted more quickly, gets formal recognition, and typically earns more in comparison to the 75 percent not in the top cadre.

Interestingly, in the first 5-10 years of their careers, Achievers tend to have less practical experience in work than their peers, due to their rapid promotions. So if a company screens on years of experience, they’ll tend to eliminate many of the high-potential candidates from consideration before they even have a chance to evaluate them.

From an assessment standpoint, it’s pretty easy to recognize the Achiever pattern, if you don’t first get impressed by the candidate’s first impression and presentational skills. I suggest that during the first phase of the interview. Try to spend at least 20-30 minutes on the work-history review as you go through the person’s resume, look for evidence of his Achiever pattern which consists of things like

• Rapid promotions or assigned to bigger projects at quality organizations.
• Higher compensation, including extra bonuses and bigger raises.
• Assigned leadership positions for a variety of projects consisting of multi-functional groups.
• Formal recognition for exceptional performance, including awards, honors, and letters of re-commendation.
• Technical recognition including patents, white papers, presentations, and industry acknowledgments.
• Strong academic background, academic awards, and strong institutions.
• Mentoring skills.
• Subject matter expert in his area.
• Displays a pattern of self-development, especially during gaps in his employment.

Identifying Achievers is actually far easier than finding and recruiting them. The key idea to remember here is that Achievers don’t look for new jobs or accept one the same way as everyone else. Keeping this objective in Mind, make sure that the next recruitment you plan to do is a combinational mix of an achiever and a non achiever for an organization to achieve.

 

 

LinkedIn rolls out two new killer applications for their users called as “Referral Engine” and “Jobs for you”.

LinkedIn recently announced the new launch of their new product offerings to the LinkedIn brand. Called as “Jobs for You” and “Referral Engine” by LinkedIn, the products were a super success right from its first day of implementations.

Being targeted exclusively for recruiters and employees, the products pre-populate the persons work experience and only displays relevant contextual jobs in his profile as a page called as “Jobs you may be interested in” offering jobs specifically targeted to end users.

The perception after customizing this page was tremendous. LinkedIn revealed the fact that after the application was installed, they saw lots of success with passive candidate’s clickthroughs applying as active job seekers. The success behind it was simple. They placed this offering in the home page of the employee’s profile.

LinkedIn’s “Jobs for You” directly helps companies, recruiters, individuals to directly share job openings. The advantage is that it uses the information directly from their LinkedIn profiles to target users with relevant job opportunities.

While LinkedIn’s concept of finding and delivering relevant job opportunities is not new. LinkedIn has taken professional networking to a new level. Their intention is to target active job seekers, who run specific job searches in their database.

They plan to capture the audience by a strategic method called as “Geotargetting”. Here individuals are targeted within a specific location.  With the data gathered by LinkedIn from individual profiles, the Jobs for you console will deliver the most relevant opportunities based on your LinkedIn profile information.

LinkedIn users will be able to opt out from these options if they don’t want to participate in it. But who wouldn’t want an occasional interesting career opportunity to be displayed to them. However from a recruiting perspective it takes targeting passive candidates into active ones to a whole new dimension.

Referral Engine

LinkedIn went a step ahead in terms of their new product and brand development by launching “Referral Engine”, slated to be in beta mode until 2011. But the buzz is that it’s going to be the killer app specifically for “employee referrals”.

The intention behind this is to assists companies in hiring top talent from their employee’s referrals by involving more employees in making potential referrals, and thereby helping them make more quality referral closures.

With Referral Engine, any company posting a new job through LinkedIn will now make automatic job suggestions to potential employees who can be a good fit for that job. This thereby helps employees to “pre-screen talent” in their own network to make quality referral suggestions.

To promote this service, LinkedIn has planned to launch “Referral Engine”, as a free service to its “Recruiter” customers. They opine that, the more jobs posted by the company, the better this service will work in a viral mode.

More Information about LinkedIn’s new product Lines can be read on its Talent Advantage website.

 

 

Why performance of HR departments should be evaluated

It seems that no one can deny the importance of effective HR management.  Sure, there are some business managers who still think and work on the assumption that the supreme value for their company is money, investments, equipment and production facilities etc.

However the recent economic downturn has proved that companies which possessed the best human resources managed to survive, and even managed to conquer new potential markets in the form of attracting new customers, thus making us re-think on the fact that “Business is run by people, no matter how efficient and smart the IT solutions are”.

For this tactical reason, it is important for every organization to measure performance of its human resource department.  The problem is that HR or the personnel department does not earn money unlike other departments, and to the contrary it spends financial resources in order to hire, educate and retain the best of professionals in a strategic business area.

Human Resource departments believe in human resource investment, which has time and again proved to be one of the most effective long-term investment tools.

However not many HR departments can be effective in this and can be more of a bane than a boon for many companies. The reason being they misuse the company money for cheap and unproductive training programme.

Hence it makes us consider many factors to take into account when working with personnel. Thereby using a balanced scorecard system, it is possible for the management to evaluate the human resource performance and thereby align the HR goals with the strategic goals of the company, its mission and values.

Evaluation of HR performance is a must for any companies as it in turn contributes to improvement in effective “two- way communication” and proper feedback system, the system of education, training and coaching.

Proper HR policy even improves the organizational climate and employee satisfaction. Use of a balanced scorecard for HR performance is recommended for heads of human resource departments and top managers of big companies who want to optimize work of their enterprises and firms.

 

5 simple steps to create an Effective Online Resume

A resume is a very important tool highlighting your achievements, strengths and core areas of work in a detailed format. However not many people are so confident when it comes to creation of an Online resume, and are left fumbling for details.

Hence, we created a small write-up on how to effectively create an online resume databank. This will not only help in gaining maximum visibility, but also gets a higher stance of getting noticed by recruiters in job portals and professional networking sites.

Few Steps to effectively create an online resume to gain maximum visibility are

1. Selection of the platform: – Personal branding on the Web is about the Pull factor. The challenge lies when you pull them into your network, which you’ve built through forum participation, feedbacks and social networking. Platforms range from forums, blogs, websites, and social networking sites to the simple e-mail.
2. Create a positioning statement: – After selecting your platforms, try creating a positioning statement in your online resume. This not only helps in showcasing your unique personality to potential employers. It helps in engaging the recruiter as it is a unique way of branding yourself, which is what recruiters would prefer.
3. Enhance your resume with Goodies: – Multimedia goodies, this is the one of the advantages of an online resume creation. This increases the ability to enhance your online presence with recruiters, and allows your potential employers to see you in a more complete manner. Thereby allowing recruiters to connect to your resume, thereby making your profile more appealing. Video or audio testimonials from previous clients and coworkers are a very innovative idea that can be included, which can be linked to your YouTube channel or a Flickr page which support you activities when representing yourself to recruiters.
4. Integrate your resume with Leading Social Networks: – Now that your resume has started to take shape try linking your resume with your favorite social network profiles. Make sure you keep the resume fresh, professional and constantly updated.
5. Start Promoting Your New Resume: – Now that you’re online resume is created, start aggressively promoting it in multiple channels and modes like adding it to your paper resume, business cards, email signatures, social networks etc. The possibilities are endless. It’s about how smartly you brand yourself.

 

 

 

Small Changes in your Recruiting System can go a long way in succesful Candidate Engagement

Candidate engagement is increasing day by day. Staffing companies and organizations are ever increasingly creating a conducive stance wherein candidates can directly submit their resumes and even know the status of their resumes. The recruiters are going a step ahead wherein they get back to the candidate personally after they fill in their application or after giving the interview.

These sessions helps in solving a problem from scratch and brainstorm how an organization should look and act to a candidate. This stance helps to create the organization the leader in candidate engagement.

Candidate engagement however has a few obligations, which must be seen or taken care of by the organization, If it is to be succesful in it. They are

Setting expectations early :- Organizations after receiving a resume upload should begin turning on the auto-reply feature within the ATS. There is no reason why you shouldn’t turn this on today if you have this feature. I was surprised by how many people in the audience were not using it or were not aware of it.

Organization should set their expectations, and set a higher productive stance wherein every candidate submission is replied back via their ATS. The key however is to concentrate on the messaging of this auto-reply and how long the process will take.

Should all candidates be treated equally? – First off, I think an auto-reply should be sent to all candidates that submit an application. But after that should you feel compelled to treat everyone the same? In a perfect world, sure but our world is far from perfect. If you have limited labor resources, I’d recommend putting candidates in tiers. Candidates that don’t fit the job description should be sent a generic rejection email, which is quite easy to do in your ATS.

Candidates that you interview should always receive a personal call that they didn’t receive the job. And finalists should receive a conversation from a recruiter to gauge their interest in future positions in the company as they would still be good fits for the company in the near future.

Candidate engagement is not that difficult. There are a number of small things that you can do in order to improve the experience of the candidates that are coming through your recruitment marketing system every day. The key is doing it in a channelized manner than just doing it for the sake of it .