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.

 

 

Recruiting Top Talent to your Organization – Make sure that you have a Sourcing Checklist ready:-

Recruiting as people say is an art than a job. Many recruiters still underperform due to improper ineptitude errors. This not only causes improbable mistakes in the recruiting process, but also maximizes the Organizations hiring metric capability.

Hence to succeed in Recruiting, Any organization should make sure that they have a Sourcing Checklist ready. This not only helps them source top talent easily, but also handle complex recruiting procedures.

Using a checklist in recruitment search, results in great success. The reason being the recruiter works upon the competency skill map ratio as per the checklist, which can help the organization to get top-notch successful placement ratio.

Top Strategies to be included in a Successful recruiting Checklist:-

1. Use Key metric tools to stay on top of all recruiting assignments and make sure that you keep the ATS (Applicant tracking system) up-to-date.
2. Define top performance indicators, by asking the hiring team to define their Work Success quotient, the person needs to handle.
3. Create an Employee Value proposition statement as to why would an employee want this job.
4. Prepare a channelized sourcing channel plan, which covers all channels of recruiting from social media, Blog sites, Career sites, groups, and even references. This helps in getting the best talent from multiple sources.
5. From this build your recruiting pipeline of prospects for the future as well as for the current projects.
6. Track the Objective metric of the Candidate as to the Hiring Objective of the department, and only when they match go ahead with the hiring process.
7. If you feel the candidate is potential enough recruit, negotiate, and close the offer.

 

Employee Referral Programme- The pros and the cons

Talent retention and acquisition is increasingly becoming popular in organizations. Companies to ensure that the best talent acquisition happens insist on using employee referral programme to poach the best talent available. However many internal employees are of just one perception, does it always really work.

However the trend happening in companies is that employee referrals are preferred for only experienced roles and hire on an average ten top potential referrals for every hundred interviewed for multiple reasons. So we can infer that referral hiring is an average medium to bring in top quality talent, as compared to job board search and social recruiting via the ATS (Applicant tracking), which continue to be the hot pick.

We have a perception that external hiring always holds good, as they produce good results in terms of hiring, but recruitment analysts opine that social media hires or job board recruiting is better when it comes to an efficient external hiring policy. It all comes down to not just hiring through a referral programme, but making sure that the “Referral programme” becomes a “Best Practice” and should focus on making the referral program more visible among remote positions.

Employee referral in certain situations breeds ego – slates between present employees and the new employees, as they presume that project-management roles will be taken over by the new hires. Hence Organizations are a bit apprehensive when it comes to Employee- referral programme.

Lastly but not the least, If you want a successful employee referral program, accept responsibility for managing the performance of the program. Never try to act in influencing factors and do what works best as the organizational climate varies from company to company. It has also been proved that a well-managed employee referral program can accomplish higher employee productivity and greater organizational profits. It’s all about implementing it and accomplishing it successfully.

 

 

 

Is Mobile recruiting going to be the Future in Recruiting Space?

Recruiting is growing at a tremendous pace. What job board and referral search activity was before is now being aggressively replaced by Social Media Recruitment. Industry Experts predict that the next vertical to be aggressively placated in recruiting in the coming days is Mobile Recruiting.

Recruitment experts say that The Mobile is becoming an important tool in recruitment with each passing day. With users becoming tech-savvy at an increasing pace, Recruiting Organizations are trying to segment and leverage the usage of mobile space as a niche recruitment channel. However a mobile recruitment strategy should outline the following objectives if it’s to outlive its predecessors.

1. Use Promotional messages as a Premium Recruiting Channel: – SMS or short messaging service, WAP, Server messages should be used as a recruiting channel by recruiters to attract talent. The reason being Users are more accessible in their mobile than online networks.
2. Use Mobile as a Candidate Sourcing Channel: – With GPRS, Internet as an open source tools on the Mobile. Recruiters can now provide real-time job updates and thereby source qualified candidates into their CRM. This helps them to grow their recruitment database and thereby close more candidates as compared to other channels. Phone applications enabled in 3-G phones are the best tool for a successful mobile recruitment strategy.
3. Enable RSS updates in your Mobile for Live Job updates: – Recruiters can go a step ahead to enable RSS (Syndication updates of New Job openings) to attract top quality candidates via mobile. The reason being Phones are becoming more impressive in the browsers to view web pages and receive spontaneous updates.

Mobile Recruiting is a must to include in your recruiting strategy as the future of recruiting is going mobile. With Social media supporting Mobile, We can say that the future of recruiting is going to witness a dramatic change in terms of recruiting efforts.

 

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.

 

 

New Features in LinkedIn Company Pages Adds Visual Excitement

LinkedIn has launched a Products and services tab, which is a new feature being launched by them for all companies. The Products and features tab enhances the layout flexibility of profiles. This makes the interaction more visual and encourages a broader use for the people in the company page.

Company profile on LinkedIn allows us to use the products and the services channel to highlight the kinds of projects and products that new hires will be working on. This thereby helps us to connect it to the project and the job opening posted in the company profile. This not only helps in giving a strong company presentation but also adds a higher visual excitement to the end user.

It’s even more critical that the message be as authentic and honest as possible, since LinkedIn members can post reviews and recommendations.

It’s a strategic move by LinkedIn, to show the companies in the best possible authentic manner as users can post reviews and recommendations in it. This helps in recruiting, marketing and sales a lot as it highlights a lot about the company’s technology, applications, services, product portfolio to the best possible extent.

This helps us in understanding, what it is the company is all about. Because when LinkedIn began allowing members to follow specific companies, close to one million companies are now being followed by more than 30 million users. Now with the launch of the rebranded Company Pages, LinkedIn intends to remain the dominant business-oriented online professional network in the planet.

LinkedIn beyond a doubt has established its identity as a career-focused site. Social media surveys, found that among college students 75 percent use LinkedIn predominantly for career purposes, whereas 76 percent use Facebook purely for social purposes.

 

 

Job Board Recruiting vs. Social Media Recruiting

Social media recruiting is gaining a brisk momentum. It’s not just in one channel but in multiple channels as the technology is freely available for everyone to actively get involved.

It has become a norm nowadays, that recruiting via social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter etc are picking up at an aggressive pace.

Companies are quickly coming around to it, as the candidates are already there and recruitment agencies are slowly implementing the fact that they need to be using the channel, apart from traditional job board search.

The question however, everybody has in mind is that, do job board companies really want social media recruiting to happen or is it becoming a threat they have to live with.There are some job board sites that have embraced social media big time and are genuinely using it effectively, this is for the reason that they have taken the time to understand the channels and how they are to be used for their benefits.

But, I believe that the majority still doesn’t understand it and pray that social media dies tomorrow or soon, which is not going to be the scenario.

There are two primary objectives of a job board – to get jobs placed on its board and candidates visiting the board to apply for the jobs. So why wouldn’t they embrace social media to help them? Why are so many still not doing anything social at all?

When it comes to objectives, Job boards has 2 main objectives, that’s either

1. Get jobs placed on its board.
2. Inducing Candidates visiting the Job board to apply for the jobs.

However, the fact remains that a good number of job board portals are out there blasting jobs on social media sites at random, thereby killing its effectiveness for job seekers. This not only damages their online brand reputation but also kills the job search interest levels among potential job seekers.

Job Boards are not active in ‘Candidate engagement’; hence they lose out on candidate retention, whereas social media recruiting is about candidate engagement and retention.

 

How 2010 changed the scope of Recruiting

Recruiting space is becoming aggressive day by day. The changes are so dynamic that what was good yesterday may not be so today. Recruiters say that technological boom is the biggest contributor for this trend. Technology in recruiting has shaped up in different mediums like Social media recruiting, Online job search, Blogging, HR and even e- mail recruiting.

ATS (Applicant tracking system), is one such software which has streamlined the recruiting process even further. Mergers, Acquisitions and takeover segment in recruiting segment also saw some up new tidings and trends like

• Monster Buying Out Yahoo Jobs
• Kenexa Acquiring Salary.com
• ATS being the new frontrunner for staffing solutions

Recruiting related domains although have changed hands, but when you add in the major job seeker, HR, and salary transactions, you can see that something’s are still the same. This seems to be a trend beyond coincidence as we have precise insight into the causes.

But the real reasons why the Internet Recruiting has changed so much is that is

1. The jobs and economy experienced dramatic shifts prior to 2010. This along with increasing usage of Internet changed the monetization equations and metrics around job search and online recruiting.
2. Easy, immediate distribution of content in the online segment leveled the playing field. When every individual is a publisher, the brand becomes more important which makes it easy to establish a big brand.
3. Professional networking, job referrals had been an important source of job placement, However Social media drove that process online, thereby creating new opportunities and expectations for the future of online job search.
4. Mobiles and consumer devices furthered the penetration of the Internet as the primary vehicle for job search thereby making online job search even more important and thereby changing the scope of recruiting and made Internet Recruiting a reality.

 

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.