Popular Sources of Recruitment

Recruitment is a challenging task, and many people are left in the lurch when it comes to finding new sources of finding potential candidates. However in my point of view, there are ample sources of recruitment sources available, which can be used by the recruiter to select the best candidate.

The most popular sources of recruitment are :-

1. Social Media Recruitment
2. Incentive based referral program
3. Community recruitment
4. College recruitment/placement
5. Talent sourcing in the crowd

• Social Media Recruitment :- One of the most popular sources of recruitment currently. It has grown tremendously because of its ease of use, multiple sourcing channels and low cost of usage. Recruiters now are able to double up as online reputation mangers and get the best talent for the hiring manager or the company, which they are working for.Social media also helps in getting the best talent for the company as we can get to know the likes, strenghts and any other special characteristic possessed by the individual.

• Incentive based referral programme :- This is one of the frequently used sources of recruitment, wherein Organizations ask current employees to recommend skilled and competent employees within their network to expand their potential pool of candidates.If the candidate is duly selected the person referring him duly receives a small percentage of payout from the organization.

• Community recruitment :- Many organizations follow community recruitment programs, wherein they hire people from within the community they are catering to. It is a way of maintaining corporate social responsibility. It also has the ability to build a superior workforce, with great loyalty and low turnover, at a reduced cost.

• College recruitment/placement :- College recruiting includes internship or rotational programs to give students a taste of real work as well as a way to evaluate and assess students for potential recruitment as regular employees. There are many other elements that could be added to this list, but the idea is not to create a list of everything. It is to show , what happens if all of these elements are combined to create a bulletproof, flexible, and expandable ability plan to find good talent.

• Talent sourcing in the crowd :- Very much similar to employee referral programme, but works in a broader group of network to recommend and select candidates with the right criteria. Common examples are Facebook pages, Groups and twitter etc, which promises to be a rich source of candidate selection in a targeted audience.

 

 

“New Age Recruitment Skills”

1. Be fast in spotting rare talent: – New age recruiters should be highly aggressive in spotting talents in an individual. They should simultaneously be highly skilled in using the internet and searching for candidates on multiple social networks, job portals and even blogs. Today’srecruitment trend depends a lot around what’s happening in the economy and the industry to which they are catering. They not only have to build a large network base which helps them in getting the right talent, they have to simultaneously ensure that they add value to the company through the right hire and thereby gain credibility in the market.
2. Relationship and Rapport Building Skills: – Today’s Recruiters have a knack of building relationships and rapports, with complete strangers over the phone itself. This shows their convincing skills, and ease of handling the situation. People possessing these skills are good at analyzing who are the best performers. They know how to co-ordinate with them, get the information from them, which is a required skill for today’s recruiter.
3. Ease of Technology usability: – Today’s recruiters have the competitive advantage of ease of technology use. From Social, Professional networking to e-mail to job portals to Blogs toApplicant tracking systems and recruitment websites, Online Technology has acquired the recruitment space. Successful recruiters always make it a habit to be constantly updated on trends happening around Internet to successfully implement them in their work, and thereby make it more streamlined.
4. They don’t just develop Rapport with the candidates but make sure that they close the hire: – Today a recruiter sees that not only does he develop a good rapport with a candidate, but he makes sure that they close the candidate for a job of his liking. They know how to turn objections and turn negatives into positives and offer solutions, work out compromises, negotiate, and in the end, make the hire happen successfully.

 

Importance of Strategic Recruiting

Recruiters today have a common problem of finding an adequate pool of talent. Despite job portals, social networking and other recruitment sites, the problem lies in finding and placing the right candidate. The situation turns to either less qualified people applying for the job or talented people applying for the job but with a higher expectation in the compensation package. This has caused a stance wherein firms are becoming a bit apprehensive about selecting the right candidate for the job and in turn is causing the firms negative reputation about not having a proper hiring policy among potential job seekers.

What makes Strategic Recruiting a Success?

Strategic recruiting is the norm of the day, as it forms a pipeline to schedule the candidates as and when the company needs a new inflow of talent. It helps both in short term as well as the long termrecruiting strategy of the organization as it helps in streamlining the activities completely. This helps in higher operational delivery to the organization

Strategic recruiting helps us in determining the best talent selection for the organization. The reason being strategic recruiting is intertwined with multiple sub sect recruiting components which will help us in getting the best people interested, who are capable of handling the job. As the metrics are directly interlinked with the recruiting process, they ensure a higher occupational match between the candidate and the organization.

Organizations Strategic recruiting processes differs, but the baseline remains the same, that is getting the best talent at the highest productivity and properly retaining him. This forms the right approach for every organization.

Successful components in a Strategic Hiring process are

1. Identifying and prioritizing the jobs
2. Candidate targeting and placement conversion ratio
3. Recruitment sources
4. Trained recruitment process
5. Candidate evaluation and hiring.

 

Retention of Talent in Organizations

The current personnel skills shortage is a major business constraint which is hampering organizational growth around the world. Although hiring has gone big time, post recession with the signs of economy recovering, the challenge now lies in ensuring and retaining a sustainable talent pool of personnel for companies today.

Organizations say that, position in top and middle management slots nearly 45 % of them become vacant, as the challenge lies in finding the right hire. Although organizations are aware of the fact they cannot do much as it’s an ever persisting problem.

Organizations acknowledge that the talent shortage is an issue that they can overcome by retaining the person successfully by adopting a more sustainable approach to his work space issues, and look outside traditional hiring methods which eventually are successful in a timely and cost effective manner.

Internal job changes, job rotation and job role changes creates a lot of challenging situations which help in high retention of an employee as the people already familiar with the company and its business objectives. The job role function differs which can be made accurate by a person based on his.

• Knowledge
• Skills
• Values and mindset
• Personality and intelligence, (Emotional Competency).

How to make sure that you retend the best talent for your company and simultaneously ensure Company expectations

Every candidate will be having his own choices, before joining any organization. The key lies in forming the right association between the culture of the company and the frequency of the candidate. If frequency is lacking in either side, it can lead to employee disengagement from the work what e is doing. Human resource departments should take a strong stance to ensure that employee and organizational productivity go hand in hand. This can only be ensured when candidate is known of the expectations; the company has towards him, which makes him clear on his career path.

Retention of a talented employee is a herculean challenge, and many companies are insisting on Open-door communicational policies and flat organizational cultures, with lesser hierarchical levels. This ensures in bringing about a uniform consistency in the individual.

Human resource personnel’s have now taken several initiatives to promote employee branding, talent management, learning phase execution which in turn is helping the employee to deliver a lot in terms of his qualitative output.

Hr personnel’s have now started using several training and motivational seminars, which helps to enhance in

• Building and leveraging an employee’s talent.
• Easy Information and communicational exchange between employees and the management.
• Using technology as a partner to engage and get the best prospective employee through Social networking channels and to gain a positive insight from the people.

Measure your Quality of Hire

Quality of hire is directly interlinked to the measure of how well a new person meets the performance needs of the job. The performance management process of the job and the candidate involvement is very crucial here.

When should you measure quality of hire?

Try measuring your quality of hire in 3 interval stages mainly

• Before
• During
• After

Based upon this we can know, whether our hiring decisions were accurate or not and is comparable to measuring the hiring quality as per the industry standards. Compare a candidate’s past accomplishments to what needs to be done on the job across a rating factor scale.

Some of the factors include technical competency, emotional intelligence, and motivation to do the required work. The evaluation is based on asking candidates to provide detailed examples of accomplishments that best relate to the actual performance objectives of that position.

This performance based approach to measure and control quality of hire is possible as it meets a lot of organizational key needs. The biggest advantage is, that it’s not that difficult to implement and can be easily tracked from a process control and feedback standpoint.

So plan out your hiring objectives and go for it.

Hiring Process- Make sure that your hiring metrics are above excellence

Hiring forms an integral part of every organization. But what organizations miss upon the subtle point is that of the quality and the excellence of the candidate. Hiring Metrics depends from vertical to vertical, but the point that should not be missed upon is the quality of hiring’s happening. I consider a few given metrics of mine very effective for hiring and staffing the best candidate, irrespective of any given vertical.

1. Determine your hiring process and make due changes: – Hiring processes and people involvement differ from company to company. But make sure that hiring activities are spruced to the best level possible by implementing benchmarks. This can help you in positioning your hiring standpoints to the optimum.
2. Break the recruiting activities into multiple levels: – Start by breaking or sub grouping the recruiting and staffing activities into multiple levels. This helps you to figure and channelize on things, which are working and which are not. This helps to allocate your budget correctly on multiple candidate sourcing channels.Staffing activities done online, job portal selection will work for some stances, whereas telephonic recruiting might work for some. Take due care that budget allocation always means higher ROI for the company.
3. Candidate Hiring Accuracy= Hiring accuracy of a candidate can be determined after he joins the job and starts performing on it. This helps us to gauge his knowledge levels and output productivity levels. This not only helps us in predicting the output of a person but also in the hiring decision undertaken by the company.

Channelizing LinkedIn’s Potential.

Yesterday, we were talking about how to potentialize on the power of LinkedIn groups. Today I want to take the discussion ahead on how to channelize your LinkedIn account’s potential to its fullest.

You can add a few points mentioned below in your LinkedIn to make your job search activity more effective.

1. Update your profile completely: – Take care to update your profile completely, and include complete educational details, past and present employers, professional recognitions, awards and the keywords related to your job and activities. Include recommendations from people who are known to you. Do share your complete contact details so that the employer can easily contact you.
2. Network Building: -Try adding people who could hire you, or even help you to refer a job. Your networking list must be strong enough to showcase your profile on the top, so that they can be easily listed on the top searches, which helps recruiters to easily find you, when they are looking for potential candidate hiring.
3. Interview preparation using LinkedIn: – LinkedIn helps you to research on people and companies, who will be interviewing you beforehand. This helps us to prepare for the job by speaking and networking with people on the same job roles and thereby prepare ourselves for the interview at ease.
4. Joining and Participating in LinkedIn Groups: – Joining and participating in LinkedIn groups as discussed before will help recruiters identify you easily. This helps in building a larger contact base of like minded individuals from your domain.
5. Job Search options: – LinkedIn’s job board function helps us in directly applying or mail the hiring manager. LinkedIn even helps us to write to companies, recruiters based on job postings we like, with our complete list of details.
6. Follow and Identify Companies: – LinkedIn allows us to follow and identify companies. This option can be done from industry, geography to better expand you network. Through this option we can come to know how many hiring’s and recruiting activities have been taking place in the company recently.
7. Create and promote your blogs / articles /webinars/ other social media networks like Slideshare etc optimizing them on LinkedIn.
8. Last but not the least, update your profile regularly, this helps in getting better exposure, as your profile update will be visible to all the people in your network. Include Social Media Links on your profile, this helps recruiter to analyze that you are a media-savvy person. Include your LinkedIn profile link in all your e-mail correspondences, to better grow your network.

How to channelize your Corporate Website into a Recruitment Portal

Organizations today are primarily concerned about making their website a brand identity to the economy they operate from. Many opine it reflects to people and the society, what the company is all about and to whom is it catering to. This has created a buzz in Organizations, which are insisting on creating a higher retention and awareness to people, when they visit their websites.

Web 2.0 experts say that “The base point for any organization when it is planning to attract new personnel should be its own corporate website and the blog. This showcases the brand value of the organization as every employee is actively involved in it”.

Organizations are tailor making their websites into micro sites, so that the recruitment details can be easily distinguished by a potential employee. With the corporate website branding segment growing aggressively in today’s context, it is all about “Targeting the Right Communication to the right audience.

Corporate websites should try to reflect the philosophy and the work culture of an organization. The intention behind it is to motivate potential employees, and be able to quickly identify what kind of job, information, and association they are looking for. This helps in getting the right candidate information at the right time, thereby providing the required association between the person and the company.

Corporate websites also serve a niche purpose of pre-screening the candidates before itself, when he applies to the job. This helps the recruiter in selecting only the best talent for the company, which in turn helps in higher cost effectiveness to the company.

I-9 Audit= Is your company ready for it

Today recruitment process is growing at an ever increasing pace rapidly fuelled by Globalization. This in turn has turned the whole world into a massive talent pool. Location is not a problem anymore and people are found working around the clock in various geographies.

LinkedIn has become a useful recruitment tool for recruiting the right candidate as it helps in presenting our profile to the right audience. It even helps us grow our professional network and in easy information exchange in groups. It acts as an online database in knowing the profile of the companies and people associated with it beforehand.

After successful recruitment processes and induction of an employee is done, due care should be taken up in filling up of the I-9 form. The I 9 form verifies the identity and employment approval status of the employee, which is becoming an integral part of the federal immigration regulatory process.

The I-9 form process has become a crucial component in today’s organizations, and recruiters are helping their organizations in the audit process, which is periodically conducted by the Immigration and customs department, which compels them to surrender their I-9 forms to the government.

Human Resource department in Organizations, who want to keep themselves free from unwanted I-9 audit troubles, can use the following suggestions.

1. Making sure that new employee irrespective of their work authorization status completes Section 1 of the I-9 form fully and leaves no details unfurnished. If found incomplete later, The employee has to pay the fine
2. Make sure that the employee joining has either an employee authorization document (List A) or an Identification document (List B) or an employee authorization document (List C) in the section 2 of the form.
3. Keep the I-9 forms separate from employee record files, as they can be demanded any time for Inspection.
4. Create a reminder for employees working temporarily to update their I-forms periodically.
5. Do not violate the antidiscrimination provisions of the law by treating employees who may look or sound foreign to you.
6. Businesses/Hr departments should hand out “Handbooks” to employees which outlines the various rules and regulations pertaining to that state relating to employment related immigration laws.
7. Hire a legal representative, who has prior experience in I-9 laws and procedures and can help organizations in reviewing all the I-forms periodically.
8. Last, but not the least the recruitment process doesn’t end, when the new employee signs a contract, It extends to the retention phase of the employee. Properly Filled I-9 forms form a successful retention strategy in many organizations.