Effective recruitment process

Effective recruitment process

Recruitment is a challenging work, full of pressure… if you work as a recruiter you’ll know this far better than anyone else. Sales department keeps calling every day regarding their new hiring order, which is just placed last week, an urgent order to fill up 3 mechanics who quitted last week, so on and so on… it’s the matter of time, and time you don’t have it enough.

Besides, recruiters often ask “Am I doing good?”, How’d the managers tell about my recruitment works, will they tell me that I ain’t doing any good? Is there any complaints about my service, my deliverables …”. Your boss might ask and you might ask yourself how effective you’re doing with your recruitment or selection activities. If you’re an HR professional, this question being asked regularly and yearly, especially once you guys doing annual performance review.

Get back to the point, in order to measure how effective you’re working on recruitment job, there should be an understanding, mutual agreement in writing or verbally thought about what the expectations are, take into account the deadline of each assignment, how the staff turnover works … there suppose to be those criterias in the “expectation” scheme, this is just like setting an objective. Considering the final results, which is new and capable people you bring in onto the company workforce, considering the time you spent on each new recruits, the contribution they made after a year, the money you spent for news ads, or executive search service …. Always asking feedback from line managers regarding what you have done to help them to find out how you can make it better, faster and cheaper. Professional recruiters would see it this way: They’re selling stuff to sales department, marketing department … and all other departments within his company, with his great service, by providing the right people for the right job and within a reasonable time frame.

An effective recruitment process is there to ensure every party involved is happy, from the hiring manager to the final selected candidate, and even more importantly, it will help the organization achieve its business objectives. Basically, in order to achieve this making it an effective recruitment activitive, you’ll need: A recruitment process in place, make sure everyone follow strictly on the process, no shortcuts …, review and evaluate the process regularly, edit & adjust the process … and so on.

Job ads writing

A perfect job ad will sell, winning you best candidates with least effort. A loosing job ad is just like a messy sales pitch, pushing customers to your competitors, a completely waste of time and money. Look at a scenario: A jobseeker looking at various job ads for the same position he or she’s looking for, may react different ways to those ads. Some would take his interest, some totally being ignored, luckily he would interest in some ads and take action by applying for the job. Spending the same amount of ad expense, some job ads would generate more responses from the others, some ads may result in a big zero. You know it, everybody who pays for the ads know it. So, let’s make the ad worth every single penny you spent for expensive ad space nowaday.

You will need to prepare a job ad whenever you would like to publicize a manpower need. Writing a job ad is not so tough, writing a job ad that sells is a totally different thing, it’s not just rough scope of work which includes responsibilities, reporting lines, geographical working areas, and requirements but also a description in details of kind of “what’s in it for me?” stuff. Let’s take this as an example: two companies offer 2 same position, same work level, same salary. But because of business nature of each corporation might be different, each company has its own strategy applying on each position. Small firm gets it hard to compete with large corporations in attracting capable calibrates. The point comes into how small firm can get the people that best suits its business. What do you have to offer to attract that candidate? Beside cash income, what other non-cash benefit you propose. Spend some time conducting a market research to find out what kind of benefit other companies (in the same range with yours ie. Competitors, location, …) are offering to candidates. At the end of the day, writing a job ad just like doing the same thing for sales ad, that’s it. Each company comes up with their own strategy, but it’s best to have a strategy. Normally, an initial selling process would include the following stages, aiming at pooling the potential candidates, some hiring managers put it upfront all what to give, some takes it step by step. Think about what you have to give, what’s the benefit for the buyers, how to get the attention of your potential buyers in the first place. How to inspire their interests, how you ignite their desires to join your team and finally how you encourage them to take action by sending you their job application. You don’t have to “over-sell” it or it may generate a backfire.

Once the job ad completed, think about how to spread it around, where you think you might get the targeted pool of candidates. Sources of candidate might vary, from newspaper to headhunters, from internal notice board to job boards online such as jobacancies, each hiring gate has pros and cons, depending on what type of position you are recruiting and some other factors such as budget, confidentialities … you decide how glorious your campaign could be.
Give it a try today to wrap up a job ad that sells! You can grab the below template to start off:

* Position title: The job title goes here, a specific title coming your organization chart
* Opening date and close date: Give the time when this recruitment campaign will end
* Job description: List all tasks which you think the candidate will take on
* Requirements: Education level, personality, skill set that describe an ideal candidate for the job
* Compensation and benefit: What you will propose to your candidate, this should describe both cash and non-cash benefits
* Contact: The conclusion lists contact details, who to call, email, website…