#Hiring102: Building Effective Teams Is an Art
“Elementary, my dear Watson.”
Time and again, recruitment gurus have stressed the need to have a hiring process that is inclusive, unbiased, and focused on ensuring a potential candidate fits right into the company’s culture.
But how do you measure the effectiveness of a process like this? Well, two factors determine its success or failure: One is a new hire’s progress at a company, while the other is the company’s retention rate.
To be more elementary about it, recruitment is all about finding good talent and building good teams.
A company’s growth relies heavily on its employees. Thus, having a strong recruitment process is a must. Though access to the best technology is not a limitation anymore, navigating your way around competing companies and changing candidate demands requires some necessary tweaks to your strategy. The journey of an applicant to hire consists of several critical stages, including awareness, application, assessment, analysis, and acquisition.
Awareness: Creating the Right Channels for Recruitment Marketing
Most modern recruiters follow the mantra mentioned above, but sometimes attracting the best hires depends heavily on getting the awareness stage right. This stage is key to ensuring that candidates who are interested in possibly applying for your jobs learn enough about your company and its culture to decide to click “submit” on an application.
How do you create awareness? Start by exploring the media channels your candidates use most, and then publish your job openings where they matter the most, e.g., niche job boards, social media networks, professional networks, mobile applications, online communities, and passive talent pools, among others.
Application Process: Building a Diverse and Inclusive Talent Pipeline
Switch to an applicant tracking software (ATS) that allows you to manage multiple job postings from a single interface. Make sure to set up web forms across job boards and aggregators so candidates can find your jobs, apply to your jobs, or even just send a query.
Recruiters must also utilize a centralized vendor portal where third-party recruitment agencies and vendors can contribute candidate profiles to certain job openings. This creates a talent ecosystem where the right candidates find the right jobs, which is ultimately a win-win for all stakeholders.
Analysis: Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)
A hiring process that aces CRM is a definite win in today’s market. Recruiters must ensure that candidates are kept engaged and informed throughout the interview process. Recruiters must be able to interact with candidates directly on their social profiles and schedule automated emails to engage them and continuously communicate valuable information about the process — whether or not the candidate is still a prospect.
Assess: Evaluate Both Skills and Personality
Experts from the recruitment industry have insisted that modern recruiters should evolve into “skill hunters” rather than remain dependent on job boards, but is that enough? Long-term employee retention can be guaranteed only when a candidate aligns with the company’s vision and can clearly identify a path for career growth within the organization. The answer, then, is that an analysis limited to only skill sets is not enough.
Acquisition: Provide Value, Not Just Money
When taking on a new job, candidates expect more from a company. They expect more from their recruiters as well. Recruiters must dedicate time to researching a company’s work atmosphere, employee benefits, ongoing education, provision for parallel work, study opportunities, and travel potential.
Sure, it takes time to adapt to the constantly changing talent needs and the influence of technology on the hiring process, but if your strategy is future-focused and your fundamentals are on point, the right candidates will make their way to you.
Recruiting is hard and involves mastering the art of placing the right candidates with the right companies. You know what makes the whole process worthwhile? The satisfaction of building a great team.
This is the second of three posts in a special series from Zoho focusing on hiring lessons that are essential for every recruiter. In the first post, we broke down the basics of effective recruitment. Stay tuned for our third post, which will elaborate on the secret ingredient of recruitment. We also have a huge announcement coming up, and we would love to keep you notified. Learn more.
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