Recruiters today, have a steep challenge in keeping pace with talent footprints, social media capabilities and creative networking (aka attention seeking!). Here’s a glimpse of how the world of new age hiring looks through the lens of data,  according to a 2018 Talentnow.com survey.

• 73 percent of the employers are struggling to find relevant candidates.
• 86 percent of the most qualified candidates are not actively seeking a job.
• The best candidates are off the market within 10 days!

With such demanding statistics, can a company’s recruitment process enables the recruiter’s success? Can the probability of the role being filled be increased through enhancements to the process and ensuring that it is an efficient system? And, most importantly, how can a recruiter apply strategy to their day to day operations?

As employers, does your recruitment process answer these questions?

• Are you looking for a unicorn? With growing role complexities, it is not unnatural for a business manager to submit a job description that requires Spiderman, Superman, and Hulk to be found in the same individual. For example, a research head who has experience in primary and secondary research, an expert in statistical tools, panel management, M&A experience, qualified coach or trainer, certified in PMP and is willing to travel 30 percent of the year. Does this person exist? Maybe somewhere! But, do you want to spend months looking for that needle in a haystack and what odds are you willing to bet on this unicorn successfully interviewing and onboarding with you?

• Do your recruiter and business manager meet eye-to-eye? Planning a recruiting strategy is an important first step. Before jumping into job portals, the smarter approach is for the recruiter and manager to mutually agree on a set of skills/competencies that are i) must-haves, ii) good to have and iii) trainable. This helps the recruiter broaden the diversity of search for candidates, encourages everyone in the process to be open-minded and displays the maturity of one’s recruitment process. This can be taken a step further by agreeing to have bi-weekly meetings to calibrate any hits and misses during the early search process so that the recruiter can sharpen his/her tools.

• Are you looking for the best candidate or the right one? The joy of finding that distant, shining diamond in the rough is un-parallel but equally heartbreaking is losing one! Any recruitment process should help present diverse and unique candidates who have different capabilities, expertise, and challenges so that an interviewer can try to analyze how different candidates would fit into the context of the organization. This can be from the perspective of the role, the potential team members, or even the company culture. Thinking beyond one’s role can help you find the right candidate who displays motivation, connects with company values and drives the boundaries of the role versus the best candidate who may start losing steam in the long run.

• Does your candidate really know you? LinkedIn is no longer the one-stop shop for candidates – they are looking through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Glassdoor and even Snap Chat! Corporate Communication teams today run the tall task of managing the content and brand in different social media handles to both highlight uniqueness yet maintain synergies across all these organizational facades. Why is this important? Social media should spend time displaying your company values given they are the only window for a candidate to peek into before they step into the doors of your workplace. Does your content speak of thoughtful CSR stories, recognize the efforts of employees, celebrate diversity through festivals, or discuss business challenges?

• Is someone counting the red flags? The search is over! You have found Ms. Right, she sweeps you off your feet and all hands are now on deck to perfect the wooing process, before onboarding her. The tete-a-tete begins, you start understanding each other better, you are communicating frequently and all the boxes are nearly ticked. Everything seems perfect, except that, it’s not! At the back-end, your recruiter has described some strange conversations, the candidate has been making unreasonable demands, every interaction ends with questions rather than answers. However hard it seems, it is important for both the recruiter and manager to count any red flags throughout the recruitment process because no candidate is worth your anxiety and unproductive energy.   

• Do you let data speak to you? HR is probably the one team that has the largest data pertaining to employees, but often they seem to get lost in it, taking little advantage of all that information being heaped on them every minute. A good recruitment process is also a measurable one. Recruitment pipeline, time to fill, conversion ratios are operational metrics but there is a different kind that can help the recruitment strategy. Example: Based on engagement data, is there a past trend of engaged employees from a certain set of companies versus which companies do we often lost them to? Have you seen success with specific recruitment channels (aka campus, referrals, etc.) for specific teams? Do candidates join other companies due to more competitive medical or loan benefits?

Recruitment teams are the eyes and ears of the HR team. Given that their role is fast-paced, real-time and measurable, they are consistently being fed industry information that if passed on to other teams like compensation & benefits, talent management and training teams can provide a solid foundation for the company’s HR team to be up-to-date, proactive and progressive compared to their competitors.