Article: What do CEOs expect from recruiters?

Recruitment

What do CEOs expect from recruiters?

In People Matters, Talent Acquisition League 2018 Sanjay Kaul, Managing Director, India & South Asia, Cisco Systems and Ramesh Iyer, Managing Director, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services discuss the impact of digitization and highlight their expectations from the recruiters. Here are a few highlights of the discussion.
What do CEOs expect from recruiters?

It is no news that ‘Digitization’ is impacting every facet of the business, from HR to finance to manufacturing. Considering this, the way in which the organizations are built and the way in which the talent is acquired has to change. Therefore the role of the recruiter has to change. And this requires everyone from recruiter to CEO, to change the way they look at talent. 

Embrace digitization and broaden your perspectives

In People Matters, Talent Acquisition League 2018, Sanjay Kaul, Managing Director, India & South Asia, Cisco Systems shares the example of a 14 year old kid Tanmay Bakshi who is a computer programmer and artificial intelligence expert and says that in the era where potential like Tanmay exists the old ways of recruitment are never going to work. By following traditional methods like judging a candidate by the number of years of experience he/she has, organizations will miss the chances of hiring talent like Tanmay. 

“If you are not spending two hours every day in studying where the world is going you will become irrelevant and obsolete in next six months and that includes me,” says Sanjay Kaul, Managing Director, India & South Asia, Cisco Systems. 

Hence, it is very important that organizations embrace the digitization and bring in these added solutions into the mix to enhance the possibility of hiring right. 

While embracing digitization is essential in today’s VUCA world, complete dependence on technology can impact the business negatively. 

Ramesh Iyer Managing Director, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services says, “Utilize technology but don’t become its slave. People have to continue to remain intelligent and relevant. And they cannot completely give away their gut feeling. At the end of the day every recruitment or business decision at the last hour it is the man deciding what is their gut feel.” 

When you think about talent, think about purpose not cost

Comparing the employees to customers, Ramesh Iyer Managing Director, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services stresses on the need of changing the way organizations look at their employees. He says, “If you start believing that every employee is as important and good as a customer is, your approach towards people will change substantially.” 

And this is where investing in the growth and development of employees plays a crucial role. Treating your employees as assets and ensuring they get revalued has to be the focus of businesses. This approach has to begin right from the primary step, i.e recruitment. The intent with which a recruiter or organization hires the employee has to be long term. Instead of worrying about the cost or the price of talent, managers must think about the purpose the talent will solve. The center has to shift from cost to purpose. 

“If you need somebody don’t worry about the cost, think about the purpose and not the price. If your focus will be on price, you will delay the recruitment, sacrifice the process and might end up hiring someone who would survive in the company only for short-term and thus the cost at the end of the day multiplies,” says Ramesh Iyer Managing Director, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services. 

Lead the recruitment process

While machine takes away the repetitive tasks of the recruiter like sourcing and scanning the CV, the recruiter’s job will now be to lead the change in hiring approach. They can now stop looking at hiring as a transactional job and work closely with the managers to understand their needs and then based on that lead the decision of hiring a talent not for a year for a specific job but for the future to solve a long-term purpose.   

Sanjay Kaul, Managing Director, India & South Asia, Cisco Systems says, “As a recruiter when you get a task to hire someone, spend time with the hiring manager and understand what he is trying to achieve. Ask them what they are looking for but don’t let them define how those talents should be like, you do that.” 

Sanjay shares how he once hired a CTO, who was extremely capable and ticked every box in the JD, but left the company in five months because it was a cultural mismatch.  

Thus the message is loud and clear, the CEOs expect the recruiters to be transparent, move away from the transactional approaches and hire talent with a long-term purpose in mind. Most importantly, they want the recruiters to lead the process of hiring. Recruiters should seek help from the hiring managers only to understand the business and talent needs but ultimately be the ones coming up with solutions taking full ownership and responsibility. 

Click here to watch the recorded session. 

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Topics: Recruitment, Talent Acquisition, #TAL2018

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