4 Ways to Improve Your Recruiting Leadership
Leaders are not created magically, but emerge over time from a continuous process of being challenged, meeting the challenge, reflecting on what was learned, and applying it to the next challenge.
The past few years have been challenging for the recruiting profession, that's for sure. And most of us have done a lot of reflecting on our circumstances and the future.
Being fully prepared for the next wave of the talent wars is going to require even greater leadership skill and organizational expertise.
Less Work, More Time? Try Differentiating Candidates and Applying Technology
Are all your open positions of the same value to your organization? Most of us don't really stop and think about this, but we all know that certain positions contribute more to the success of our organization than others. To treat all positions as equally valuable is probably impossible to do effectively.
Positions within organizations fall into one of four categories: administrative/maintenance, special services, professional/technical, or strategic/critical.
Defining Talent in 5 Steps
About once a year I get the feeling that we aren't making any progress in improving our approaches to acquiring and retaining talent. Perhaps part of this discouragement arises because neither recruiters nor managers have put much rigor into defining the quality of our employees.
We bandy about the term "talent," and yet we have no real definition of it.
Some Thanksgiving Thoughts for 2004
Recruiting has changed significantly in the past 3 years. Technology, an option or a novelty 3 years ago, is now the foundation of good recruiting practice. Virtually all major organizations have a recruiting web site and an applicant tracking system (ATS). Many are adding screening and assessment technologies and enhancing how they communicate with candidates and hiring managers. Chat rooms, blogs and social networks are all in use, but not yet common.
Fifteen Things You Can Do to Improve the Quality of Your Employment Function
1. Survey all hires within the first three months and ask them why they said YES. Identify statements, practices, and behaviors that were particularly attractive to them as candidates. Also probe into what could have been done to make your brand stronger and your organization more attractive.
2. Use customers as a source. They can refer candidates that might be 'in tune' with the way you think and work. Customers can be as good a source of referrals as employees.
Good Hiring Starts With A Good Job Profile
Most of the time, managers have trouble clearly explaining what kind of person they need to fill a position. They submit a requisition to the recruiter that contains generic skills and competencies that apply either to almost all good candidates or only to those with highly specific and narrow skills.
The typical phone call goes something like this:
"I want to open up a req for a process engineer," says the hiring manager.
"Okay," the recruiter replies.
The Uneasy Triumvirate: 5 Ways to Make it Work Better
There is an uneasy triumvirate in today's organizations: human resources professionals, recruiters and hiring managers. Managers complain that recruiters aren't responsive. I also hear human resources professionals complain they are not consulted and that recruiters often don't really understand the hiring manager's needs.
In some organizations, hiring managers simply bypass both and go directly to third party recruiters who are outside the firm.