The rapidly changing landscape of recruitment over the last two to three years thanks largely to the innovations in technology, has left a critical gap in the entire experience for both the Companies and the candidates. This is the new era, all of us are SMAC in the middle of it all…. SMAC stands for Social Media, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. With SMAC influencing our lives so much, how can recruitment and recruiters be far behind, it is essential to master the digital tools and of course a critical success factor too!
While the digital tools and social media have given us visibility and accessibility to talent like never before, I have often heard from candidates and hiring managers that the recruitment function has become very mechanical and impersonal! Asking myself a few questions from my own experience in this enriching profession as to what is being overlooked and how we can enrich the experience for all the parties –
Recruiting, is all about passion? With faceless searches and postings online, mastery in Boolean search, using control “F” to sift thru tons of resumes, working on multiple openings simultaneously without appreciating the nuance that exists with each client, and of course the scores of templates one has to fill in to keep the corporate mandarins happy. Recruiting isn’t a job, one must be passionate about the industry or domain or function to develop foresight and engage with the talent in a meaningful way.
Recruiter as a strategic adviser? Deep understanding of the company, the hiring manager’s expectations and the critical success factors for the role are always talked about but rarely practiced in real life. Building trust & respect with hiring managers through deep understanding of the business and market place would catapult the recruiter to a strategic adviser role!
The applicant is human? Most often a recruiter interaction with the candidate is focused on time slots available, salary, location and years of experience. Very rarely do recruiters these days’ focus on getting to know the candidates at a personal level. The resume of a candidate today gets forwarded on email to numerous folks within the company, recruiters don’t even mask the personal details of the candidate. An engineer once told me that when he was signing in at the security desk of a company he was invited to for a job interview, he noticed a couple of familiar names from his company – Candidates must be treated with dignity & respect.
Disruptive Recruiting! It is demonstrating deep insights into the products/services of the company and its closest competitors coupled with an ability to deliver top talent as potential candidates to the company. Knowing who the star performers of the closest competitors are and what drives them – nothing hurts a company more than flight of its top talent in a growing business.
A 360-degree relationship encompassing Candidate > Company > Hiring Manager > Digital Tools would go a long way in making recruiters successful. Oh! Yes, it makes life as a recruiter more interesting as well. The use case for social media and other digital tools gets even stronger if the recruiting professionals use them to track & nurture the candidates, stay ahead of the trends and build relationships!
In conclusion, one should adopt the best practices from the sales function to enrich recruitment. For instance, successful companies do not allow sales folks to pitch a product unless they have completed the product training, companies invest in sophisticated tools to track prospective customers, measure customer satisfaction and continuously aim to improve on these metrics. Why not treat the recruiters and job applicants in the same way?
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