Improving Recruitment Work

For recruiting the "best" talent, good is never good enough. Continuous improvement is mandatory to outsmart the competition. There are several key points to evaluate and redesign for greater in-house recruitment results. These include:

Industry Knowledge – If the recruiter fails to name the company’s competitors, is unable to describe the service offerings inside and out, or misunderstands competency models, then their performance will suffer. To close this sort of gap, the recruiter must, for example, research the industry, browse the company’s website, review all marketing collaterals, and talk to colleagues just about everything concerning the Company.

Recruitment Channel Management - Recruitment channel management entails tracking, analyzing, and forecasting application and candidate flows from all internal & external recruitment channels. It helps the HR department to evaluate channels, allocate their recruitment budget, and make more informed decisions. Therefore, recruiters should collect data on how candidates find out about open positions and look for correlations between the channels used and performance of new hires.

Candidate Sourcing – In-house recruiters tend to prefer and rely on screening over sourcing. After all, being reactive is much easier than being proactive. Nonetheless, recruiters need to overcome their barrier to cold calling and ask every candidate for a candidate referral.

Interview Skills – Hiring managers and even recruiters are often untrained to perform meaningful job interviews and as a result are frequently anxious about making a poor and expensive hiring mistake. During the interview, interviewers should try to get to know the person instead of just verifying information on the CV. Importantly, an interview is the recruiter’s chance to voice their major concerns and have them addressed by the candidate. In a talent short market, recruiters must unequivocally identify candidates that will deliver stellar performance and not ones that look good on paper. Thus, instead of looking for reasons to reject the candidate, try to find reasons why the candidate could be a good hire.

Candidate Assessment/Evaluation – More often than not, hiring managers and recruiters settle down for intuitive hiring decisions based on "gut" feeling and employment history. Surprisingly as well, references are not checked regularly in China and therefore may lead to hiring candidates for positions (or even higher) that s/he has already been fired at. Furthermore, a recruiter's reliance on the candidate's experience and having done it before can be ill-advised since it does not necessarily mean that the candidate knows how to do it right.

Report Design and Analysis – Since statutory reporting does not apply to soft HR, report design and analysis has been quite a sluggish and underdeveloped art. To start, HR pros need to determine:
• Which metrics help them the most to guide execution of the business strategy,
• Which parameters can be constituted as key performance indicators,
• Which items can ensure high quality of the recruitment process, and
• Which points will demonstrate the strengths of the company as an employer in the talent market.
Examples worth considering include:
• Percentage of candidates considered high performers after 3 months.
• Number of cold calls made, how many CVs were secured, and how many interviews were held per week.
• Diversity as a measure of candidate quality.
• Percentage of candidates that come from key competitors.

Company Culture Promotion – Company culture promotion starts by posting a recruitment advertisement and for hired candidates it never stops. In China, trying to learn about the company culture in an interview setting is sometimes just impossible. The recruiter may not be able to deliver a meaningful introduction about the company's services, clients, mission, and values either. It is vital then to take the time to prepare the recruiter fully and check their work and progress regularly to “keep them on their toes".

Team Work – The greatest inefficiency of the recruitment function is the lack of team work and closed down communication. What happens is that a recruiter keeps searching for a candidate even though the position has been either put on hold, cancelled, or a suitable candidate was already identified by the hiring manager but the recruiter was never informed (even though the HR Manager was). This sort of process is embarrassing, confusing, and highly inefficient. Making sure that everyone is abreast of the latest is the prerequisite for HR to look competent.