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June 12 A beautiful Story for all of you. Must ReadA woman came out of her house and saw 3 old men with long white beards sitting in her front yard. She did not recognize them. She said "I don't think I know you, but you must be hungry. Please come in and have something to eat." "Is the man of the house home?", they asked. "No", she replied. "He's out." "Then we cannot come in", they replied. In the evening when her husband came home, she told him what had happened. "Go tell them I am home and invite them in!" The woman went out and invited the men in" "We do not go into a House together," they replied. "Why is that?" she asked. One of the old men explained: "His name is Wealth," he said pointing to one of his friends, and said pointing to another one, "He is Success, and I am Love." Then he added, "Now go in and discuss with your husband which one of us you want in your home." The woman went in and told her husband what was said. Her husband was overjoyed. "How nice!!", he said. "Since that is the case, let us invite Wealth. Let him come and fill our home with wealth!" His wife disagreed. "My dear, why don't we invite Success?" Their daughter-in- law was listening from the other corner of the house. She jumped in with her own suggestion: "Would it not be better to invite Love? Our home will then be filled with love!" "Let us heed our daughter-in- law's advice," said the husband to his wife. "Go out and invite Love to be our guest." The woman went out and asked the 3 old men, "Which one of you is Love? Please come in and be our guest." Love got up and started walking toward the house. The other 2 also got up and followed him. Surprised, the lady asked Wealth and Success: "I only invited Love, Why are you coming in?" The old men replied together: "If you had invited Wealth or Success, the other two of us would've stayed out, but since you invited Love, wherever He goes, we go with him. Wherever there is Love, there is also Wealth and Success!!!!! !" June 07 12 Elements of Recruitment Strategy1. What are your primary goals? (Why hire?) The first element of recruiting strategy is to determine "why" you are hiring outside people. First, you must determine your firm's business goals and then what recruiting can do to contribute to each of them. Some of the more common business reasons for hiring include: • Replacements for turnover • Current or future business expansion • Upsizing the caliber of talent because top talent has become available • Limiting the talent available in the market in order to hurt a competitor's ability to staff adequately • L earning from other firms • Increasing the capability of your firm by adding new skill sets Which of these focus areas you select is important because each requires that you direct your recruiting efforts in a different way. For example, if you are hiring for geographic expansion, you will need to implement a strategy that allows you to enter new geographic regions -- as opposed to hiring to hurt, where you need to focus on hiring away key talent directly from competitors. 2. Prioritization of jobs No recruiting function has enough resources to fill every position immediately with the top quality hire. As a result, your recruiting strategy needs to include a prioritization element. Priority can be assigned in the following ways: • Hire all jobs equally with the same priority • Focus on key strategic business units • Focus on key jobs • Focus on key or powerful managers 3. Performance level to target Recruiting top performers requires a different strategy and set of tools than recruiting average performers. As a result, you must first determine what level of performance you are primarily targeting before you determine the other elements of your recruiting strategy. Performance targets include: • "Butts in chairs" (hire the cheapest candidates with adequate skills in all jobs) • Focus on average performers in all jobs • Focus on top performers in all jobs • Focus on top performers just in key jobs 4. Experience level to target Some employment strategies require you to take the long-term approach and develop your own talent, while other approaches target bringing in experienced talent for immediate help or to bring in new skills. Experience target ranges include: • Inexperienced talent that can be trained • Temporary and contract labor that can be converted • Hire at the bottom and promote within • Undergraduate college hires (interns, Internet and on-campus hires) • Postgraduate hires • Experienced hires 5. Category of candidate to target Whether you target active or passive candidates has a tremendous impact on both the quality of hire and the difficulty of getting an acceptance. Active candidates (the easiest candidates to attract): • Unemployed candidates • Currently employed but frustrated in their current job Passive candidates (These are individuals who are currently employed and not actively seeking employment. They represent over 80% of potential candidates, but they are the hardest to attract.): • Focus on currently employed average or above average performers • Focus on currently employed top performers Diverse candidates: • Diverse candidates defined by using EEOC standards • Diverse "thinkers" using a global standard Magnet hires (Target magnet hires who are well-known individuals who, because of their notoriety, by themselves help to attract others.): • Magnet hires from within the industry • Magnet hires from outside the industry 6. When to begin searching for candidates Most firms begin a search once a requisition has been created. But there are a multitude of approaches available: • Begin recruiting when an opening occurs • Continuous search (evergreen jobs where there is a constant need) • Begin before an opening occurs (pre-need hiring can be done to build a talent pool or to build a relationship over time, in order to increase applications and offer acceptance rates from employed individuals and top performer candidates) 7. Where to look for candidates There are three sub-categories within the "where" element. They include: Internal versus external: •Focus on all internal candidates (laterals or promotions) •Settle on a fixed ratio of internal to external hires •Hire primarily from college campuses •Hire primarily from external sources Inside or outside the industry: •Target within the industry only •A fixed proportion outside the industry Geographic focus: • Local commuting area only • Within the region • Within the U.S. • A truly global search 8. Who does the recruiting? There are two sub-categories under this element. They include: Internally, who is responsible for recruiting? • Generalists do most recruiting. • Primarily internal recruiters working in HR • Separate sourcing and recruiting efforts within a centralized recruiting function • A mix of corporate and contract recruiters that work internally • Line managers do most recruiting. • Employees contribute significantly to recruiting through a heavy emphasis on employee referrals. Utilizing external recruiters: • Utilize external recruiting agencies mostly at the very top or bottom jobs • Third-party recruiters are utilized only for hard-to-fill or key jobs • Primarily utilize external recruiting agencies • Outsource the entire recruiting function 9. Primary sourcing tools Identifying candidates and convincing them to apply is essential to great recruiting. Some of the possible sourcing focus areas include: • Traditional media (newspapers, walk-ins) • Sourcing using events (job fairs and industry events) • Traditional Internet sourcing (large and niche job boards) • Nontraditional Internet sourcing (Google-type name search for passives; chat rooms) • Employment branding (a long-term sourcing strategy to build a steady long-term supply of candidates) • Acquiring intact teams and a large amount of talent through mergers and acquisitions (buy firms for talent) 10. What skills should you prioritize when selecting candidates? When selecting the most appropriate candidates from the candidate pool organizations can use a variety of approaches. Those target skills or competencies could include: • Hiring brains or intelligence • Selecting based primarily on personality • Selecting based on the technical skills required for this job • Selecting based on skills (technical and people) required for this and "the next" job • Selecting primarily based on pre-identified, company-wide competency needs (present and future) • Selecting primarily based on the candidate's experience (industry or job) • Selecting primarily based on the candidate's contacts and network • Selecting the "best athlete" available at the time (hire and then find the best job for them) • Selecting primarily based on cultural fit 11. How to assess candidates An essential part of any recruiting strategy is the process you will utilize to assess the candidates. Common choices include: • Interviews • Personality tests • Skills tests • References (business, personal or educational) • Grades or academic performance (primarily for college hires) • Drug screening • Job simulations • On-the-job assessment (primarily for temp-to-permanent conversions) • Hire more than you need and intentionally "wash out" the poor performers 12. Primary sales approach Candidates can be "sold" on a job and company based on a variety of strategies. They often include: • Compensation • Opportunities for promotion • Benefits • A great team and manager • An excellent culture and values • Bonus and stock option opportunities • Challenge, growth, and learning opportunities • The firm's employment brand and image June 01 Meet the Challenge of Technical Recruiting
If you don't know the difference between VB 6 and VB.NET, how can you recruit new staff for your company's burgeoning .NET initiatives? And even if you discover the answer, can you distinguish between candidates who really have the expertise you need and those who are simply good at slinging technical jargon? HR professionals charged with recruiting technical staff face a host of challenges. They must find candidates, wade through detailed, acronym-laden resumes to extract meaningful information, and during interviews, decipher what may sound like a foreign language. What's a recruiter to do? In a nutshell, technical recruiting demands the participation of both HR professionals and hiring managers/technology experts. Beginning with job requirements and continuing through the selection process, combining HR and hiring-manager expertise will yield the best results. Follow these tips to collaborate effectively and ultimately, choose the right candidate. Define the Job Requirements"First, do your homework," says Dave Gordon, vice president of HR for Cincinnati-based Winegardner & Hammons, a hotel-management company. The key to technical recruiting, he says, is "understanding exactly how important the technical aspects are, what they need, what they can do without, what they can train on." He recommends meeting with department heads and establishing their requirements before recruiting. "Understand what you are really looking for," says Johanna Rothman, author of Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science of Hiring Technical People. Rothman suggests blending the strengths of the technical experts with those of HR pros "who know how to write a job description." Screen for Technology SkillsOnce job requirements are agreed on, HR can perform initial resume reviews and candidate screens for the defined skill set. Mike A. Sipple Jr., vice president of recruiting firm Centennial Inc., uses a checklist to verify skills and asks candidates to self-evaluate on level of expertise and length of experience with each competency. Some of his clients use a technology test to evaluate fundamental skills. Interview for Performance and Cultural FitHere's where HR's expertise really adds value to the process. Every job is about so much more than technical skills and knowledge, so use the interview process to evaluate past performance and fit with the department's environment, work pace and company culture. Behavior-based interviewing is an excellent tool for eliciting performance stories. When you ask candidates, "Tell me about a time when" or "Give me a specific example of" and encourage them to describe the complete Situation-Action-Result (SAR), you gain insights into core competencies, performance track records and areas of weakness as well as strength. Rothman recommends delving beneath the technical activities to determine actual accomplishments, using pointed questions such as, "How many times have you been on a project where you actually released software?" Partner with Hiring ManagersGordon invites technical experts to participate in the interview process from the earliest stages. "We focus on the HR side, everything beyond technology that you need to assess -- maturity level, people skills, career goals -- and let the tech expert dig into the areas we're not prepared to evaluate," he says. As a retained recruiter, Sipple fits "character, culture and chemistry," then works with both HR and hiring managers at his client companies to further evaluate candidates on technical and performance skills that characterize a quality hire. Get Creative in Sourcing CandidatesYour online application system, resume-tracking software and job listings probably yield a good number of qualified candidates. But with growing demand for technology talent, these sources may not be enough. Gordon, Sipple and Rothman all recommend networking as a primary source for candidates. They also suggest tapping these resources:
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