Recruiting With Finesse !

Recruiting With Finesse !

Recruitment agencies can boost an organisation’ s recruiting prowess by following performance- based methodology.

Key learnings:

Job descriptions restrict talent search, and therefore, should be used only as a reference template
Recruiters need to identify at least two accomplishments- -individual and team based--to help recruitment managers steer the interview in the right direction

The workloads of a recruitment manager and a recruiter are inter-linked. If a recruiter works hard, then the recruitment manager need not struggle as hard! Recruitment managers, with the help of recruiters, can create an equation that is mutually beneficial, while serving the organisational interests in the long run.

Most recruiters complain about how recruitment managers reject piles of resumes ruthlessly, while the latter crib over the poor quality of database that the recruiters give them to sieve through. However, experts believe that with performance- based recruiting, the scenario would change for the better. Performance- based recruiting is a tool that recruiters could use to tame the fussy recruitment managers. The strategy aims at providing the managers with better choices, thereby ensuring more hits than misses.

Feel the pulse

Performance- based recruiting underscores identifying candidates who fit the organisation’ s talent description, while analysing the personality type of the candidate and understanding how well it is suited to the existing organisational culture. It makes traditional templates and tools like job description redundant, and uses instinctive judgments to shortlist candidates. The idea behind it is to improve the quality of candidates sent to recruitment managers for screening, thereby enhancing the success ratio.

The concept is based on certain key guiding principles that need to be adhered to for maximising its impact. The guidelines include:

Discard ‘ideal’ job description

Most job descriptions that are handed over to recruiters are more surreal than real! If recruiters go by the job description, they would cut the chances of finding the ‘right fit’ drastically, and instead, line up resumes that are anything but close to the organisational requirements. Experts, therefore, recommend discarding the job description and focussing on a simple “what kind of a candidate will do the job well” criterion. Stating the requirements simply makes the job of identifying talent easy. A simply stated requirement projects the candidate as a normal professional who is equipped to do the job well. In addition, a job description limits the choice, as it binds recruiters in details like experience and skills that may be important only because the manager thinks so, but not because the job requires them. The decision to discard the job description, however, has to be taken with the consent of the recruitment manager. The job of convincing the manager about how he will get a better screening profile without a description lies with the recruiter!

Develop thorough understanding

As ‘job descriptions’ go out of the window, recruiters need to understand the job in totality. Without a clear understanding of the job, recruiters will end up making inappropriate profile selection, leading to a high rejection rate. A job can be understood well by indulging in a point-by-point discussion with the recruitment manager about the pre-requisites mentioned by him. For instance, if the recruitment manager says that the candidate should have at least two years of global work experience, then it would be worthwhile to ask how global experience helps perform the job better. Thus, converting job description into performance profile will help recruiters develop a thorough understanding of the job.

Identify accomplishments

In the process of screening candidates, identifying two accomplishments- -team-based and individual-- can help recruitment managers make the interview process quick. Recruiters asking candidates to list two defining moments of their careers and communicating them to the recruitment managers can set the pace for the interview process, giving managers an insight into the real worth of the achievements.

Drop preconceived notions

Most recruiters and recruitment managers make their decisions within the first 10-15 minutes of the interview. This happens partly because they give into certain preconceived notions, and therefore, their decisions are not necessarily the best and the most prudent. Staying wary of this tendency and making a deliberate attempt to fight ‘first impressions’ is important for making logical recruiting decisions.

Invest in candidate preparation

To ensure that candidates are at ease, recruiters must prepare them by sharing information that can help them answer job and industry-related questions. Providing them with a list of probable questions will help candidates cut on their nervousness and anxiety before the interview.

Use holistic assessment Most cases of underperformance are attributed to non-technical skills. Technical competence alone will not give a complete picture. Hence, using a multi-factor assessment tool is important to ascertain candidate competence.

Recruiters who incorporate these recommendations in their recruiting plans will benefit immensely. As for recruitment managers, screening will be easier and decision-making much faster.

Ref: TheManageMentor.

Improving Returns on Talent

How should companies approach and formulate a talent strategy focused on better returns.

Organisations have worked over the years towards efficiently managing and monitoring returns on capital and assets. This has been an important role for the CEO and top management in years of boom and downturns.

However, there remains a great deal of ambiguity over the idea of managing talent as an asset. While organisations commit huge investments in talent and incur heavy costs on it, rarely do CEOs have visibility on the returns on talent employed (ROTE).

Investments in talent

An organisation makes multiple investments in acquiring and utilising its talent effectively. These are:

Time and effort: The man-hours spent by HR managers and others in an organisation in recruiting and managing talent adds up to quite a lot. And this has a cost attached to it.

Operating costs: The largest human resource costs in a company are in the areas of recruitment, training, staff welfare, travel for HR-related processes and so on.

Overall employee costs: This is an aggregation of cost to the company (compensation and benefits) of all employees. These costs are a part of the profit and loss statement of companies and normally tend to increase over time.

These spends directly hit the bottom line of the company. In times of downturns, organisations look at cutting down these spends to reduce costs. Although obvious and intuitive, this approach to improve ROTE has limited benefits and could prove counterproductive in the long run. Considering that any recessionary or slow growth phase is likely to be followed by a phase of rapid growth and expansion, a reduction in talent investment has to strike a balance between short-term pressures and long-term imperatives.

An alternative approach

Companies’ top management have always, knowingly or unknowingly, strived towards improving returns from talent. Their concern and need is to find more comprehensive ways of doing so. But what comes in the way is the absence of a common understanding of what constitutes talent, what kind of returns to expect and what levers must be used to improve ROTE.

Talent constitutes not merely employee numbers but also their capabilities. Hence, ROTE may be defined as the value gained in terms of contribution to business results through effective utilisation of talent and its capabilities while optimally managing talent costs.

The concept of "talent value chain" provides a comprehensive model to view the processes through which talent is employed and utilised

An organisation’s strategic goals along with a well-defined organisational structure are the starting point of the talent value chain. Each link in the talent value chain is a talent lever. Specific actions and initiatives under these talent levers are identified and planned leading to development of a "talent strategy".

Like business strategy, talent strategy addresses the key challenges a company is facing and hence, necessitates a careful examination of business challenges and objectives. It also needs to be adapted and changed to suit changing business environments and goals. Such a talent strategy ensures optimal and appropriate utilisation of talent and hence leads to an improved ROTE.

However, an appropriate and well-articulated talent strategy is rarely found to exist in organisations and hence improved returns on talent seem to constantly elude them. Let us examine three different business scenarios to illustrate the approach that an organisation can use to develop its talent strategy.

Downturn/low growth: An organisation struggling with a downturn or slow growth in its industry is faced with the challenge of optimally managing its assets and costs. Such an organisation should, therefore, employ its talent levers in a manner such that they address this strategic challenge.

In workforce planning, the organisation’s focus should be on optimal utilisation of talent through re-deployment or reducing existing manpower. Similarly, recruitment should either be frozen or highly selective. High performing, valuable employees should be identified from the less productive ones based on performance differentiation. This would help identify both talent which the company must strive to retain and manpower which can be released without a significant impact on company productivity.

Rewards too can be selective. Only those who contribute significantly should be rewarded. Policies should be reviewed to enhance centralisation, wherever possible. Potential development and retention should be geared towards the best-performing talent. Thus, this approach helps improve ROTE through managing costs, optimal utilisation of talent and high involvement of top management.

Rapid growth: Any organisation operating in an environment of rapid growth will look to capture a large share of business. This obviously translates into a key strategic challenge — talent acquisition and development.

In such a scenario, talent strategy is not so much focused on differentiation, as in a downturn/low growth situation, but on the speed of ramp-up for building employee numbers, their skill development and retention across levels.

Rewards and benefits are liberal and aimed at retaining a large mass of the employee base to maintain high productivity levels and build capacity. High degree of delegation for decision-making is dispersed across the management hierarchy to provide control and authority at key positions in the organisation to facilitate quick turnarounds.

ROTE is enhanced through improved skill base availability, development of skills in line with business requirements, and building and maintaining talent capacity. Hence, the talent strategy and initiatives are geared towards enabling the firm to successfully meet growth targets.

Global expansion: As organisations grow and evolve, they are likely to look at global expansion for higher growth. In such a scenario, strategic objectives change dramatically. This necessitates the redesign of the organisation structure and roles and also needs a drastic shift in talent strategy.

The talent strategy in such a scenario is focused on shifting from known practices to redefining talent practices to make them relevant to a global, geographically dispersed entity. Hence, it will focus on redefining recruitment practices to successfully recruit in new geographies, establishing a new employment brand and company identity, adoption of global practices, global standardisation of policies and practices and compliance. These become the key areas to improve ROTE in an international, multicultural context.

Formulating a talent strategy

A structured and sound methodology to formulate and deploy a talent strategy is described in figure 2. The initial phase is primarily to understand the strategic objectives and ensure that there is an appropriate organisation structure, with clearly-defined roles, to support the achievement of company goals.

This is followed by an assessment of the processes in each link of the talent value chain. During this phase, a company may discover a complete absence of a process or gaps in the processes. These constitute the areas of improvement or new initiatives which are necessary to achieve company objectives.

These improvement areas/new initiatives are then prioritised depending on the strategic challenges and goals of the company and the presence of supporting systems/processes. This leads to a talent strategy defining specific steps or initiatives along each link of the talent value chain (talent levers). Based on this, a detailed implementation schedule can be developed with specific initiatives and timelines.

This approach, while simple and easily implementable, can provide disproportionate returns on talent employed. It provides a framework that can be used to ensure that an organisation’s talent is aligned towards achieving its strategic objectives. With such alignment, companies can maximise their ROTE in any industry or economic scenario and gain an advantage over their competitors.

Reference: Business Standard ( Article by: Sona Rajesh & Amit Bajpayee)

Job Analysis: Right Person Right Job

Job Analysis: Right Person Right Job

Writing job descriptions is an art. A correct job description brings in the right employee. As today the focus is on multi-tasking or multiple skills, companies with good job descriptions have a shortened recruitment cycle. A good job description is well thought out but not written from boilerplates.


What is job description?


Job description specifies job requirements and acts as a screening tool. Therefore, manpower requirement and planning is dependent on job descriptions. Information about duties, responsibilities, Key Result Areas (KRA’s), qualifications and compensation information are detailed as part of job description.


Duties: Clearly outlining the duties is crucial for a good job description. Duties need to be specific to both short-term issues and long-term challenges of the position. Short-term priority issues need to be addressed during the first few days. Long-term challenges relate to where the hiring manager wants to be in months down the road.

Qualifications: Qualifications are the principal screening elements. These fall into two areas – must haves and nice to haves. Must haves are absolute requirements and without them the person is screened out. Nice to haves are like the icing on the cake.

Compensation information: Generally,this area is skipped in job descriptions. When stated, however, will attract a wider range of qualified individuals. The most important thing is, for the right person, compensation can always be adjusted, titles changed and duties expanded.


The why's of job description


It is essential to provide guidance to people as to what to do and how to do it. Job description enables people in organisations to know who does what and who knows what. Above all, it provides information about the technical skill requirements and “nature” of the person best suited for the job.


How to write a good job description?


Be crystal clear: The crucial question is, "What is the purpose of the job?" It highlights:


. Management’s expectations from the employee.
. Role of the job-holder.
. Employee's contribution towards the achievement of company goals.
. Relationships between different jobs and activities of the organisation.

Source of information: Best-written job descriptions are those written by or with the person in the job. He is the best person to know about the job and thus will be able to complete his own work profile. In case the employees are not articulate enough to write the details, help them with formal and informal interviews and questionnaires. Encourage them to choose the titles.


Assess the skills and abilities: It requires complete analysis of the work structure on the following lines:

Technical/professional aspects.

. Administration.
. Man management.
. Commercial activities.
. Written or spoken communication skills.
. Analytical skills.

List the tasks: They should be arranged in an order based on the importance, frequency and processes.


Analyse the job: Should be analysed on the following accounts:


.Decision-making authority.
. Time frame to make decisions.
. Number of units under control.
. Definition and distinction between the staff and line functions.
. Levels of authority.
. Whom to report to.

Write the job description: It should contain the title and department, location, responsibility and major functional relationships.


Current trends
E-recruitment is the in thing now. The workforce, too are looking for opportunities on the Net. Writing job descriptions for the Net is radically different from writing for the regular media. Here are few tips that will help you attract the best talent to your company. An effective job description format online includes:


Position heading: It is the text that catches the job-seeker’s attention. The text must goad them into going further and hence needs to have a punch in it.


Company statement: It is essential to create excitement and interest about your company.


Position summary: It enhances the interest level about the position along with providing additional information.

Salary and benefits summary: It provides the salary range associated with the position as well as a profile of company benefits.


Qualifications: Need to be stated clearly. If unclear, the job-seeker may think the position is below his expertise and may not apply.

Restructuring Recruitment

Restructuring Recruitment

Cost cutting measures, massive layoffs, and reduction in jobs have left organisations with fewer talented employees. Organisations are being compelled to recruit from the best available rather than those best suited for the job. This is resulting in bad hires. Ultimately it is the organisation's performance that is affected.


Though organisations are implementing innovative strategies to attract the right talent, they are finding it difficult to retain them for long. This demands a restructuring of the recruiting process.

Structuring the recruitment process by automating it has helped organisations. They can invest in systems, which give recruiters sufficient time to assess soft skills. Recruiters will also have the opportunity to evaluate people for factors such as motivation, aspiration and potential, and not just the skills for the job.


How does it help?


Automating recruitment process can help HR:


. Bring in objectivity and rule out bias in assessing potential employees
. Track an individual's data
. Provide information to set standards for performance
. Understand personal interests
. Match future organisational needs with individual development plans
. Use resources effectively

While online recruiting saves the organisation both time and resources, it should be ensured that the time saved is spent on the key issues of the recruitment process. The recruitment stage should thus include:


. Identifying the motivating factors of the employees to help them perform better
. Understanding their long-term goals and aspirations to draw their career plans with the organisation
. Tracing their lifestyle and family needs to make them feel cared for, to help retain employees for a longer time.

Reference: TheManageMentor

How Recruiters and HR Can Work Together?

How Recruiters and HR Can Work Together?

In the business world we have a short list of traditional sources of interdepartmental friction. One of these “hot zones” is the intersection of HR and third-party recruiters, who can easily find themselves at odds.

HR departments often view third-party recruiters as obstacles, while recruiters know that if they can get their best résumés in front of a hiring manager, they’ve got a shot at making a placement. If recruiters are held up by HR bureaucrats whose own need to control the candidate flow overshadows their desire to bring talent in the door, headhunters are sunk. As a result, it’s common to find tension between internal HR people and outside recruiters. Is there a path that allows internal HR and external recruiters to work together for maximum gain?

The Recruiter’s Role

In my experience, the greatest service a third-party search partner provides to the organization, besides the strength of his or her candidate database and relationships, is the intermediary role a search pro performs during offer negotiation. I pride myself on good listening and negotiating skills, but if I’m inside the company, I won’t have the same credibility with a candidate that his ally, the outside recruiter, has.

So it makes sense to let the recruiter handle the delicate job of negotiating between the employer (“our offer is good enough already!”) and the candidate (“they’re dreaming if they think I’ll take this job for that salary”) when the stakes are high. We do it when we buy or sell a house. We know that our trusted Realtor won’t be as emotionally bound up in the negotiation as we very well may be. It’s the same in a high-level offer negotiation process—a place where the middleman can get us more quickly to a handshake and save egos in the process.

As a CEO, managing partner, or division president beginning a high-level search in your organization, it’s critical to sit down with your chosen search partner and your HR chief and work through the common issues that divide these two players. What can easily happen in the absence of such a kickoff meeting is that the search consultant creates a tight one-on-one communication bond with the business leader so that the HR person feels left in the dust.

A Profitable Partnership

Feelings are one thing, but the bigger issue is that without the input of your organization’s Minister of Culture—a/k/a HR chief—your search will be hampered by a lack of a critical perspective. At every stage of the process—initial screening of candidates, the interview process, or the delicate negotiation phase—the quality of the hire you end up with will be affected by the level of participation of your HR chief, the one person most likely to know more than anyone else (including top management) about how things work on the human side of the business.

When I was a corporate HR person, I learned to invite my search partners into the office once every six months or so for a check-in meeting. In this way I learned that partnering with trusted search colleagues is one of the highest-yield moves an HR leader can make. Search pros will tell you things that candidates never would (e.g., “no one will work for Jane Smith any more—she’s a terrible manager”) and will fill you in on the state of the local job market with a level of detail you’d never have time to acquire on your own.

To cultivate a partnership, however, an HR chief has to let go of many an HR leader’s favorite office tool: the presumption of control over the process. The fact is that in a typical, intense, high-level search, the HR chief won’t be the conduit for much or most of the information that is exchanged. If your No. 1 candidate is suddenly presented with a competing offer, your search pro is going to reach whomever he can reach first—whether that’s the HR leader, the CEO, or the CEO’s assistant.

Cooperation is Key

In an effective senior-level search, the time-honored paradigm, “all information passes through HR on its way to the hiring manager,” won’t hold. Communication has to take place instantly, and important decisions may happen on the fly. With a high level of coordination and respect for individual talents, this can work to an employer’s advantage. When hierarchy and bureaucracy creep in, typical responses run along the lines of, “I don’t care what you and our CEO discussed. All new VPs get three weeks vacation, and we’re not budging for this candidate.” And believe it or not, negotiations with candidates can fall apart over things as seemingly small as a week or two of vacation.

HR chiefs and recruiters can be pivotal in one another’s success. As one executive recruiter said to me, “Like most HR people, you chat with candidates maybe one or two hours a day. The rest of the time you work on other things, like executive comp or performance management or employee communications. All I do is cultivate talent and sell your company and my other clients to the talent marketplace. Isn’t that worth my fee?” With the right partner, it is worth the fee—and more

Ref: Liz Ryan / Business Week

Corporate Peter Pan - Recruitment & Retention.

Corporate Peter Pan - Recruitment & Retention.

Most times recruiting managers are battling self-created problems like an ill-fitted recruit.......

Internal talent movement and succession planning are surely better recruiting options considering the cost and fit factor. Internally placed employees are more likely to fit better as compared to an external recruit and therefore the time taken to get to work would be considerably less. Despite the advantages, experts say that these recruiting options may fail to deliver if measures to ascertain their workability are not adhered to.


One size fits all

The beliefs that a star salesman would make an excellent manager and a finance wizard would be an effective finance head have no takers now. Earlier people got carried away by past performances and based promotions on the performance of an individual in a particular job. However, the tales of failed leadership and managerial feat are famous when a junior executive was promoted to the managerial level only on the basis of his performance in his previous job. Most times in such cases the appraiser fails to take into account the difference in job profiles of the two jobs and therefore makes his decision with a short-sighted perspective. This logic has failed enough times to let managers know that the only time a person has performed equally well in two jobs is when the job profiles of the two jobs and the competency and skill level required to execute it are the same. It is very rare to see the same performance output from a worker who gets promoted to the next level without additional inputs in the form of training.


This belief is echoed in the Peter Principle, stated by Dr. Lawrence Peter. According to this principle, a person would continue to rise in the organizational hierarchy unless he reaches a natural level of incompetence. The principle clearly states that every time a person gets promoted to a job that is one step higher in hierarchy, the individual will in all probability fail to deliver the same level of performance as he did in his previous role. The relevance of Peter Principle becomes obvious every time a manger makes a wrong decision and promotes his "go-getter" to a position that does not need a "go-getter" but needs somebody who can manage a bunch of "go-getters"! Thus, with Peter Principle at work every time, leaders and managers need to craft their decisions carefully.


Intuition and bias

Another pitfall in the process of right recruiting is intuition and its evil twin bias. These factors together can play havoc with the science behind recruiting and result in decisions that may be far from logic. Recruiting managers justify this by saying that it is humanly impossible to gauge every little nuance of human behavior and make inference on its basis. Hence, in such times it is the intuitive powers that come to rescue and help them make decisions. While it is not completely wrong to use intuition in the process of decision- making, it certainly is unfair to make decisions only n the basis of intuition. Similarly, we all have certain mindsets and beliefs (halo/horn effect). We associate a smart looking candidate with professionalism, skill and panache. However, this may not always be true. In fact many times looks can be sadly deceptive and can disappoint beyond reconciliation.


Besides the halo and horn effect (the practice of making a decision on the basis of a single good/bad incident), experts believe that casualness in the interview process too can lead to bad decision- making. A study on the conduct of recruiting managers in the interview process revealed that, many times the decisions tend to be based on insignificant aspects. These include the way the candidate talks, his family background, his interests and other unrelated attributes. While these attribute are worth learning, they certainly do not make an impressive decision -making pre-requisite. Hence, recruiting managers should get more professional and focus more on job-specific competencies and skills if they want their "peg" to fit in well.


The funnel effect

As a guide to scale skills and competencies needed for different jobs in different hierarchical levels, experts recommend the "funnel effect". The funnel effect underscores the changing skills and competency levels as one rises up the hierarchy . The rise is depicted by an inverted funnel, that also represents the fact that as one climbs up the hierarchy the skills and competencies get more specific .

Recruiting is a scientific process. Hence taking a mundane approach to it can ruin the entire exercise and result in some very damaging recruiting decisions. When recruiting managers sit across the interview table they have to be aware and alert of the pitfalls in recruiting and use their providence to overcome them.


Ref: TheManageMentor