Saying ‘I Do’ to the Recruiting Process
It’s a Commitment
The hardest part of recruiting is not finding the specific purple squirrel. It is not sourcing and screening candidates. It is not communicating the corporate culture or the company mission. It is not coordinating telephone and onsite interviews. It’s not even negotiating the employment package. It’s getting the commitment of the hiring powers.
Funny how this should be the easy part. Once a decision to hire has been made, once the method by which that hiring process will be conducted has been decided, the company should be ready to roll. But it is not always the case.
“Companies and hiring managers need to understand and give themselves to the hiring process knowing it will take time away from everyday operations,” states Mike Curry, Tech Recruiter at Redfish Technology. “It is a commitment, just like when a company hires a web developer, that website can’t be developed in a vacuum, it requires effective, timely communication from the client company in order to be successful.”
Whether a company uses internal or external recruiting resources, the hiring manager is the pivotal player. The recruiting professionals need to be on point, understand the manager’s needs, re-calibrate the search whenever necessary, and keep the candidate pipeline enthusiastic and bought into the company. The heavy lifting and meticulous recruiting efforts are handled by the recruiter, who is informed by the requirements that the hiring manager communicates.
“It’s our job as external recruiters to take care of the time-consuming sourcing, screening, vetting, pre-selling, pre-negotiating, and all the nitty-gritty details,” affirms Tory Thomas, Sales & Marketing Recruiter at Redfish. “But if the hiring manager is not available to move forward in a timely fashion or give detailed feedback, it is going to be more difficult and take longer. The punctual communication is the essential partnering aspect that allows me to do the recruiting job I am hired to do.”
Studies show that the high cost of recruiting is not so much the direct costs of job boards, social networking, employee referral programs, campus recruiting, applicant tracking systems, internal recruiters and human resources staff, or even headhunters; it is the indirect costs.
Indirect costs include: “Bad Match” hires, company productivity loss, time-to-hire, and misuses of the internal recruiting team’s time. A lot of these indirect costs can be managed by saying “I Do” to the recruiting process.
This means that you determine a timeline, agree to review and response times, establish a process, and communicate. Feedback is an essential part of the search process, observing what is working and what is not, analyzing the outcomes, and re-calibrating any part of the search and evaluation process. Sharing insights into what makes the company unique, the team effective, the future bright, is critical as are sharing the impressions of the candidates so that the search can continually be honed. Yes, this takes some time. Time well spent and money saved by achieving fantastic hires, in as short a time-to-hire as possible.
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