Is recruiting part of, or likely to be part of, your role? If so, do you know where to look to find the best candidates? If not, you could spend many hours posting advertisements on unsuitable job boards and responding to candidates with little or no relevant experience. So to help, we’ve put together a list of tips that’ll show you where to grab the best people for the job!
Widen Your Pool of Potential Candidates
Making sure you have a wide variety of places to visit for potential candidates makes it easier when it comes to filling a vacant role. And, don’t wait until you have a position to fill to start making connections with useful people and places. Use the tips below to help you cast your net far and wide in your search for new team members:
– having good relations with local colleges and universities is a real bonus. This will allow you access to a large pool of newly qualified, eager people to choose from should you find yourself with a position to fill. Recruiters will often target colleges that have a great reputation for producing top quality candidates and make sure they attend recruitment fairs and the like
– if it’s appropriate, allow current staff members to join and participate in industry associations. Here they’ll meet other professionals in the field who may be looking to change jobs, or they may get chatting to someone they think would be perfect for the position
– keep an eye on industry online job boards as, not only do they allow candidates to search for jobs, they also allow job seekers to upload their CVs so that employers with jobs on offer can search through them for potential matches
– use professional association websites to target your job advertisements
– don’t forget to check amongst the staff already employed by the company. There may be someone working in another department who would be perfect for the job! And I am sure you can see that there are definite advantages to employing people who already work for your company
Can you Hire a Sure Thing?
Whilst it is great to open jobs up to a wide range of candidates, including those without much relevant experience, it can lead to you having to spend time and money training those people. Whilst some training is inevitable, some schools of management, including Bruce N. Pfau and Ira T. Kay, authors of ‘The Human Capital Edge’, believe that you should aim to employ someone who has experience of this “exact job, in this exact industry, in this particular business climate, from a company with a very similar culture.” They say this because they think past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour. So, if the candidate has a highly successful track record in sales in your industry area, it is likely that they will do well in the position you are offering too. However, it is worth noting that this approach may take a long time to be successful, as you may need to search for a long time to find just the right person.
Use Your Current Staff as a Resource
When you have a vacant position, tell your staff. They may just know someone who is perfect for the role. Not only that, they may be able to tell you more about the person than you could ever learn from an application form or interview, for example whether they are reliable, how they get on with senior members of staff, whether they are team players and so on.
Always Check References!
To recruit successfully you need to have faith in the information that is being presented to you. Sadly, research suggests that up to one in four people lie on their CVs! This could spell disaster for you as the recruiter as you’ll choose to interview people on the strength of what they put in their CV or application form. If they lie about a key skill needed for the role, it’ll be obvious at the interview and both their time and yours will have been wasted. So, make sure you follow up on the information given in the CV. If the person says they have a first in geopolitics from Cambridge University, make sure that they really do! You can do this by asking for copies of certificates from the short-listed candidates. If you are satisfied that the certificates are genuine, fine, if not, you can go further and call the awarding body to make sure.
Whilst you can’t protect yourself against every eventuality (you may follow all the guidelines but still end up with the wrong person for the job!) following the advice above will, hopefully, help make the recruitment process as efficient and painless as possible.
If you are about to take on the responsibility of recruiting and you feel you need more help, why not think about our Recruiting Staff and Integrating them into the Workplace Course.
