Recruiting talented professionals requires skill, expertise and talent. While that does sound quite straight forward but it’s something that every recruiter learns and develops with time. Exceed’s recruitment team have successfully recruited over 300 professionals over the past few years and the Regional Talent Acquisition Manager heading that team shares some useful tips with us that recruiters need to keep in mind while doing their job:
Before sourcing, you need to know what you’re looking for. While a job description or a list of skills and keywords is a good starting point, you’ll have to make sure that you’ve got all the information you need before embarking on your search for suitable candidates.
Interview the hiring manager. By doing so, you will not only reconfirm your understanding of the vacancy and the hiring manager’s requirements, but you might also discover additional information that will make your search more accurate.
Planning means reaching an endpoint or achieving a certain outcome or goal. Your goal here as a recruiter is to fill a vacancy and that requires planning and executing a series of steps that are controlled by time.
Start by listing all the steps of the recruitment process and work out an estimate of how much time it will take you to move from one step to the next, keeping in mind the deadline you need to meet. And always keep a buffer to allow for surprises, which are more common that we’d like to think or believe. Your Plan A needs a Plan B, C and D…backup plans are your safety net.
You’ll find that in most cases hiring managers need to fill a vacancy not in a week’s time, or in a within a month, but “yesterday”. You are already pressured for time and the clock starts ticking from the moment that manager says “I need your help to find me the perfect person for this job…”. As the main orchestrator of the recruitment process, you need to make sure you don’t cut any corners or skips any steps, just follow the process and set realistic expectations. There’s a reason your company wants a job applicant to undergo several interviews… and that is to pick only the best.
You’ll often find that the progress of a job application can lose momentum due to the availability of interviewers, and more so when you have a lengthy interviewing process. The more interviews you have in place means the more you’ll need to rely on interviewers. With this comes the hassle of setting up and scheduling interviews, and then getting feedback about an applicant from the interviewers themselves.
So, during that initial phase of working out your plan and setting timelines to fill the vacancy, give your interviewers the heads up that you’ll be scheduling interviews with them soon. They will be more cooperative and share their feedback after the interview a lot quicker, especially if you make sure to follow up with them rigorously. Ask nicelyJ
Easier said than done, right? As a recruiter, you have a process to follow and you might- or might not- have a system that helps make your job easier. If you feel that these tools provided to you by your company aren’t enough, then use whatever other tools out there to make things easier for you. Juggling more than one vacancy or having a heavy workload requires task management, so if an excel sheet or a to-do list helps you keep track of what needs to be done, make use of all the resources out there!
Thank you.