5 Tips for Successful Job Recruitment

Whether you are making your first hire or recruiting multiple employees to fill vacant positions, if you have not thoroughly planned out ahead, then the recruitment process might be long, arduous and even fail! Taking essential steps before even posting a job or interviewing increases the probability that you will quickly find the right candidate for your needs.  

I recommend 5 essential steps to ensure that your next recruiting assignment goes very smoothly and increase the likelihood that you uncover the right candidate for your needs:

1. Write An Explanatory Job Description – This details the key tasks and elements required of your position. This not only helps the candidate to better understand what is expected of them, but also assists you in better screening out unqualified candidates by forcing them to verify their skills per your job’s requirements.

2. Specify Candidate Profile – Detail what type of profile you are looking for. This can include: years of experience, education and all the criteria that are important for the job. Study past excellent job performers to uncover what profile they possessed. Also, research the current job market place by viewing job boards like Career Builder to see what types of jobs and skills your competitors are recruiting for. The caveat is you may be seeking a certain job skill, but it may be in very short supply and high demand by everyone in the jobs market!

3. Quantify Your Chosen Criteria – Whenever possible calculate the essential tasks of the job. For example, 30% C programming, 45% digital hardware design and 25% testing. This will not always be easy, but whenever you can quantify your job tasks, it will allow you to more quickly identify those candidates who possess all the qualities and abilities necessary to accomplish your job profile and add value to your company. It will also assist you in the interview process to better screen candidates per your most relevant interview criteria. For example, “What percentage of your last job was devoted to C programming?”

4. Thoroughly Develop An Interviewing Strategy – It is extremely important that you develop a detailed plan your interviews in order to gather the maximum amount of information from candidates in the least amount of time. Research shows that open-ended questions tend to elicit the most information possible. For example, “What did you accomplish at your last position?” Also, try to incorporate the “quantifying” as mentioned in my 3rd tip. For example, “break down for me by a pie chart what your job activities looked like in your last position?” Finally, meet your entire interview team in advance of the actual interview to cover your detailed strategic interviewing plan. Make sure that all interviewers are clear about: a) what information you desire from a given candidate? b) Which interviewer will ask what questions? And c) what metrics you will be using to determine whether a candidate is qualified or not per your job requirements?

5. Get The Word Out – Use all sources at your dispose. Start with all your contacts. Then employ your candidate’s contacts including searching their social media contacts list and networks. This can benefit your company in two ways: a) it can provide you valuable, hidden information on the candidate and b) it can increase your sampling frame of viable, qualified candidates for your job.

In summary, I have shared five proven tips to help you increase your batting average in employee recruiting for your business. They will help you to streamline your recruiting and interviewing process and increase the probability that you will more quickly secure the most qualified candidates for your job requirements. 

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Falling Economies, Rising Disengagement Rates

The United States, as we all know, is the strongest and most developed nation on earth. However, with falling economies across the globe, some shocking figures might just throw you off guard and open your eyes wide enough to understand and accept that all that glitters is not gold. I’d like tossed light on hidden unemployment in the U.S., which is not always apparent to the media, government officials or the masses.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is an autonomous body and the main U.S. government agency that keeps a complete record of labor and job trends on a regular basis. They provide complete statistics and detailed data that inspire most labor policies enacted by the U.S government. Every month they calculate the number of new jobs created both nationally and within individual states. Although these figures are always delayed by a month, they provide a true, clear and concrete picture of the labor and job trends prevalent in the country. Hence, based strictly upon the most recent BLS report released on November 8, 2013, one might be pleased that 204,000 new jobs were created. Furthermore, if we sum up the jobs numbers for the last six months, we get a whooping figure of 1,053,000-jobs created, which sounds really enticing considering many of the government’s policies over the last several years have run contrary to jobs creation. Unfortunately, those figures only focus on those “purely defined” as unemployed.

However, digging more deeply into BLS figures, we unearth that 21.7 million workers in the U.S are either a) unemployed or b) underemployed (people who are not left with an option but to work part-time because they cannot find a full time job) or c) having just given up looking for a job! When those figures are added to the unemployment numbers, the rate explodes from 7.3% to almost 16%! That is 1 in every 6 people you meet on the U.S. streets!

A lot more needs to be done to create jobs. Especially to assist small companies, which is the traditional engine of jobs growth. Many of my clients are small business owners and they regularly convey to me that they wish to add new personnel. Unfortunately, they are afraid of the current government climate including many new regulations that will add a lot of necessary burden to them. Instead, government should lessen the regulatory load on small businesses so we can further expand the jobs market in the U.S.!

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