Effective Recruitment Practices

Effective Recruitment Practices

This is not an exhaustive article on Recruitment Practices. In this article I am trying to highlight my experience and certain observations to make Recruitment process and Role of BUHR more effective.

According to me, Recruitment/Talent Acquisition is the vital function in the organization. The more mature this process is you will get right talent for your business, leading to its success.

Today in many organizations Talent Acquisition is a separate function and specialized people takes care of this activity in the organization.

This was the need of the hour in Mid-size to Large organizations as HR Generalist was finding it to difficult to take care of all activities. It is very important to devotee quality time and to have mature process to get right talent, then just running behind numbers and closures of the position.

As the recruitment process got separated from the role of HR Generalist, a new role got formed as of Business HR. But with my experience, Business HR role cannot be a success, unless the person is having great amount of exposure and knowledge of other functions of HR, such as, Talent Acquisition, Compensation & Benefits and Legal & Statutory Compliance.

As a Business HR, to be effective in your role, one should know, what is the status of the Recruitment in his/her Business Unit (BU) and should closely monitor the status of it. How the Resource Management is happening (Allocation, Deployment and Redeployment)

BUHR should be a part of meetings associated with Recruitment, Resources management and should conduct meetings periodically with C&B team as well as legal team to understand status, needs and how BUHR can contribute in all these activities.

To be effective in role of BUHR, it is very important to have clear knowledge and updates on various HR & Project related activities, else you will not perform role of BUHR, but will be a coordinator, passing and seeking information from various groups/departments in the organization.

Be accountable and responsible towards your work and take keen interest in other areas as well to become an effective contributor in your role at organizational level.

Right talent leads to the success of business. Sourcing of resume is the first thing recruiter does, once the hiring activity starts. I personally do not want my people wasting too much of time in sourcing resumes, as most of the candidates (with no offence to anyone) today copy paste things from there colleagues resume. But screening and sourcing is also important, but avoid wasting too much time on these activities.

Psychometric Testing: Is it really helps in Recruiting Right Candidates?

Lot of organizations today go for psychometric testing as a part of recruitment process. I always had a problem and it still exists to understand how it benefits. I asked one of my psychologist friend, who designs and conduct psychometric test, that how it benefits, trust me he was also not able to provide convincing answer.

I think any online psychometric test will not help you understand candidate than personal interview with him. Western world have stopped conducting psychometric test and they more rely on Personal Interviews.

Psychometric testing is one of the tools of psychology and I strongly recommend other tool of psychology and that is Personal Interview. Nothing is more important than taking right candidates, if companies are relying on psychometric test to save time (this answer I got from lot of colleagues) they are sadly on the wrong track, rather I recommend spending more time in personal interview with the candidate.

Right way to judge candidate is by asking questions, the best way to check candidate’s ability of decision making, leadership, team management, team player is by creating artificial scenarios or asking question related to situations happened in the organizations, role plays will also help in this. Till the time you are not convinced with the benefits of psychometric test please do not go with it and definitely it is not a time saving tool.

Have Discussion and create strategies

As a HR interviewer, please do not form first impressions and avoid halo effect. As a HR interviewer you should understand the requirements of the position from the hiring manager. In my experience I have seen that, there is a very less communication/discussion happening between hiring manager, recruiter and HR interviewer. How this communication gap is going to help to get right candidates?

It is very important to understand how this position is going to grow in the organization and in project. If the position is very technical with minimum or no interaction with clients, is it right to have same weight age for communication skills what we have for position where interaction with people, client is more.

To understand this and other aspects of the position, it is very important to have a discussion between people conducting different levels of interviews and sourcing team. So that we get right people and can provide opportunities to people who are not very fluent in English communication but are technically far superior.

As a HR interviewer, we cannot judge all candidates applying for different positions on same behavioral parameters; I have seen many HR interviewers trying very hard to evaluate candidates on all behavioral parameters mentioned in the evaluation sheet, resulting into asking not suitable question to the candidate and loosing effectiveness. To avoid this please have a well planned strategy right from creating Job Descriptions and specification, sourcing to the closure of positions by conducting different levels of interviews.

This will help you to be effective during interview process and to get right talent.