How to Hire the Right Talent

Despite thousands of applicants applying to organizations with job opportunities, businesses today are facing a long-term talent shortage unlike anything experienced over the past several decades. Leading editorials as diverse as The Economist and CNN Money have pointed out that the problem is the shrinkage in highly skilled work force, increasing worldwide demand for highly skilled knowledge workers and globalization of the economy will create difficulty for even the most creative and successful businesses in managing their talent pipeline. 

[Over the next 10 years… performance metrics must be employed along with the aid of tools and techniques to source and screen talent.]

How do I know I have a problem?

* I have fewer applicants than I’d like showing up at my door
* Resumes never give me the right picture
* I am spending too much time calling each candidate
* I am spending too much time talking to candidates that are not really qualified
* My applicant to hire ratio is very low
* Line organizations constantly differ with the candidates that are shortlisted….

Organizations measuring their recruiters in traditional methods and processes are losing out in the war for talent.]

According to us recruitment has 3 key areas to focus on that every recruiter and recruitment manager need to live by.

1. Attracting talent exhaustively
2. Screen talent systematically
3. Measuring talent for knowledge, skills, abilities, and other factors such as fit.

Recruiters today are being trained to “screen out” applicants, thus making their roles very transactional. Measuring the number of transactions a recruiter could perform in a specific amount of time led to the creation of the most commonly used metrics: Cost-Per-Hire. Many organizations continue to employ these same metrics on today’s recruiter with poor results and low “client” satisfaction….

To summarize: “How recruiters are measured is having its impact on the quality of hires”. But smart recruiters and recruitment managers can change the way they hire and be accountable for quality of hires while continuing to make more hires through a very systematic approach. To achieve this recruiters should spend more time with pre-qualified candidates and leverage technology that simplifies processes and systematically follows the 3 key areas of focus; attract, screen, and measure.

How do I address that problem?

The smartest employers, who hire the best people, recruit a pre-qualified candidate pool of potential employees before they need to fill a job. The earlier you adopt these practices, the better your organization will do in the war for talent.

Posted by Jaffee, Cabot at Tuesday, 01/18/2011 12:13 pm

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