Delegating work to suitable resources is the surest way of efficient, timely management of a project. While start-ups recruit to delegate tasks and sub-tasks to people brought on board, larger companies develop a hierarchy in which discrete roles are assigned to each member in a team – which is also a form of delegation.
Strengthening a team is done to ensure that organizational goals are met consistently. Top management makes staffing decisions in view of expansion, integration or diversification efforts. Fine tuning performance is possible through hiring and right-sizing teams.
Hiring for specialized positions happen on a referral basis or is mostly outsourced to professional recruitment agencies. It helps weed through unsuitable applications and presents shortlisted candidates to the company for the final stages of selection and appointment.
It is natural for companies to consider upskilling or cross-training their existing workforce to ease the transition into senior positions. While this option remains, recruiting outside talent continues to be important for at least some rungs in the hierarchy. To reach a fortuitous balance between established performers and new recruits, recruiters across the board follow uniform guidelines. Often these are put simply as hiring tips since hiring is a common activity among businesses.
The hiring life-cycle
Strengthening a team by carrying out hiring is an activity that involves not only the personnel department but has an organization-wide impact. Despite hiring being a common, frequent activity carried out by organizations of all sizes and descriptions, the impact stems from the fact that it’s a long-drawn methodical process comprising several steps.
It is for good reason that an entire department is dedicated to the function of hiring – there are several steps such as attracting talent (through advertisements and postings on job portals), screening, assessment, selection, and finally appointing the best applicants after several rounds of a formal discussion.
Why recruitment assumes heavy-weight importance
Both staff managers and line managers, subject-matter experts, department heads, would be called in at different points of the recruitment process, in addition to the direct and complete involvement of the personnel department.
Despite this concerted effort to get competent professionals on-board a team, recruitment routinely meets hiccups. This is because recruitment sometimes happens in hurried, haphazard ways. For instance, checking on the background and references of a candidate is an important step that staffers who are in a hurry sometimes dispense with. This can be a costly mistake, with organizational resources being misdirected towards undeserving candidates.
The urgency in filling a position can result in many deviations, additional steps, fast-tracked processes or the total absence of all these steps. In such cases, a candidate of questionable quality may enter to cause wastage of resources. It is worth pursuing hiring and onboarding of new candidates at a deliberate pace to ensure that discernment is employed at every stage.
Cutting-edge hiring tips for the savvy recruiter
- Pay attention to gauge a candidate’s leadership orientation levels. Lazlo Bock in his book Work Rules says the leadership-style and ability show in how he/she acts in group scenarios. Their seniority or years of experience do not matter as much as the way they interact with people. Bock recommends paying close attention to these cues.
- Lazlo Bock also outlines how Google strives to bring people who are dissimilar to themselves. This points to the openness of work culture. Not only should people be accepted for who they are, but this rule also encapsulates ‘you can’t get different results if you don’t try anything different’. They look for the drive to do something differently. Where rigid company policy might prevent or even penalize employees who dare to be different, Google’s success in its work culture is a testimonial that breaking away old molds to make way for the new can make path-breaking performance possible.
- Google also reputedly hires people who are “better than themselves” which is in itself a daring move. Stacy Sullivan, Google’s Chief Culture Officer, talks about how insecurity has no place while hiring. Bringing in better, more talented people pays off in the longer run. This keeps the corporation afloat, much like the ‘Going concern’ concept of Business Accounting.
- Add Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence tools to attract specific, curated lists of candidates. Artificial Intelligence, for instance, simplifies the process of writing out job descriptions. Tools such as Texio use meaningful terms and language to put together job postings that effectively attract the right candidates.
- A related point is keeping track of recruitment progress using the same data-driven approach. Analyzing this in retrospect can help you identify the channels of recruiting that are the most profitable ones. Further attention and resources can be driven to these channels in future instances.
- Similarly, Machine Learning concepts can analyze video submissions and voice messages and flag off unorthodox behavior. This is a perfect solution in the context of increasingly common video interviews.
- Social media recruitment is too brilliant in the results it produces to be ignored. It is particularly well-suited to hiring top executives. It is also a great way of getting your own company’s culture exemplified through real examples.
- Data analytic and predictive analysis of candidate data against, say, the company’s culture gives estimates of how well a potential candidate can fit in upon appointment. And since this analysis is done by an algorithm and not a person taking a judgement call, the chances of bias are eliminated more effectively.
- Develop skills such as video interviews. As staffing solutions border on the unorthodox, recruiters have to be prepared with every tool in their arsenal to fill positions. Skills include being tech-savvy to be able to tell genuine content apart from pretension. Being able to turn a negotiation in the company’s favor is a valuable asset – practice this in conjunction with novel concepts such as remote hiring to draw out candidates.
With these guidelines, it is possible to find, bring on board, and retain suitable talent fit for any workplace.
