As a recruiter a highly flexible approach is needed in order to succeed. Each candidate, each customer, each team member require a personal approach, which really takes a lot of your energy and time.
At the end of the day, if this stream of effort leads to a successful recruitment – it is all good! But often times, difficulties occur on the way and it becomes a vicious circle of trying, hoping, not succeeding and starting all over again.
Qreer will try to eliminate that problem by giving 4 useful tips for how recruiters can avoid making their work more challenging than it already is.
- Shift the focus to tasks and responsibilities, rather than skills and requirements
I dare to say the approach used by the majority of recruiters is rather obsolete and old fashioned. The traditional way to present a job position by seeking for a match with the candidate and the job requirements does not encourage the candidates at all.
However, if you thoroughly explain the tasks and responsibilities summarizing them in targets to be met, the applicants may feel more motivated and triggered to show his/her full potential. As a recruiter you should read between the lines and do the match making in a rather creative way. Sometimes the “informal” part of the interview speaks more about the personal than the actual past experience and education.
That is why you should ask your respondents to explain how do they see performing the tasks and responsibilities, rather to test the level they have regarding the requirements.
- Seek for the USP of your candidate
Try to understand the recruitment process as going through the candidate’s personal and professional story and finding the highlights of it. You should be able to find a Unique Selling Point in each one of them and them seek for pros and cons about how this unique characteristic fits into the organization. It works according to the principle of match-making, roughly compared.
The easiest way to find this USP is firstly look for key words while screening the CV, check what is the thing the person spent most time on, or wrote the most about. On a later stage, you could directly ask your candidate what does he/she think is distinguishable with. In that way you can also check their confidence and ability to “sell” themselves within a short pitch.
- Keep a transparent communication & stimulate involvement
A quick correspondence is the key to building trust with your candidates. The better trust they have with you, the more genuine information you can gather, which facilitates a beneficial job search.
Besides, no one likes to wait a long time for a response. It is more likely for the candidate to get into a new application process, if he/she does not hear anything from you within two weeks. But if you make a weekly reminder or an update, even if there is nothing new so far, the person feels taken care of and remembered. Not knowing what is happening bring the most of pressure on the jobseeker, while if an open communication is kept, things can go way more effortlessly.
Flexibility is also personally appreciated. A candidate feels flattered if you take into consideration his/her preferences. Give them the option to make a choice themselves and feel equally as important and dominant in the process. Allow them to pick whether the interview will be via Skype or via a phone call or choose the time slot available that can be presented to them. Initiation of action from their side increases their involvement into the application process.
- Keep a tight and structured application process
Chaos is something recruiters are well aware of. Can you agree?
Keeping a tight structure to the application process will definitely make yours and your candidates’ lives easier. Make an overview sheet of the steps that each applicant has to go through and keep a record of the status of each one of them. Assigning weekly checks and updates of the data is useful to easily keep track of the procedure. The neat scheduling facilitates the continuous repetition of tasks, which leads to faster and more qualitative work results.
Furthermore, your candidates will be triggered to respond in the same organized fashion as you approached them. So you generally do yourself a favor.
To summarize, there are multiple strategies you can undertake in your personal recruitment style. But these general hints might help you understand who your candidate is and add value to the relationship in the whole recruitment process.
Qreer assures you they are worth to try and as recruiters to recruiters, we advise you to try to put the above four into practice. 🙂