The primary goal of recruitment is to implement a set of procedures that will quickly identify top talent for vacant positions.
It is important to recognize that the recruitment effort is not a static process.
Nurturing a candidate pipeline allows you to engage in proactive recruitment, rather than last minute “put out fires”, which all too often results in a less than best fit. A poor fit leads to employee recidivism and the need to start the recruitment process over again. This can significantly increase both real and opportunity costs in the form of lost productivity.
Building a Candidate Pipeline
There’s several low-cost recruitment strategies you can use to build a strong candidate pipeline: pre-employment testing; social networking; and employee referrals. We will discuss each of these options below.
Pre-employment testing
Pre-employment testing provides an objective measure of each candidate’s skill set and personality traits. By consistently incorporating testing tools into your recruitment process, you will be able to significantly increase the quality of new hires.
The purpose of skill-set testing is to validate that each candidate possesses the requisite skill-set to perform successfully in a given job. For example, Excel tests measure each candidate’s ability to create spreadsheets or work with formulas. Cognitive-based assessments provide a high degree of accuracy in being able to predict the level of performance in terms of such traits as attention to detail, spatial ability, logical thinking, problem solving, etc. Studies have shown that aptitude tests are two to four times more likely to predict success in a given role than is past experience.
Behavioural testing taps into candidate personality traits that may or may not mesh with your overall organizational culture. Behavioural tests can reveal traits around self-motivation, self-discipline, ability to commit, whether the candidate is a team player or prefers to work alone, leadership potential, emotional stability and the ability to work successfully under pressured conditions. Understanding each of these traits is important because they add the dimension of cultural type and preferred work style. thus providing a 360 degree perspective of each candidate.
Social Networking in Recruitment
A recent study by CareerBuilder has shown that nearly 22 % of hiring managers now peruse social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to identify new talent, and an additional 9% of hiring managers plan to incorporate social media into their recruitment strategy in the near future.
Social media provides a highly viable method for employers to identify qualified candidates with little, if any, cost. To derive the most benefit of these sites it pays to follow a couple of simple strategies:
• Take the time to view profiles to gain an indication of candidate’s hard and soft skill sets. In addition to past work experience, you may gain an insight into team orientation (as shown by group memberships, hobbies and extracurricular activities), communication skills, computer proficiency, and degree of professionalism (e.g. pictures used, wording of profile, status updates, discussion group posts).
• Social media sites provide a wonderful method for employers to interact with passive candidates (those not actively seeking new employment) via one of many professional groups. Most of these groups provide discussion forums where employers and candidates can explore common areas of interest. This fosters the development of relationships and permits each side to determine whether there is sufficient commonality to move forward in the recruitment process.
Employee Referrals
Recruitment need not be delegated to the Human Resources department alone. If you have a happy and motivated culture, your employees will become ambassadors for your brand. This can be a highly cost-efficient method of building your candidate pipeline.
Employee referral recruitment is a valuable tool for small and medium-size organisations that value transparency and foster a democratic culture. It can be thought of as a top-down recruitment strategy since it involves all levels of the organization. Once a recruitment culture has been developed, encourage employees to incorporate talent identification into social medial interactions.
Building a strong candidate pipeline will take time, but well worth the effort as it will fast track the process of filling vacant positions with top talent. Once built, the pipeline needs to regularly reviewed and updated, so that you weed out those candidates who are no longer available and replace with fresh talent.
