The Reality of Hiring Someone: It is Too Easy to Miss a Great Applicant
By GL Hoffman
It is axiomatic that great employees help a company do great things. There is no "company" per se, only great people banding together finding and helping customers. The better the talent in your company, the brighter your future. From my vantage point, talent acquisition is everyone's job.
Take the New England Patriots. Not content to rest on last year's talent (players), they went out and got Randy Moss and some others. This attitude of talent acquisition helped the entire team go 16-0 in the regular season. What are you doing to better your team?
If you are in HR, talent acquisition is your job. You must find great candidates for the hiring managers. If you can't, it's not the customer service manager's fault-most likely it will be yours. I am going to give you a few suggestions that may help you.
The sheer number of applicants and candidates has never been higher. What with unemployment rising, and resume-blasting systems on every portal and banner ad, the typical HR manager is overwhelmed by the number of resumes and applicants. It is not uncommon for a single opening to have hundreds of applicants. How can HR possibly evaluate this number of resumes? Most HR managers will admit they can't. They are not sure if they have actually discovered the best applicants to put into the interviewing pile for the hiring manager. Using whatever assessment tool they have, their hope is to get "close enough,"
and maybe the hiring manager can sift and sort all the candidates.
But the hiring manager feels the same way. His unspoken fear is the "garbage in-garbage out" rule. He only interviews those who HR sends his way. Down deep, he is a bit shaky in HR's ability to find the gold nugget in the gravel truck. HR has a thankless and almost impossible job, thankyouverymuch.
Here are some ideas that may help.
- Avoid using employment media that consistently use services that datadump candidates on you. Almost every resume-blasting database service scrapes your job off Monster and CareerBuilder. It is so easy for anyone to send you their resume, they will...qualified or not.
- Find out which media the hiring manager likes. More often than not, he knows which advertising source brings in the best applicants, not the most. We had a situation at JOBDIG sometime ago, where the HR manager told our sales rep that, according to the hiring manager, JOBDIG worked much much better than the local newspaper, yet she was still going to use the daily newspaper because it was still an approved vendor.
- Be aware of those suppliers who share your information with every other service. Every six months or so, Monster announces yet another privacy breach. Why continue to use them?
- Develop internal tools and procedures that help you with each applicant. Ask any jobseeker to identify the most irritating part of the job search process, and they will tell you the lack of followup or contact from the company. This is rude behavior and poor company-employee branding. This will hurt your company in the long term. There are tools you can use that help you manage the process.
- Extend your HR toolkit into the hands of the hiring manager. When we hire sales reps here at JobDig, our hiring manager creates files on each applicant-phone interview, initial interview, etc. He ends up with 4-5 files on each applicant JUST SO he can keep track of where he is in the hiring process. Tools like Applicant Tracking Systems are out there which should get out of the HR department and into the hands of the people who do the hiring.
If you can do this simple things, you will be able to locate your next golden nugget in the pile of resumes that arrived in your in box.
