Indeed,
no asset for an organization is as powerful and productive as talent. Getting
the right talent is the key to taking the organization on the growth path.
Hiring the right talent is a talent in itself. When an organization finds the
right people for the right work, it has a winner on its hands.
Although
hiring and recruiting are talked about in equal terms, a few HR
professionals make a distinction between the two. A quick look at these:
Hiring
is considered more roundabout and comprehensive than recruiting, which is
considered a part of the entire process of taking an employee into an
organization. In other words, while hiring includes all the steps needed to
take an employee for employment in an organization starting from assessing the
need for the particular employee to taking all the necessary steps needed for
it; recruitment is that step in which the ideal candidate is filtered and taken
up for further steps. This means that at some point, these two converge,
although technically they are different in the sense mentioned. For this
discussion, the two are used together, with some necessary overlaps.
Back
to best practices in hiring and recruiting, some best practices related to
hiring and recruiting include the following:
Seeking references:
Although
this practice is as old as the hills, it is still a reliable best practice for
hiring. There are two components of this technique for hiring:
Employee
referral program: This is one of the popular methods of seeking out candidates.
When your own employee has known a friend or a past colleague, preferably the
latter, it is a great reference to have about the potential candidate. If an
employee feels, during the course of her interaction with peers, that a certain
acquaintance’s behavior or approach to work is impressive, it means half the
job is done.
We
would all have come across a person at a workplace that would have made an
impression on us. Let us say I work in the retail industry, and my organization
is looking to hire. It asks me if I can think of someone who could be a good
candidate for the job. I immediately think of the really friendly and amiable
salesperson I happened to bump into at the ice-cream counter when I had taken
my daughter there some time back. I may have been impressed by the salesperson’s
demeanor, or her ability to make friends, or simply anything else.
That
person may not in any way be related to me, but I immediately see a fit between
her attitude, outlook and presentation skills and the requirement that my
organization’s HR is seeking to fill. Once I have made the reference and got to
that salesperson, it is up to HR to take the next steps.
This
is how an employee referral program can bring out completely remotely connected
persons together. The surest guarantee that my organization has about the
candidate is that I think highly of her professional outlook. A good reference
from an employee eliminates a laborious and time-consuming step for HR. If
everything works well, there is no reason for the organization not to feel
great about what I have done for them. I have helped them bring in a valuable
resource to the organization who will utilize her wonderful skills for our
good.
Peer-to-peer
recruiting:
This
is another method that is
used by HR to zero in on the exact fit of the organization’s choice. It is a
variation from the employee referral method. Where it differs from the method
just mentioned is that in peer-to-peer recruiting, the management decides on a
candidate who is generally very well-known to the organization or in the
industry, and could also be from the competition. The organization may have had
a good experience in working with that person in some or another way, be it as
a vendor, outsourcing partner, client, or just anything. Where this method
differs is that the management decides on the candidate and then takes the team
into confidence about the reasons for recruiting that candidate.
This
approach differs from referrals in another sense. In this latter technique, the
management takes the lead in focusing on what it believes is the ideal
candidate for its organization. It is highly effective because the decision to
hire this candidate involves the team and is thus a collective, consultative
decision in which differences in the opinions of the different stakeholders are
first ironed out and only then the recruiting takes place. One limitation of
this technique is that it is only suited for very high positions in an
organization. That is why it is generally employed only when the organization
needs a leader or a person in a very senior position.
Hiring from
within:
Selecting
a candidate from within the organization is a great cost and time saver for the
organization and is almost certainly guaranteed to give the best results. When
a candidate that is needed for a certain position is available within the
organization, a whole lot of procedures and processes are automatically
eliminated, making the job easier, faster and more effective. The candidate is
already familiar with the organization. Nothing new needs to be taught to her,
and very importantly, HR and management know how to motivate her.
However,
the drawback of this best practice is that HR has to be prudent in taking the
suitable person for a requirement. If hiring from within means offering an
employee an opportunity to try something new and take up more challenges and
creating opportunities for growth; it is well and good and works great.
However, if HR falters in this and gives something a person is not interested
in or is unsuited for; it will have the opposite effect and will lead to
unnecessary wastage of resources. It will also lead to bad blood between the
organization and the employee, with the employee feeling that something was thrust
upon her, and the organization believing that it offered the best opportunity
which the employee failed to utilize.
Ask for
specific examples in which the employee has demonstrated her required skills: A very
effective best practice for hiring and recruiting is to test the candidate’s
stated abilities by asking her to provide demonstrable and verifiable examples
of the same at the time of the interview. This will be a great credential to
have in a candidate. It will also show the reliability of the candidate,
because if the candidate says she has done something in her career, but is not
able to convincingly prove it; it reflects on her uprightness.
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