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Are You Getting Your Recruitment Right With The UK In Full Employment?
January 2018 is showing an unemployment rate of only 4.3%. The employment rate (proportion of people aged 16-64 in work) is 75.3%, the joint highest since comparable records began in 1971.
We know this is good news for people who want to work, but what is the impact on small and mid-tier employers?
For most businesses this means there is higher competition for good candidates, more roles available for them to choose from. Employers need to roll out the red carpet to attract jobseekers, not the other way around.
Here are some top tips from People Puzzles, the UK’s leading provider of part-time HR Directors to ensure you are attracting excellent candidates, amongst increased competition:
Champion your culture
Searching for jobs is a laborious task. People want responses, to be treated fairly, to understand the process, and be sold the real job, not a rough approximation of it. Your employer brand can really make you stand out from the competition here. Make sure your adverts, your process, your website and all contact you have with candidates is consistent, is true to who you are, and tells a really good story about your purpose, your team and their potential journey with you.
Commit to what good looks like
If you are trying to hire great candidates, you need to know what good looks like before you start the process. Job descriptions can feel like a paper exercise, but if you aren’t clear what job you need someone to do, and more important the attitudes and behaviours of the person you want to hire, you are not setting yourself up for success.If you ask mid-tier CEOs and MDs to describe their star performers, descriptions include, challenging, hardworking, driven, ambitious, self-starter, proactive. Only 1 in 10 of the words was anything to do with the skills someone had to do the job. Make sure your ‘good’ includes how they do things, rather than just what they can do.
Don’t let an administrator or an agency run it all
Recruitment is time consuming. We all know it is an added hassle on already busy workloads. But when we stand back, we also know the difference it can make between hiring someone excellent or hiring someone average (or less than). If we hand the most important decision about who joins us to a junior or a random third party, we are not in control of the most important decision we could make that week or month. To hire brilliant people, you need someone excellent involved with the process, who understands the business, the vacancy, your culture and your values.
Recruitment starts before the vacancy is identified, and the job description, person spec and advert are much more important documents than we give credit for. They are describing and attracting a new employee. In a market where unemployment is very low, it is worth getting your marketing team or an expert online recruitment advertising service involved, such as MaxAd, Intelligent Online Recruitment specialists, so that you really are an attractive proposition to an in-demand job seeker. You have to get this right!
Consider internal recruitment expertise
If you find recruiting new people to the team to be time consuming, consider getting an internal recruitment resource on a part-time basis. Recruitment is a specialism and isn’t learned overnight. As part of our HR Director offering, we often run recruitment for our clients from the inside, because external recruiters are incentivised to fill a vacancy, not necessarily to find you the right person. We work alongside specialist online recruitment advertising service MaxAd, to maximise the visibility of your vacancy to the right audience.
Run a brilliant recruitment process
Although hiring doesn’t seem a particularly strategic issue to be discussed at board level, whether your business is a high performing team or not, and meeting your business goals certainly is. Most business KPIs and measures are delivered (or not) by individual people in your business performing (or not). That is why the right people are so important.
A brilliant recruitment process weeds out the unskilled and the bad apples, it saves you time so that you increase your hiring percentage and decrease your turnover. It means you don’t have the embarrassment of putting a complete lemon in front of your precious clients. It may include behavioural profiling, structured interviews, skills testing. It may not require much of your time once there is a tried and tested process to bring the right people into the business. When you have that, the chances of hiring right, and meeting your business goals are that much higher.
If you are ever wondering if this effort with recruitment is worth it, just take a minute to reflect on your best and worst performers in your business at the moment. Recruitment is your moment to invest in getting more of the former and fewer of the latter. As a business owner, how can you afford not to get involved?
Ally Maughan, CEO of People Puzzles.
To chat to Ally or her team, visit www.peoplepuzzles.co.uk or email Ally on ally@peoplepuzzles.co.uk
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Placement Success Stories
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MaxAd’s Recruitment Portal
Emails, emails, emails. Constant emails back and forth. Emails in your inbox, your junk, your spam all about recruitment. Is there any wonder good candidates are missed in the plethora of emails that you receive in any one day? Surely there must be a way to make this whole process easier, quicker and more efficient? There is – a recruitment portal!
A portal can be hugely beneficial in the recruitment process as it ensures CVs are all grouped together in the same place without relying on ongoing email communication. MaxAd’s new portal incorporates a single login which can be shared by all relevant members of staff in the process, from HR, to hiring managers and board members. The benefit is that everyone can view applicants at their convenience without having to wait for an email to be forwarded.
Making use of a portal thus greatly reduces the chance of breakdowns in communication and emails being missed in busy times, or being caught in spam filters.
MaxAd has recently implemented its own recruitment portal allowing a hiring client to view a suitable CV, with accompanying screening notes from the Campaign Maximisers, in a near real-time service. This portal gives clients an easy-to-use platform where they can view suitable candidates and action options such as “Like”, “Hold” and “Reject” each candidate – the changes directly correlating to our own internal databases and updating the Campaign Maximisers.
This portal will allow for an improvement in communication between the client and MaxAd, helping MaxAd to work better towards our client’s needs. This improved liaison stops the “Do you like this CV? / What about this CV?” type of questions and opens the gateway for more constructive open questions: “What is this CV missing? / “What is it that excites you about this CV?” and so on. The more detailed feedback from client to MaxAd enables us to undertake more tailored searches to find the ideal candidate. This is especially important in such a competitive market – being able to move quickly and accurately increases the likelihood of a positive result.
A recruitment portal is an efficient way for hiring clients to view CVs and improve their communication with their chosen recruitment party. As great as emails are within recruitment and business in general, we are sitting pretty in the technology age and a portal could just be the next great leap forwards in streamlining the recruitment process.
Read MoreThe challenges of recruiting senior people in the IoT
A talent shortage? Even non-technology businesses are now scouting for IoT talent, as IoT is cross connecting companies and technologies. In a corporate world, where we have a general deficiency of Chief Data Officers, platform architects, security architects, data scientists and software architects – companies need to be open minded, when recruiting for these new roles.
Do not expect to find someone with 10 years experience in this area, one of the key factors to look for, is professionals who possess strong data interpretation skills. Get them to share their examples of data capture, and most importantly what have they done with it!
Above all recruit a candidate that “gets it” in terms of your business and how to engage with new technologies to reach the customer or how to best market new products and services.
Look for the progressive individual and don’t rule out someone who has worked in a free lance capacity or in a start up environment, as their learning is real and recent, they might just be looking for the right long term employed role right now!
As well as tech knowledge and skills (specifically cloud based business solutions) what are the other key skills to look for?
· Commercial and business outlook, interaction with business partners
· Forward thinking mindset – new business models & go-to-market strategies
· Data, data, data – experience of trend modelling
· Understanding of the possible security risks and threats
· Innovator and Implementer
Think about how you can attract and retain the best IoT talent, as their motivation is not necessarily the same as traditional industries…
· Am I working on new, innovative important work
· Who am I working with? Are they recognised as a credible manager or developer
The organisations that recruit the talent now, in preparation for future IoT needs, will be positioned at the forefront of this evolving business landscape.
Creating a strong IoT presence in the company can have massively positive effects, increased market presence, improved productivity and hence the opportunity to dramatically grow in sales and profit.
A talent shortage? Even non-technology businesses are now scouting for IoT talent, as IoT is cross connecting companies and technologies. In a corporate world, where we have a general deficiency of Chief Data Officers, platform architects, security architects, data scientists and software architects – companies need to be open minded, when recruiting for these new roles.
Do not expect to find someone with 10 years experience in this area, one of the key factors to look for, is professionals who possess strong data interpretation skills. Get them to share their examples of data capture, and most importantly what have they done with it!
Above all recruit a candidate that “gets it” in terms of your business and how to engage with new technologies to reach the customer or how to best market new products and services.
Look for the progressive individual and don’t rule out someone who has worked in a free lance capacity or in a start up environment, as their learning is real and recent, they might just be looking for the right long term employed role right now!
As well as tech knowledge and skills (specifically cloud based business solutions) what are the other key skills to look for?
· Commercial and business outlook, interaction with business partners
· Forward thinking mindset – new business models & go-to-market strategies
· Data, data, data – experience of trend modelling
· Understanding of the possible security risks and threats
· Innovator and Implementer
Think about how you can attract and retain the best IoT talent, as their motivation is not necessarily the same as traditional industries…
· Am I working on new, innovative important work
· Who am I working with? Are they recognised as a credible manager or developer
The organisations that recruit the talent now, in preparation for future IoT needs, will be positioned at the forefront of this evolving business landscape.
Creating a strong IoT presence in the company can have massively positive effects; increased market presence, improved productivity and hence the opportunity to dramatically grow in sales and profit.
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