Today Job Portals have become an excellent platform to find new candidates for employers. As there are no learning curves involved, it becomes quite easy for organizations of all sizes to work on job portals and find candidates with required qualification criteria.

There are multiple job portals including ones, which operate on niche areas of talent search. An SME organisation generally subscribes to 1 job portal which can be long term association or need based.

SME’s generally do not have high volume of recruitment compared to their larger counterparts and hence are more inclined to invest in moderate subscription charges. As it can be seen from the subscription figures above, obtained from a leading job portal, you can find that the number of CVs that can be accessed even with the highest monthly subscription of INR 25500 is around 2000 with one month validity. And each time a CV is accessed the number of CV access correspondingly gets reduced.

Also very few amount of postings can be done even with the highest subscription package. Yes, there are customised options also available for larger CV searches, but the costs will also be skyrocketing.

So an SME has to spend a decent sum of money for a sizeable number of CV access. Again a Team of trained professionals has to be deputed to do the CV search diligently keeping in mind the job requirements. The amount of time and effort the professional persons will spend will also have to be taken under consideration as a cost of recruitment. If the job role is tricky, then the costs of time and effort are bound to increase. In many SME organisations, in absence of trained recruitment professionals, goof ups happen during the process of candidate’s CV searching.

Moreover there are also lot efforts involved in writing proper job descriptions, multiple levels of interaction with the candidates, making the prospective candidate understand the value proposition involved with the proposed job roles and responsibilities and finally on boarding the candidate.
Unless a group of Professionally Educated & Experienced persons are involved in the entire process, expected results might not be achieved resulting in a wrong hire. And as we all know, trained and experienced professionals come with a cost.
And even after so much effort, an SME organisation is not sure that he had been able to locate the best talent for his needs.
In comparison to the above scenario, if an SME organisation hires a seasoned Recruitment Consultancy, they will not have to bear so much hassle. Let’s understand the reasons briefly:

1. The placement agency will not limit itself just to the subscription of one job portal. They will have subscription to multiple job portals and even the niche ones. The agencies invest a large sum of money for the subscriptions and they can access huge number of CVs to the tune of lacs of candidates
2. The recruitment agency will be connected with large number of professionals in Social Media and they will have a wider reach because of their connections and regular campaigns in leading professional Social Media sites Like Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter
3. There will be a team of experienced people well versed with complex recruitment scenario to execute the entire chain of tasks starting from understanding the job requirement from the organisation till on-boarding of the candidate.
4. Commitment to deliver on time resulting in faster on boarding
5. If a candidate leaves the job within a stipulated period, the placement agency guarantees a free replacement
6. As the leading recruitment consultancies handle complex recruitment scenarios and candidate profile, they are far more adept in gauging attitude of prospective employees to determine, whether they will fit the company culture
7. Recruitment Consultants dig out quality talents who are passive candidates and are not found in job portals, or are not willing for a job change. A seasoned recruiter can convince him / her to switch jobs by highlighting the value proposition of the offered position resulting in high quality talent on boarding for your organisation

SME’s might have to shell out some amount of money to on board a trusted recruitment agency. But it’s worth every penny because you are leaving nothing to chance in making key hiring decisions.

Employing the best talent is the most important aspect for any successful organization. Diversity in hiring and employment helps in making a strong team of highly talented professionals who can take up any sorts of challenge at work.

Research done by McKinsey reveals that highly diverse organizations are more profitable.

Well, Human beings are naturally biased about every aspects of life like food, dressing and parenting etc. But when it comes to HR profession and recruitment of the best talent then unbiased recruitment becomes the top priority.

Biased recruitment is a big challenge for the skilled and talented candidates and it also harms an organisation’s ability to respond to more complex stakeholder demands. In the realm of HR it affects not only who and how they recruit, but also why?

Recruiters may unintentionally align with candidates preferred interests or reject them due to preconceived notions about social status, caste, gender or ethnicity.HR professionals are doing their best to be impartial but are hampered by the nature of human experience.

Let’s have a look how Seasoned Recruiters follow the strategies of unbiased Recruitment:

Standardize interviews

Unstructured Interviews lack defined questions and due to that a candidate’s experience and expertise are not revealed organically through conversation and it leads to failure in job. On the other hand, Professional Recruiters follow structured Interviews, where a candidate is asked the same set of defined questions. It allows to “standardize the interview process” and “minimize the bias” by allowing Recruiters to “focus on the factors that have a direct impact on performance of the candidate. So, structured interviews are nearly twice as effective at predicting actual job performance.

Usage of Technology to Eliminate Bias

Based on what parameters it will be predicted that HR team is treating all resumes fairly as everyone in the department has their own personal bias? It all starts with name-blindness. Due to this reason some Recruiters have adopted a system where resumes can be submitted digitally or scanned into a software solution like ADP Recruiting Management’s new Visual Search, which then sorts the documents by skill rather than name, gender, age or ethnicity. By this type of recruiting tool, top candidates can be more easily identified, and by changing the targeted skill set recruiters can easily access different portions of the candidate pool.

Seek Help from Outside Experts

When it comes to unbiased recruitment, Organizations can seek advice from professionally trained Recruitment agencies who can guide them to:

• To organise awareness training to educate the employees regarding company values and ethics
• To do job posting in better way by highlighting stereotypically gendered words and verbs
• To organise work sample tests to judge the quality of the talented candidates
• To Control for personal feelings about a particular candidate by giving likability a numerical score
• To set up Effective pay systems for both Men and Women. It includes Strong policy to ensure that there is
no bias in pay and they are checked against a formalized policy.

Using Video Interview Process

Video Interviews with multiple participants can be helpful in removing bias from Recruitment. As video interviews are viewed by multiple people, and the presence of multiple people can act as a check-and-balance to inherent biases. This sort of interview gives indications about a job candidate’s attractiveness, accent, speech modulation and other characteristics. It can also be far more cost-effective than transporting job candidates for face to face interviews.

So, Companies with structured and well defined hiring process can avoid bias and can hire the best talent for the suitable post. Companies that try to eliminate those biases from their hiring processes are really benefitted from the economic and cultural advantages and can form a diverse workforce for the future.

Evolving Technology plays an important role in the strategies of companies regarding Talent Research and Hiring Process. Technological advances are affecting our world and our business operations also need to follow modern strategies for growth. Today, the world of Recruitment has mostly gone digital. To hire and retain the best talent in the team is the main mantra of a successful business.

The age of digital recruitment depends upon certain parameters:

Seeking the best candidate through online job portals

Recruiters use online job portals to advertise their job Openings and motivate candidates to submit their resumes. Job boards offer huge database of resumes and recruiters can easily find out the suitable candidate. It also helps the recruiters in reducing the screening time before hiring. Portals offer Recruiters and candidates to find each other. Recruiters can get qualified resumes and candidates can get notifications regarding new opportunities. Some job portals serve a niche purpose of talent hunt based on location, experience, skills and industry.

Unlike many SMEs, Seasoned Recruitment firms invest in costly subscriptions of multiple job portals with huge amount of candidate presence and niche talent. This helps the placement agencies to suggest the perfect candidate to organizations with less chances of error

Recruiter Chat bots & automated audio interview software

Recruiter Chatbots makes the life of a placement consultant easier by not having to devote a trained resource for answering queries of candidates 24/7. The Chatbots provide real time interactions, feedback and suggestions to prospective candidates, thereby improving their engagement experience. Automated Audio interview software such as Reckrut helps to reach thousands of prospective candidates in a very short time span through custom recorded audio messages with job descriptions and facility for candidates to select particular options to highlight their choices. The tools provide powerful analytics on the automated calls which lets a recruitment agency sort the perfect candidate profiles for their customers. The resulting benefit is that the recruitment agency reaches a wide base of prospective candidates in lesser time and clients are happy that they have not missed out on any eligible profiles

Smart usage of social media

Tech savvy social media recruitment consultants reach candidates at faster mode and at lower cost. The response rate is high when jobs are posted on social media. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook are common platforms where jobs can be posted and the information spreads like wildfire and getting the right candidate becomes much easier. Candidates who usually don’t visit job boards but having niche skill-sets and outstanding capability can easily be reached via social media. Social network helps the recruiter to do candidates background verification of academically, professionally, culturally and socially.

Data analytics

Due to technological evolution, the overall recruitment process has also witnessed a transformation. Technology has replaced the hiring processes globally. Recruiters are following innovative hiring strategies to tap the best talent. As social media is improving recruitment process, likewise, technologies such as big data analytics have also been reshaping the overall process of recruitment.

And now, big data analytics is the latest trend that has a great impact in the recruitment industry. Its rising demand is now bringing in the world of social media and big data analytics much closer than before. Companies are dependent on big data and social recruitment campaigns to make critical hiring decisions.

Big Data is a tool that helps recruitment agencies to analyse, gather and structure the data generated on social media, unstructured information on public domain and on their existing data repositories. Social media is utilizing big data to help organizations to tap passive talent, and most productive human resources who can be a best fit for the job.

The Big data algorithms apart from data from social media sources, matches various criteria, previous placement record, resume content, discussion topics, geography, educational credentials & institutions, industry, credit score and innumerable custom criteria to provide an unbiased fitment score of a candidate for a particular job.

Some Seasoned placement agencies know how to work with big data tools and social media platforms to come at an unbiased conclusion for placing the right candidate at the right job. Instead of searching few resumes and coming to a judgement, the said recruitment agencies can analyse and scan thousands of resumes and candidate profile and information with these tools and that too in a very short time window. The results of this comprehensive exercise are a far more dependable and logical then conventional profile searches.

The factors and trends mentioned above will impact quality hiring in 2017 and beyond. As the technology is changing, SMEs need to partner with recruitment agencies who are investing in cutting edge technology to spot the best talent for their organization.

Attitude has a strong link between the workplace, employee happiness and their productivity.

A positive attitude in the workplace helps the employees to complete tasks faster and in a better manner. Even performance of employees also depends on the good relationship they share with their staffs and higher ups. Positive attitude helps to create a positive and joyful environment at workplace and tends to drive the employees to achieve their goals easily.

But in some cases employees generally fail at their new job role due to attitude and behavioural issues. It is bit hard to judge the candidate’s attitude from couple of short and meetings and interviews.
Employees with wining and positive attitude can adjust easily. They motivate themselves and other colleagues. Since they have high emotional intelligence, it is easy to train them on skills needed for job role but it is impossible to train someone to have a good attitude. Finding a prospective employee with positive attitude is of utmost importance.

Psychological contract is a relation between employee and employer. If the contract breaks down, then employees think that their employer is unfair to them and it leads to a negative workplace attitude. A seasoned recruiter can easily spot a prospective candidate who might be prone to be having a suspicious mind-set towards his employers by posing behavioural based questions

Personal issues of prospective employees may affect their morale in their future workplace. This may be due to family or social problems which may bring negativity to the work place ultimately nose-diving the overall team performance. An experienced placement consultant can dig a lot of important information from a prospective candidate during a friendly one to one discussion, simulating multiple scenarios that will expose their true underlying values and actual conditions.

A seasoned placement consultant can identify attitude issues of prospective employees by:

A) Identifying candidates who have consistently shifted jobs in very short duration of their career graph.

B) Engaging in detailed discussion with the candidate about his past jobs, noting down key points and delve deep on the information provided to unearth even the slightest of anomalies

C) Focusing on the data about the reasons for which the candidates changed their jobs, their interaction with their colleagues and superiors, posing tactical questions and reviewing their responses, asking for examples & clarifications and finally probing each and every data points from the candidate.

D) Asking behavioural based questions and scenarios emulating tactical riddles that reveal a person’s true colour and compels him to choose one way or the other. The placement consultant can easily red flag those persons who refuse to take a stand.

E) Crosschecking the references given by the prospective employees and making sure that the right person in the company is approached for verification. The entire process is documented by the placement consultant in order to spot any inconsistencies on the part of the prospective employee.

F) Performing detailed background verification of their social, criminal and sometimes their economic profiles along with their educational and professional credentials to uncover any missing pattern or link that had been so far elusive.

G) Deeply studying the body language, conversation patterns to spot negative mind-set.

It is imperative for organisations to find talent who are having balanced traits of competence and good attitudes as ultimately the progress or downfall of an organisation depends on diplomatic rational decisions which can only be taken by talented individuals with a positive mind.

Acquiring quality talent at key positions in a business is a complicated process which, at most of the times are fraught with risks. The selected candidate may perform excellent or he or she might turn out to be a dud.

So, utmost caution has to be exercised during selection and subsequent on-boarding of a candidate to weed out the undeserving ones and welcoming the performer.

Many a times this entire process becomes cumbersome and a time taking affair for organizations who works on limited HR budgets. These types of problems are mostly evident in SME sectors which run on lot of operating constraints such as quality manpower, systems and processes with respect to talent acquisition and recruitment.

Larger organizations generally don’t feel the heat as they already have proper recruitment systems and processes in place with a brand name and reputation. That’s why it’s easier for them to attract quality human resource.

But in today’s competitive market dynamics the SMEs seldom has to out manoeuvre their larger compatriots in order to sustain their business and for this, regular hiring of key personnel is a pre-requisite. The entire process has to be awfully fast else either the vacant position will remain unfilled as well as shortlisted quality candidates will move to greener pastures.

The pertinent question is how to speed up the talent acquisition process. Let’s concentrate on 5 points which might shed some light on the riddle.

A) Target the Right Placement Agency – It’s always a safe bet to go for specialised recruitment firms who operate on specific sectors rather than taking the “Jack of all trades, master of none approach”. The recruitment firm which works with a niche sector approach are likely to have right connections both in quality and quantity, instead of a generic one

B) Faster Screening of Candidates – There can only be two outcomes in the selection process either a positive or a negative verdict for a candidate. A specialised recruitment firm with their deep expertise can screen candidates with in short time window taking care of due diligence protocols thereby ultimately increasing the professionalism quotient of the organization

C) Ask the Right Questions – The prospective candidate’s talent quotient can be gauged by asking proper questions that will highlight his attitude, skills, intelligence, knowledge & mind-set. A seasoned recruiter armed with NLP techniques can deftly place the right questions in front of the candidates and easily spot the deviations, in less interview cycles, thereby helping organizations narrow down on the perfect choice in lesser time.

D) Stick to One Recruiter – The hiring organizations most of the time make a blunder by employing multiple recruitment agencies. The result of this exercise leads to targeting of same candidate by multiple Recruitment Consultants / Agencies. Also due to multi-vendor engagement, the hiring manager has to deal with large number of applications as well as recruitment vendors. The result is a process that ultimately becomes cumbersome and time consuming resulting in not so desirable results. Hence exclusivity should be given to a Placement Agency for a perfect talent search

E) Referrals – This route can be employed to hire quality candidates at a faster pace. You need a good recruitment firm to design and maintain a professional referral program. Referrals can be from existing employees, clients, suppliers and other business partners. The recruitment agency can be partially employed to write professional job descriptions, assessing the candidate’s mettle and organizing the recruitment process. This will make the entire recruitment process unbiased.

By following these modalities, SMEs can greatly boost up their talent acquisition mechanism thereby bringing in innovation and agility to succeed in this ever changing world of business.