Why are Placement Consultants for Corporate Companies Important

Posted on July 24, 2018July 24, 2018 by b3brain

Placement consultants play a significant role by being the middleman between corporate companies and candidates seeking a job. Most big companies outsource the responsibilities of recruitment to placement consultants. It becomes the job of the latter to ensure that the right job-seeker is selected for the appropriate role for the company. More and more companies are turning to placement consultants, thus it is about time that we delved deeper into their importance.

Importance of Placement Consultants for Corporate Companies

• Makes Life Easier for their Clients

This is the most basic yet important advantages of hiring placement consultants. Once a company has given the job of employee selection to a job consultant, they can rest assured that the most capable candidates will get through the interviews, tests, and the entire screening process performed by the recruiters. The final interview is, however, often conducted at the company’s office, but only after the candidate has been able to perform up to expectations at the premises of the placement consultant for corporate companies.

• Flexible Hiring

Another plus point of getting placement consultants to hire candidates is that they can be put on the payroll for short-term. If there is a project which requires a specific skill set, the placement consultants can put out advertisements for the situations vacant and find the right people for the job. These candidates are usually on fixed contracts and can be easily let go once the project and contract come to an end.

• Confidentiality

Placement consultants also ensure that the names of their client companies are kept confidential throughout the recruitment process. The candidates are usually only given a broad idea about the firm they are being interviewed for, and are given the complete information at the end of the successful completion of the screening tests and interviews. This confidentiality also makes placement consultants a favourite of corporate companies, regardless if the latter is big or small.

• Existing Database

Placement consultants for corporate companies are usually in possession of a massive database of candidate’s information. Once approached by a company, they can simply look into their database and come up with several candidates who can be considered capable of the positions vacant. Established recruitment companies build up their database over years of being in the industry. The advent of the internet has ensured that all sorts of relevant information which might be useful for the recruiters are just one click away.

• Training

No matter how qualified and deserving a candidate is, they usually require a certain level of training before they can come on-board with the company. Giving the candidate the basic training before they can join the company also comes under the purview of placement consultants.
As is evident from the above points, it is no wonder that the companies are outsourcing their recruitment process to placement consultants. The guarantee of quality makes going to recruitment agencies a value for money option.

How Psychological Assessment Helps Effective Recruiting

Posted on June 11, 2018July 24, 2018 by b3brain

Hiring and training new employees can be an expensive process. To help keep turnover to a minimum, some companies employ psychological testing to ensure that potential employees are suitable before hiring them. Psychological tests, however, are not only used during the hiring process. Some companies use these tests to monitor the continued suitability of employees who have been on the job for some time.

Purpose

The purpose of psychological testing is to make more informed hiring decisions. Many companies consult outside companies to give and assess these tests in an effort to keep the tests unbiased and to help guard against lawsuits. Psychological testing is used to determine, in particular, the ability of potential employees to work under stressful conditions and to assess the potential of a prospective employee to handle the job effectively under those conditions.

Benefits

The use of psychological testing can lower the risk of a company being sued, according to Mike Poskey of ZeroRisk HR, a company that specializes in strategies and solutions for greater employee retention. One reason is that psychological testing can help reduce the number of problem employees. Psychological testing can be particularly useful for jobs with a high-stress factor such as law enforcement, the medical field or firefighting because these tests can help determine a potential employee’s abilities to work under stress. Such screening can help a company hire more suitable employees and save on the cost of high employee turnover.

Validity

No psychological test is ever completely valid or reliable. According to Dr Wade Silverman, of the Florida Psychological Association, psychological tests are “as valid as standard medical tests” and are administered and interpreted by clinical and forensic psychologists. Even then, a proper psychological assessment requires a battery of tests given over time because one or two tests may be contradictory. With this in mind, the validity of tests administered in one sitting is suspect.

Legality

However, use of psychological testing by recruitment agencies may have legal implications, based on the country, state or area the organization belongs to.

Let us take the example of USA. Psychological testing is legal in most states in America, provided the tests are administered by a professional organization or a psychologist. Some states in the USA have specific privacy acts that prevent a company from forcing employees to participate in psychological testing. Terminating an employee who refuses a psychological test in one of these states could result in a lawsuit based upon a breech of privacy law. On the other hand, some states, including California, require psychological exams, particularly in law enforcement and similar fields. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act limits the use of tests by prospective employers, avoid using tests designed to reveal disabilities, particularly schizophrenia and manic depression. Such tests can lead to claims of discrimination based on medical issues.

Therefore, a recruiting agency for companies in India or in any other country is advised to check the law of the land before including psychological tests as a part of their HR process.

Trending Recruitment Practices in India & Road Ahead

Posted on May 22, 2018July 8, 2021 by b3brain

The Indian economy is growing at an attractive rate. As a result, the demand for talented professionals is increasing across many sectors to deliver rapid and sustained growth.

Therefore, Indian recruiters will be facing significant pressure in attracting and retaining top talent. In fact, experts found that 79% of Indian organisations project increased hiring for 2016-17. This seems to be a critical time for Indian recruiters to evolve and be as innovative and nimble as possible. In this article, we have broken down the 5 key recruitment trends happening in India right now and some key actions Indian recruiters can take in this new landscape.

Trend #1. Increasing Gap Between Hiring Volume and Budget

After a positive year with the gap between hiring volume and recruitment budget getting narrower, yesteryears saw this gap get significantly wider. This means Indian recruiting leaders must do more with less and invest wisely check out loanstip.co.uk. This finding from LinkedIn’s India Recruiting Trends report makes it all the more difficult for recruitment teams to overcome the obstacles associated with attracting top quality candidates from high-demand talent pools.

The disparity between volume and budget means recruitment teams need to use creative and cost-efficient ways to meet their goals. Some of the trends that follow are evidence of this, with more companies focusing on less costly channels such as employer branding and employee referrals so as to not break the bank.

Trend #2. Quality of Hire

One of the key priorities for HR consultants in Kolkata for the foreseeable future is optimising ‘quality of hire’. According to LinkedIn, talent leaders believe ‘quality of hire’ is the most valuable performance metric to track hiring effectiveness. While the urgency to fill open positions led to ‘time to fill’ getting the biggest increase in attention over the past year, ‘quality of hire’ remains the most valuable key performance indicator for recruiters.

Common challenge recruiters face is finding the best way to measure this metric. And there seems to be no unified way to measure this, with Indian recruiters tracking ‘quality of hire’ in various different ways. Time to productivity, new hire performance evaluation and early attrition are all used to determine this success metric. Aligned with this, hiring manager effectiveness in identifying the best talent is a key enabler in optimising this metric. This means employers need to build the interviewing capabilities of hiring managers.

Trend #3. Employer Branding

With the increased demand for talent for many economic sectors in India, recruiters are beginning to realise the positive impact a well defined and consistently communicated employer brand can have in attracting top candidates. With senior leadership starting to take a keen interest in their companies’ employer brands, this is starting to grow as a big priority.

Almost every recruiting agency for companies in India believes that recruiters need to start building cross-functional relationships, specifically with marketing. This will help them in order to build attractive employer brands and gain a competitive edge. According to LinkedIn’s report, social media is on the biggest upward trend when it comes to employer branding tools, with traditional channels like LinkedIn and websites falling in popularity. Also becoming more popular is using employees as brand ambassadors who can help communicate a distinguished employer brand.

Trend #4. Employee Referrals

Using employees as brand ambassadors is the perfect segue into the next big Indian trend: employee referrals. Employee referrals as a source of hire in India have grown in size and importance, especially in the last year. Reasons for this include the need to reduce cost per hire and getting access to passive talent that would be otherwise not available for recruiters. A big finding in the LinkedIn study was that India is leveraging employee referrals extremely well and that they actually lead usage in this across the world.

If an organization is not using employee referrals as one of its main sources of hire, it needs to start experimenting with this immediately as it is fast becoming a key trend in the Indian recruitment market. Recruiters may face some challenges in getting internal buy-in as well as developing one that incorporates current technology (digital and mobile) but these programmes can drastically improve candidate quality, quality of hire and employee retention. The organization should be sure to communicate to employees what they can expect from the employee referral programme and make sure to incentivise them with rewards.

Trend #5. Analytics

Given that Big Data has swept into every industry and has become the key basis of competition and growth for enterprises of all sizes, it comes as no surprise that the integration of talent analytics and key hiring decisions is becoming a top priority. According to some experts, 65% of Indian companies now have dedicated team members for talent assessments, data analytics and technology.

That being said, many companies lack the ability to effectively crunch the data. Recruitment teams need to start building an in-house capability to drive data-based hiring by educating themselves on best practices, tools and techniques, as well as selecting the metrics that really matter. Glassdoor recommends some key metrics one can measure around the quality of hires, influence over hires, and retention, which should serve as a good starting point.

These are the 5 biggest recruitment trends that India recruiters need to look out for.