Blog Tape

by | Aug 16, 2017 | Communication

Candidate attraction is not recruitment

How many CVs do you get in response to your job postings?

How many CVs does your recruitment partner send you per live role?

If these are the metrics you use to judge the success of your recruitment strategy, trust me, you’ve got this recruitment thing back to front.

There are now so many mediums and platforms available for people to post adverts that the art of recruitment seems to have been forgotten.

Yes, I said art.

Recruitment used to be seen as an added value to a business, ensuring the best-matched candidates were in front of the right opportunities with everyone aware what the other needed, where transparency and relevant information was bountiful.

This has changed.

This has changed since the recruitment landscape became swamped by every Tom, Dick and Harriette opening an agency, calling themselves ‘professionals’, ‘disruptive’ and so on and getting on the phones selling unregulated BS to unsuspecting clients.

Sorry, I digress.

Candidate attraction is easy I promise you.  I hear clients and recruiters alike moaning (yes, moaning), about the sheer volume of CVs or applications they receive and how most of them aren’t what they’re looking for.

Arranging interviews is even easier; of course, candidates will sell themselves as they think they’re great (nothing wrong with that) and too many people have the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) so they will do a 1st stage interview ‘just in case’.

The hard part is the heavy lifting, the tough bit, the bit that takes a long time if done properly, the bit that most people don’t want to do (yes, even in-house teams) and that’s the exhaustive analysis, bespoke interviewing, behavioural assessment, cultural Fit, skills profiling, and so on which enables you to ascertain if the candidate wants a career or a job, before the decision-making team even meet the candidate.

The other difficult part that people aren’t interested in anymore, is creating a bespoke advert for the role: one that extols the virtues of the opportunity, one that is part marketing, part advertising and most important not one paragraph of gibberish ahead of a copy and paste job description!!

That’s all the art bit right there.

Call me old fashioned, but not wanting to waste anyone’s time by putting a candidate in front of hiring teams based on their CV and a phone call alone doesn’t seem like recruitment to me, focussing on fill rates and CV to interview ratios doesn’t interest me at all, but recruitment as mentioned above and done properly, well that gets my blood pumping even though AI and Millennials will, of course, replace me by Monday…

So next time you’re recruiting, ask yourself this;

Is it quantity or quality that makes you happy ?

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