Sirona Says

The Top 10 Tips for recruiting a team

Like Fabio Capello (the new England football manager for anybody that doesn't know!!), you need to put a new team together.There are of course many things to think about -here are 10 top tips for bringing this team together:

1. Find the best and then hire them. Don’t employ people who just ‘happen to be available at the time,’ find the best you can find and can afford - absolutely critical for your key positions!

2. Never hire just because you have to. This is a hard one to accept - you have only seen 'average' candidates so far, but you need somebody on board asap. Whatever you do, don't recruit the one you don't want - just because they are the best of the average candidates it still only means you are going to hire an average person. Don't forget you want the best - stick to it. It will take a little longer but will be worth it in the end (and save you a fortune!)

Cities beginning with letter 'B' are not good places to work

If you are looking for a new job, don't go to Brighton, Bristol or Belfast to find one. Thats the message from Badenoch & Clark’s latest quarterly Happiness at Work survey. Apparently, office workers in these cities are the least happy at work - I find that strange having worked in two of them, they are not that bad, honestly!!

The survey goes on to say that the unhappiest profession is HR (again!) with nearly a third of them unhappy in their jobs. Maybe that is why so many HR people give recruiters a hard time then - if they are not happy in their jobs, they could be taking it out on recruiters! (Maybe it's just me who has experienced this??)

The staggering figure the survey does highlight is that 48% (yes, nearly half!) of workers want to change jobs in 2008!! There is certainly a few retention AND recruitment issues  to be addressed there then!

Direct Recruiting: explore the channels

There is definitely some frustration with clients currently, with regards to the phrase 'direct recruiting'. While they are happy to moan about lack of candidates, expensive recruitment agencies and how tough it is to recruit staff, they don't want to seem to do anything about their moaning!!  They seem very happy to just continue as they are without looking at other options.  There are of course companies that are creative with their recruitment and it is usually around implementing direct recruiting strategies.

Just to highlight that direct recruiting isn't as daunting as some people think, I have produced a guide called Direct Recruiting: 5 Top Tips for Success to demonstrate that using different channels can really add value to recruiting staff directly. It provides tips on using five different direct channels to hire staff.

Get paid to interview - now thats different!

  I received an invited earlier today from something called Notchup, so I decided to investigate further.

This is the opening lines of the invitation:

NotchUp is a new way to manage your career. Instead of YOU having to sort through hundreds of job postings, NotchUp enables top companies to find you and pay you to interview for available jobs. It's 100% free to join and use. If you're happy at your job, and don't want to look for anything new, you want to be on NotchUp.

Obviously I have not used this (yet!) but there are some guarantees -  the site offers companies their money back and the individuals are not paid for the interviews if: a) The individual no-shows or shows up late for the interview b) The individual fails to take the interview seriously  or c) The individual has lied on their profile

It is certainly different, has anybody used it yet?

If you don't have vision you won't get the value

The majority of organisations are all competing to recruit staff. This will of course vary from part-timers, to graduates, to experienced people and senior executives. But there is a common problem with all of them - there are simply not enough people to fill every position available from the existing traditional skill resources. Many companies simply don't have any vision when it comes to acknowledging this problem.

So what are companies actually doing about this? Well, I believe there to be six types of companies out there at the moment, with differing philosophies on solving this problem. Here they are:

Am I the only recruiter to get wound up by CV's?

For all you job seekers that use job boards and upload CV's to them, I have a simple request..........please save your CV/Resume under your own name and not some abbreviation, generic or "funny" filename!!
Recruiters do spend alot of time looking at CV's on multiple job boards, and should we want to download a CV, it would be so refreshing not to have to amend the filename itself. More importantly, don't job seekers realise that a document called MyCV, does not differentiate them at all!! Let me give some examples of a search I have been doing today - these are the saved name of these 'so-called' important documents:

CV ;   Curriculum_Vitae;   CV_job;   CV_Monster;   CV_John;   CV_AB_2008;   CV151207;   MyCV;   JohnCV, RobertsCV;   Buyer;   LatestCV;   CurrentCV;   Bulletted ;   

My absolute favourite name that somebody names their CV document.....  OOOOPPS !!!

I know I am having a pedantic rant about this attention to detail, but it seems to happen so often I am beginning to wonder why? Surely you produce a CV, then you name it John Smith CV or John Smith 24-1-08 don't you?? Why on earth would you name your CV  OOOOPPS???  While I am on the rant, what is wrong with spell checkers? I reckon there must be because so many people don't use them and leave typos on their CV!!

There, finished now, back to my valium!!

Is it any wonder recruiters go mad?

Reading a good post on small business interview process on HRWorld got me thinking. A recently frustrating experience with a client left me, as the recruiter feeling embarrassed on behalf of my candidate for the time it took for the interview process.

How about this then (bearing in mind the role is for a junior coordinator role, and it is urgent) for a timeline for recruiting this member of staff?

Take brief from Client------relevant cv's provided in 2 days--------1st interview 3 days later (going well so far isn't it!)----------now we start to hit the quicksand!!-----------although very pleased with 1st candidate, wants to see more-----------interviewed more 3 weeks later-----------take 2 to 2nd stage assessment interview (including my original) - we are now in 6th week(!)----------they dither and they can't make a decision so telephone interview the 2 candidates again - in another week!---------- hang in there it gets better!----------then in week 9 the candidates have to have a 'final' telephone interview with a very senior global head of business (remember, it is only a junior position!)---------- during week 10 they discuss the outcome of this interview-------------then finally in week 11 they offer the role to the 'other candidate'----------in week 12 they accept it!!!!!!!

And of course that doesn't include the notice period the candidate had to serve! so in total it took nearly four months to recruit a junior position!!! Is it any wonder that recruiters go mad quicker than other industry sectors??

(And just for reference, my candidate went to a different company interview at 2pm and by 5pm had an offer - she was so good they didn't want to lose her!!)

Any of you had any similar (or worse) stories?

The HR Disconnect

The HR Disconnect

Recently TalentDrain conducted an interesting piece of research, with HR practitioners and 'leaving employees'. In looking at some of the data, it does become clear very quickly that there is certainly a dis-connect when it comes to why HR think employees have left their company, and the 'real reason' from the leaver.
When many companies recruit staff they use some form of analysis or assessment, to help in their process, but it has become apparent that on leaving, there are many companies that rely just on opinion and gut reaction. The cold hard fact is that staff retention is the 'poor cousin' in the whole recruitment cycle within companies. They seem happy to keep recruiting new staff, but pay less importance to why their staff are leaving.
So, looking at some of these gathered facts that HR believed to be true:

The 10 most negative vibes companies give out at interviews

As an employer, recruiting staff is hard enough, but surely it would be easier to attain a higher success level, if you didn't give your job seeking interviewees bad vibes at the interview. Well I am afraid it is a very common occurrence with interviewing managers. I have certainly been on the end of interviews, where the person interviewing has decided to approach a 'warts and all' approach, almost being too honest with the situation at the company. But would I be interested if he told me that I would be working 75 hours a week, and be expected to be on call continuously? ...probably not!!  But it does appear that these examples are exactly what does happen at too many interviews

Here are the Top 10 negative messages from an IRS work survey given to job seekers by employers at interview:

Should your company have a CEO 2.0?

Blogging within companies is finally started coming of age, whether that be for recruiting methods, employee branding, corporate PR or even to staying ahead of your competition. It allows a company to reach outside of its normal sphere into completely new areas, to people who would not normally even go near their websites. If you are using it to recruit for you, that then means a whole new potential pool of talent. If you are just spreading the word about new products/ projects or initiatives, then that means new customers.

How cool is that for a company?