October Blog Creating a Recruitment Strategy: How to make sure you hire the right people the first time

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1 October Blog Creating a Recruitment Strategy: How to make sure you hire the right people the first time Introduction The people you employ are the lifeblood of your business. Without them you have no service and no product because they provide the service and sell the product. Yet, it is surprising how many companies launch themselves into recruiting for their company s most important asset and actually do very little preparation to ensure that they attract and select the right people. Hiring the wrong people is expensive in terms of the time taken to read through CV s, interview candidates, etc., etc. But is even more expensive is the damage a person with an inappropriate level of skill can do for your company s reputation. Some companies take a laissez faire attitude to this, thinking that if someone doesn t work out, they will simply replace them. However, a high staff turnover can be extremely unsettling to your existing workforce on a wide range of levels and therefore, it not a good business policy. The series is written by Helen Wilson, Sales Director of GPRS. GPRS is an award winning independent recruitment consultancy specialising in the Work Based Learning & Training Sector. GPRS is Investors in People Gold Standard, which is an indicator for high performance and an Investors in People Champion. Helen has over 20 years experience in recruitment and selection at all levels and across many, many sectors. Helen possesses the CIPD s Advanced Programme in the Psychology of Management and has over 10 years experience in writing Induction and Management Programmes in line with Investors in People. Creating a Recruitment Strategy & Plan Once you ve done the planning as detailed in the first blog, like every other project, in order for it to run smoothly you need to have some sort of plan and these are the main considerations: Timescales Decision makers that will be involved in the interview process Interview times and dates Speed of response Timescales Most companies have a reason for recruiting: A new contract Someone leaving Extra learners etc., etc.

2 Therefore, you need to consider when you want someone to start. Often when we ask our clients when they want someone to start they tell us in a month s time. That means that unless the candidate is between jobs when they interview, they will be unable to start then. If a candidate is in employment, it is likely they need to give a month s notice so you need to work your way back from that. To do this you need to consider: How long will it take to generate CV s from an agency or from advertising? Who needs to be involved in the interviews? The candidate availability How long will it take to generate CV s from an agency or from advertising? For a role that isn t too hard to fill, a good agency should have CV s with you in about 48 hours. If you are placing your own advert, you can still be receiving CV s several weeks later. These timescales need to be considered. Using advertising is a bit like having your fingers crossed hoping the right person with the right skills will be looking for another role and your advert will catch their eye you can t guarantee a response and you don t exactly know when that response will be. However, some companies do have a great response from the job boards. Using an agency should be much quicker as they usually have a database of candidates. However, if the agency doesn t specialise in your sector, they won t have a database of suitable candidates and they will probably have to advertise too. Who needs to be involved in the interviews? It is important to be aware of who will need to be involved in the selection process and what their availability for interview is going to be. Will the interviewers be involved in every stage of the interview process or will someone do the initial interview and someone else be involved in the final stages? Candidates often accept other roles whilst several interviewers have to co-ordinate their diaries in order to meet the candidate. Doing this in advance prevents this happening. The Candidate Availability Another consideration needs to be the availability of the candidates. If your candidate is in employment, quite often they have to give a week s notice to book a day off for holiday. It is advisable to be flexible with interview times and therefore we suggest: Before work During lunchtimes After work Weekends

3 Final Note on Timescales As a recruiter it is very frustrating when you introduce candidates that are ideal for a role to a client and because the client hasn t worked out a timeline for their recruitment, or not allocated the time in their diaries to interview candidates or not co-ordinated the diaries, if several people are involved in the interview process. The outcome is that the candidate has been introduced to the client because they are good. If a candidate is actively seeking a change of career, then they will likely to have other interviews lined up, probably with our client s competitor. Because the client is disorganised, the candidate gets fed up with waiting to hear they have been selected for interview and the candidate accepts other interviews. Clients are always disappointed to hear from us that the candidate they most wanted to meet has declined the interview because they have accepted a role with another company, often their competitor. Another point to consider is that if you read most companies websites you will notice that they are focused on providing an exceptional service, yet if a candidate has to wait weeks to hear back from a company, this could hardly be classed as exceptional service. Due to the buoyancy of the economy, candidates are in the driving seat as they have choices, therefore if you wish them to choose your company, you need to make sure the experience they have is positive and professional. Waiting weeks to hear about a role is neither a positive nor professional experience for a candidate. Where to Find Candidates In the first blog we talked about planning what you are looking for in terms in skills, knowledge and experience. In the second blog we have talked about putting a timescale in place. Now we are going to look at where to find your candidates. There are many avenues available to you. The most commonly used are: Recruitment Agencies Job Boards LinkedIn Recruitment Agencies Advantages and Disadvantages All agencies will charge you a fee for finding a candidate. Obviously, that is how they make their money; just as your company will have some form of revenue stream otherwise it will not be viable.

4 Interestingly, the last time I looked, the UK Recruitment Industry was worth about 30bn to the British economy. The reason the Recruitment Industry is so successful is because the Recruitment Industry does have a vital role to play in providing recruitment solutions. Without the right people in place with the right skills, companies cannot function nor progress and so companies that need to keep up their levels of productivity, often find recruitment agencies the most cost effective solution. A well established agency will have a well established database of candidates that they have built up. This means that they don t have to sit around waiting for candidates to apply to advertisements so can get candidates to you quicker. GPRS s database has been growing daily since our inception in 2007 and now consists of 50,000 work based learning and training candidates. If an agency specialises in a particular sector, as GPRS specialises in the work based learning and training sector, they too will have a database of relevant candidates, which of course will again mean that they can get candidates to you quickly. Many agencies, like GPRS advertise your roles free of charge on major job boards. GPRS advertise across in excess of 30 different job boards. This means that our clients vacancies are seen by an extensive candidate audience. This extensive advertising coverage is prohibitively expensive for most companies. GPRS also have a search facility on the job boards, which means that even if candidates don t view their advertisements on the job board, they can search the job boards for candidates who have uploaded their CV s. This helps us reach passive candidates who may not have been able to search the job boards for advertised roles recently. Some agencies, like GPRS work on a no candidate no fee basis. This means that if they are unable to find you the right candidate for your role, they will not charge you. GPRS offer a three month replacement guarantee. This means that if within three months of joining a client company, a candidate leaves or proves to be unsuitable, GPRS will find the company a free replacement. Some other companies do offer this.

5 How to spot a great Recruitment Agency? Recruitment Agencies often receive bad press. This is because often people set up an employment agency with little or no formal and recruitment and selection training. This means they may not be aware of the laws relating to the recruitment industry and therefore may not operate professionally nr ethically. However, there are some things you can look for before you begin to work with an agency: The recruitment agency specialises in the sector in which you operate so they understand the skills, qualifications and experience needed by candidates in order to be able to do the role for which they are being employed. Your Account Manager is professionally trained with the REC or APSCO, or a similar industry body so they have been professionally taught recruitment and selection techniques. Their logos will probably be on their website. Many larger companies do have their own in house training which is often excellent. The rule of thumb is to look for a recruitment company that offers its staff a training programme. A recruitment company must always send you their Terms of Business. A recruitment agency s Terms of Business should state clearly what their obligations are to you their client and what the recruitment agency s obligations are to them. It is a legal requirement that a recruitment company issues Terms of Business on receipt of a role with a new client. Your Account Manager spends time with the client to take a thorough vacancy from to ensure they totally understand EXACTLY what it is you are looking for in a candidate. Even if you have a Job Description or Person Specification, the Account Manager should still take time to go through it with you to check their understanding. This will prevent you being sent inaccurate CV s.

6 Interestingly, some companies do not want to spent time with a recruitment agency so that a thorough vacancy can be obtained and then blame the recruitment agency for not putting the right candidates forward. I liken this to sending someone shopping for the ingredients to make a cake. If you were asked to get flour you wouldn t know whether it was self raising or plain, wholemeal or white. Without the correct list of ingredients and the amounts in which they are needed failure is likely. Your Account Manager should take to time find out what sells your company through asking you intelligent questions. Good candidates are usually in work and may be needed to be tempted away from their present employer. All the candidates that are introduced to your company for the role should have been spoken to and fully screened to assess their suitability for the role. Frighteningly, our clients have told us of candidates that when interviewed by them that were submitted through another agency, say that the first time they spoke to the agency that introduced them, was to inform them they had an interview with the client. This obviously means that the candidate hadn t been screened to assess their suitability, nor their consent gained, which is highly unethical. The candidate should be asked for their permission to have their CV submitted to the client. This is something that GPRS feel very strongly about and as only one of the 15% of the recruitment companies in the UK who are REC Audited, all GPRS s candidates following expression of interest in a client s role and having agreed to be submitted, are sent a link to complete to confirm their consent. The candidates you receive through an agency should be accurately matched for the role for which you are recruiting. Only well trained Account Managers with your sector experience, will be able to achieve this. If you do receive CV s that are inaccurate, spend time with your Account Manager and explain where they have gone wrong. If the CV s are still wrong, change agencies. All the candidates you interview should be thoroughly briefed on the role and know exactly what the role entails and therefore be interested. They must be aware of the salary you are paying and have similar salary expectations. This prevents you wasting your valuable time interviewing candidates who believe the role is different to the one you are trying to fill, or who are on a higher salary already than you are offering, or in an inconvenient location. Often with agencies, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Does the recruitment agency ask the right questions about your role which demonstrates an understanding of your sector? Are the CV s they send accurately matched.

7 Job Boards Job boards can be prohibitively expensive and cannot guarantee results. You may have to advertise a role several times; before you find the candidates that you are looking for. It is therefore vital that before placing advertisements on the job boards you are all set up as far as your planning and strategy are concerned. You also need to take into consideration the time of the year you advertise. School holidays such as Summer, Easter, Half Terms and Christmas often yield poorer results. Responses should be dealt with promptly to avoid you losing candidates to competitors who are quicker off the mark and snap the candidates up for interviews quicker. Remember, first impressions are important. Job Boards can be a very effective method of generating candidates and can produce just the type of candidates that you are looking for. However, unlike using agencies, you do still have to read through CV and application letters before creating a shortlist of the candidates you d like to meet. I d recommend telephone screening candidates first as many candidates often send multiple applications and may not remember your role, or the reason why they applied. Also, just because you receive an application, doesn t mean that the candidate is suitable. I would estimate that we have to look at 10 job board applicants to find one suitable candidate. That s time consuming and why companies often use agencies rather than recruit themselves. When screening candidates over the phone, make a list of all the criteria on the Person Specification and systematically ask the candidate how they match each criteria. For instance, We are looking for Trainers with experience of working with year olds. What experience do you have working with this age group? This will save you a huge amount of time.

8 LinkedIn The major benefit to LinkedIn is that it is free. However, it can be extremely time consuming to trawl through in order to find people. Also, once you ve sent an invitation to someone, there is no guarantee that they will accept your invitation and if they do accept your invitation, if you then approach them about a role, there is no guarantee they will be interested. You need to have some sort of tracking system in place so you can see who and when you sent invites to and then follow up if they don t respond. You also need to have an overview of the role you are approaching them about for when they respond so you can send something to them to generate their interest. Selling Your Role, Your Company and the Opportunity As I mentioned earlier, candidates are very much in the driving seat at the moment so when giving your vacancy to a Recruitment Agency or advertising it, you need to put some thought into what actually makes the role, the company and the opportunity an attractive proposition for a candidate? Why would a candidate want to leave their existing employer to work for you? Within the work based learning and training sector the type of things that attract candidates to one role, or leave another are: The company offers continual professional development Mileage allowance Mileage paid from home The size of caseload How far they have to travel to learners Generic Selling Points are: Your company s reputation within its sector Well known clients - give your company credibility Formal career structure Size of the company some people are attracted to larger companies, others to smaller A company s progress how they have progressed and grown Ofsted status Accreditations such as Investors in People

9 Summary Take time to plan your recruitment and the timescales you need to work to. Look carefully into your chosen method of recruitment and how quickly you need someone in place before jumping in. Do some research into an recruitment agency before you decide to work with them. Do they understand your sector? Are they professionally trained? If the recruitment agency sends you inaccurately matched CV s, tell them where they are going wrong and allow them to search again. If still inaccurate, this is unacceptable so move on. When candidates apply to you directly, conduct a telephone interview first to prevent you wasting time interviewing unsuitable candidates. Make a list of the criteria the ideal candidate will possess and design questions to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Be flexible when you recruit. What are the absolute essentials that you need? What are the nice to haves? What gaps can you provide through training. Put thought into what your company s selling points are. Also, what sells the company, the role and the opportunity? Use that information to attract candidates. The moral of the story is; be prepared and then you will be organised and the candidate s impression of your company will be good.