Challenging times for recruitment

Successfully landing the people that will make a difference to your business.

Post Covid, recruiting is harder than ever. It is widely recognised, that there is a genuine shortage of good candidates. They are also cautious about moving, in a changeable and volatile economic climate, preferring to stay in a known environment.  Conversely, there are more applications for advertised jobs, as it has never been easier to apply. Once registered on a Job Board, you can comfortably send in 20 online applications in an hour, whilst watching your favourite TV programme.  Employers find themselves deluged by unsuitable candidates. Any good candidates can be missed in the avalanche of applications. This is unproductive and demoralising for your resourcing teams.

 

Businesses that are successfully finding the right candidates, have revised their strategy to capture the good ones in a timely manner, before some-one else does. This requires quick and effective reviewing of applications and the ability to act decisively with the candidates you want to progress. Successful resourcing teams will take the initiative to speak to candidates (direct phone contact, not another email!) out of office hours, diligent working candidates are unlikely to want to discuss applications in their workplace.

Advertising and staff time are expensive resources that you should be optimising. Plan your recruitment campaigns to provide sufficient applicants of the right quality. Equally important is having the recruitment and interview process ready to progress good applicants through to offer stage without any delays. For this you will need your line managers to be committed to the process and to have set aside time to review the requirements of the candidates, interview them and provide timely feedback.

Recruitment Consultant, Somerset

Recruitment Consultant, Clevedon salary to £20-23,000. OTE £28k.

The company, a highly experienced Labour & Trades recruitment consultancy based in Clevedon. Dealing with an established client base throughout the Southwest.

The role: Joining as recruitment consultant, you will be responsible for generating your own leads and new accounts, through site visit activity 1-2 days per week and telephone calls following up on leads gathered from the trade press and registering contract workers.

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Just trying to be a better recruiter.

In the last two weeks I have been rewarded for going the “extra mile” with clients and reminded of the reasons why I enjoy doing the job I do.

Conversely, the experience of trying to sell our house has reminded why going the “extra mile” is key in a service industry and why when you do not deliver you not only lose your customer but damage future relationships and business opportunities.  Continue reading

Six Degrees of Separation.

flipo-chart-presentationRecently I was finding it hard to find the right candidates for a role, despite many hours of CV searching, advertising on various forums and scouring Linkedin, still no success. Pondering this, I was reminded of the theory of Six Degrees of Separation and started to think of people I might know, who might know somebody, who might know somebody, you get the picture. Continue reading

The competency based interview.

informal-interviewIn many ways, competency based interviews are a lot easier to prepare for than a general interview.

Competency-based interviews are designed to test how well you perform in certain areas. In other words, the interviewer is trying to figure whether you’ve got the right skills and strengths to do the job.

The competencies they’ll cover depend on the job you’re going for but some common ones include oral and written communication, personal motivation, planning and organisation, and problem-solving and analysis. Continue reading

Receive A Job Counter-Offer? Don’t Take It

Pitting your employer against another in a bidding war for you is often career suicide.

A few years ago, I recruited an executive to run a mid-level company. The night before he was supposed to start his new job, the executive called to say he was staying put. The board of directors at his current company–a major multinational retailer–had offered to name him CEO in one year’s time.

I was aghast, but my former candidate could hardly envision a better scenario. He had leveraged an offer to run a mid-sized company and used it to land the coveted top spot at a retailing giant. No greater career coup exists, right?

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