Copy of People think we monkey around......

Heh, hey, I'm a recruiter....... sorry no ear worm intended. I got to thinking again about my journey from IT Leadership to niche IT Recruiter, its not a well trodden journey, however many businesses are turning to doing their own recruitment right now, so I thought I would share my thoughts about the pro's and con's of internal recruitment. I should know, I've done both, not many recruitment monkeys can say that.

So its easy, right?

Yes, it is easy to find people who can claim to be able to do the job role you need filling, finding candidates is easy, yes do it yourself.

But hold on, step back a minute, do you know the objective of the recruitment, and the clue is that its not just to find someone who may be good, that would be too easy. Each recruitment piece should have defined goals. Do you know what it is that will enhance the team you are recruiting for (surely the sole point of recruitment) or are you just writing down a job spec that defines the role, but does it define the quality or standards required? That job spec / advert will attract hundreds of applicants, is that what you want?

So you work hard with the Who, What, Where, When and Why, and define the Quality you want. Incidently, Quality is easy defined, I use "the standards that can be measured that define the level of excellence of a task" and is the single most important factor in recruitment in my opinion. Hopefully the team working on the recruitment know how to define the Quality or at the very least know how to elicit it from others.

So are we there yet? We have an advert and we have worked hard to define what Quality measures will define a great candidate. Crack on place an advert on your preferred Job Site?

Sorry but there are still a couple of things that need thinking about. Firstly, if you want the best candidates, most of them aren't neccesarily looking, so how will they see your job-site advert? Secondly, how do you know your job advert has the right keywords for the pottential applicants search to find it? Now, I am a nice monkey, but I'm not going to tell you how do everything now am I?

Smashed it, we have hundreds of applicants.

Well sorry to be the doom monkey, but hundreds of applicants are easy and I'm sorry to say, it’s not what you should be looking for. Remember it’s all about Quality, you should have defined it earlier in the process, right?

So now we have the challenge of bulk CVs. Hidden in amongst them are the gems you have been hoping for, but how do you identify them? Is it a well written CV? Is it a list of quickfire achievements? Is it years of experience doing the same role? How do you know which CVs contain the gem you are looking for? How do you filter them without filtering out the gems? You MUST be able to identify what you are looking for, not just who has a nicely presented CV.

OK, good progress we have matched candidates to our selection criteria. We now have a long list of candidates who appear strong on paper, probably between 15 to 20 candidates. This next part takes time. You MUST speak to the selected candidates; the purpose of the conversation is two-fold. The conversation should validate the quality of the candidate and also be that important "first sell" of the opportunity on the table. This first conversation is a key moment, not only should you be warm and be able to have a positive impact in selling the role, but you MUST also be able to ask them "so what did you actually do" and more importantly be able to recognise the answers as "genuine or not", "quality or not", and "true or not". Do you know what good looks like for the role? If not, ask yourself why are you doing the first filter for the role? You will most likely choose the candidates who gave the best speel and hope that they were genuine. Don't bring luck into it.

If you can't add value at first filter, then sorry, please don't do your own recruitment, the objective is to add value to a team through a new hire, if you can't identify the quality and validate that it is not fake blaggery, then the hiring process itself is not quality. Obviously, if you get to hand over the hundreds of CVs to an IT professional who's the hiring manager, then ask yourself what value did you add?

Time is money

So, we have gone through job definitions and quality definitions. We have selected the right platform to attract those looking for a new role and placed an advert. We have received hundreds of applications and filtered them down to the 15 or 20 that we want to have a quick chat with and set up mutually convenient times to chat informally with them. One of the team who knows how to ask, "so what did you actually do?" has done 15 - 20 informal chats and annotated their thoughts (you must do this to protect yourself) and decided which 5 or 6 candidates to propose for formal first interview. Did I say time is money, well if you are the recruiter, you've probably spent between 7 to 10 days so far depending on how quickly you can work to a good level of quality. And that doesn't even consider approaching potential candidates who don't even know they are looking for a new role yet, that is something that is very hard to do whilst wearing the uniform of the hiring company and is a different discussion about approach / poach ethics.

Now we get to more formal interviews, and this is where Time really is money. We have lined up hopefully a minimum of 3 highly professional and expensive colleagues to do the first interviews. Interviewing is intense and tiring, it’s not about getting to gut feel, or identifying as one of my former direct reports described "well I suppose they could do the job", it is all about knowing that the person you are interviewing can meet the professional quality standards identified way back in this process and that they will be a good fit for team and company. To do this without wasting time and money, your candidate list must be strong, it is the outcome of all your work so far, if not, then it is an exercise in wasting time or accepting sub-optimal candidates, neither of these things should ever be accepted by an ambitious business.

If you can do all of the above, then crack on, but don't forget about being able to approach / poach the best people who aren't looking, but as mentioned previously, that is a story for another day.

So why do your own recruitment?

It is pretty straight forward, the upside of doing your own recruitment is purely ￡￡. If you have a lot of recruitment to do, and you can have an internal recruiter, then your outlay will be less than hiring multiple roles via someone like me. However, I do hope they know how to recognise the quality required and delivered by the truly best candidates, and don't let poor quality creep into your business.

Your people and the value they deliver for the company's wage bill is one of the most important factors in the success of your company, it really is that important.

Choosing a monkey

If you decide that a Recruitment Monkey is the best way forward, then great, but how do you ensure you are getting value, surely, they are much of a muchness? Well, no, not even remotely from my experience. During my time in IT I did know a handful of Recruiters that I felt could add value, but not many. If you want to take your recruitment seriously and go via a Recruiter route, then these are the questions you need to ask them to help understand how they add value.

• Have you or your team worked in any of the specialisms you are recruiting for (it takes one to know one).
• How do you validate the quality of a candidate?
• Do you summarise the strengths and weaknesses of a candidate?
• How do you identify the right "non looking" candidates to approach (Search methods)?
• Ask the recruiter to sell working with your company.

The answers to these 5 questions should allow you to get a better picture of what value they add. If you can do what they do, then seriously consider doing your own recruitment if you have the time and resources.

Good luck, recruit well and thrive.