Are recruiters delivering quality hires?

For a recruiter their single biggest goal or the reason they exist is to consistently deliver quality hires. However, this doesn’t always happen and many of the business leaders we talk to believe that recruiters aren’t delivering the right talent for their businesses.

Last year Sue Marks from the Harvard Business Review wrote an article The Gap Between What Leaders Want and What Recruiters Deliver. In this article Sue Marks states.

“That according to their recent research, there’s a significant gap between the importance of key recruitment activities to leaders and the performance of these tasks by recruiters. While managers understand the importance of hiring star players, recruiters simply aren’t doing a good job of finding them.”

The area that is most important to business leaders is that recruiters should be able to consistently deliver quality hires. This should be what they do day in day out. It should not be a future goal.

To help close this gap here are 3 things recruiters and businesses can do right now.

Build a talent pool

We have talked a lot about talent pools in the past. The reason for this is that they are crucial to ensuring you have timely access to the best and right people for the role you are trying to fill. To recruit without a good talent pool in place means you are starting from scratch each time. Which means you will simply miss capturing the right and best people. Or, by the time you have identified the right people they have found other roles or the business has become frustrated and lost confidence in the hiring process due to the extended time it is taking to find the right candidates. 

Build more than just a Job Description

In our experience far too many roles are filled with just a job description. And, in many cases the job description doesn’t always reflect the role, especially if it is a new role or one that has been created from considerable change within the business. Remember the old adage ‘measure twice, cut once’. Take the time to build a Job Brief, go beyond the technical requirements of the role and focus on the person. In particular what type of person will work best in the role. What are the soft skills they require.

Breathe some ‘life’ into the role. Go beyond the generic document and understand why this role has come about. What does their team look like. What is the culture of the team and the broader business. What are the future opportunities for this role and person. What does it feel like to work in this business. You are selling the role in a marketplace where others are also competing for them.

Don’t fill the role for the sake of filling the role

Sounds obvious, I know. However, recruiters and businesses areas are often under pressure to fill a role. Try to resist ‘just filling the role’ and go back to the job brief. Has something changed during the recruiting process. Have you utilised your talent pool. Go back and look at it again. The cost of hiring the wrong person can have immediate and long term costs to your business. It’s best to set up the recruitment process right the first time and if you do find yourself in a position where you don’t have the right candidates go back and look at your process.