Are you an Entrepreneur / Businessman and facing difficulties in hiring? Here are few tips.

Finding Right Candidates.

In today’s market trend, we receive thousands of applications for each job posting. Selecting a right candidate out of thousands of applications (in this region) is a nightmare for an entrepreneur. 90% of the candidate applications would not be the profiles that we are looking for. Scanning and reviewing the rest of the applications is a painful exercise. If you are looking for a candidate with a certain skill sets, age group, nationality, and gender, it would be hard for entrepreneurs to spend their time in selecting the right applications. If an entrepreneur does not have a recruitment department, he/she would have to spend at least 10 working days of his/her time. Most of the time, the entrepreneurs do not recognize that their valuable productive hours are being spent on unwanted administrative tasks like this.

There are various talent acquisition systems (TAS) available in the market that filters out the candidate pool, as per the criteria given by the Entrepreneur or a recruiter. It takes a minimum of 30 minutes to 45 minutes for an applicant to complete his / her application in a well-designed TAS. Hence, the applicants are reluctant to apply through these TAS unless the employer is having a solid branding and reputation in the market as well as the applicant is badly in need of a job. There are applications (TAS) that shall allow the hiring managers to list out specific questions to filter out the right candidates (a kind of Yes/No based questions). In order to attract the right talents through TAS, a well-structured branding strategy and a long-term retention goals are essential to attract the right talents. 

Say, if an entrepreneur is producing an average of $ 100,000 worth of revenue in a month, spending 10 days of his valuable time in recruiting a middle level manager shall cost him $ 33,000 and at the same time he will miss to do his routine work. Now the question is whether it is worthy for an Entrepreneur to spend his/her time in this task or assigning this task to an external recruiter and look after his/her core activities. 

Communicating with Qualified Candidates.

Engaging with qualified candidates is an art. We will have to have a strategy in place on what to discuss and how to persuade the eligible candidates. Candidates who are having niche / rare skills are hardly available in the market. A right strategy would reduce the valuable working hours of an Entrepreneur. Otherwise, the Entrepreneurs will be fed up with persuading a candidate and fail in moving forward.

Hiring Fast is Crucial  

Hiring faster is an important role of a hiring team. Pre-defining the criteria in “Job description” will always help to hire faster and hire a right candidate. Say an employee produces a value of $ 1,000 of a product in average per day and the employer takes 3 months in average to hire an employee, the employer is losing a $ 90,000 in average per hire. If the employer hires 10 candidates in a year in average, he is losing a revenue of $ 900,000/=. A proper hiring team / recruitment team is essential to hire faster. Alternative option is to engage with an external recruiter.

Some tips:

• Look for the right candidates in a right pipeline.
• Eliminate unwanted hiring processes. E.g. You may not need to verify qualification credentials for certain technical positions, as long as the candidate is having capabilities; You may not need to do background screen for certain lower level positions etc.,
• Certain positions may take a longer time to search for a right candidate. The position could be unique and highly potential to the business. Rather than rushing and giving hard time to the recruiting team, advising them to look for a right talent by specifying a timeline would be ideal. Hiring a wrong candidate may cost a huge loss, damage the relationship with customers and some other serious consequences to the business.

Data Driven Recruitment

Hiring by using data-driven techniques would always be helpful in a longer term. You can use recruitment data and metrics to enhance the hiring processes. Using excel sheet is an option, but it shall create a lot of human errors and requires manual input. A proper data storage that shall be accessed easily in a swift manner shall help the business in long term. Recruiters / hiring managers in Europe must follow the GDPR guidelines while storing the data.

Employer Branding and Retention Strategy

As specified in the previous topics, it is essential to create an Employer branding strategy. This will help to attract the right candidates. It is essential for an employer to create a branding so that the candidates to hear positive information about the company, policies and how the employer treats the staff. A good employee engagement and retention strategy shall get publicized through the current employees, ex-employees in the market about the company’s wellbeing. It will create an interest among the candidate population to apply directly in company’s TAS. It will enable the employers to find the right candidates at their own database. It will reduce hiring cost and increase faster hiring.

If you struggle on any of the above and would like to have assistance, please send a note to [email protected] or reach out to me directly.