3 Recruitment Tips

Today I want to put my 3 best recruitment tips out there for people. These are the simple ones; there's a tonne of other stuff you could do. However if you start with these 3 you'll be on the right track.

1. Focus on 'direct' recruitment. That is, rather than relying on recruitment agencies and search and selection companies (headhunters) to provide you with potential candidates, find them yourself. You can do this by giving the job to someone in HR (make it their main role though), or by engaging an RPO like Omni, AMS, RPO Solutions etc. There should be adverts on the major job boards (like Monster, Jobserve etc) that you put out there, branded with your logo and driving candidates to your site and your info, not an agency.

2. Improve your recruitment selection process. Even if it's good, it can be great. Make sure that screening is done properly (again, either by an appropriate HR or recruiting partner, or by an RPO) and that CVs are reviewed efficiently. Then make sure you have a clearly defined process including telephone screening, any testing and face-to-face interviews. You should not have more than a 3 stage process, maximum. That would be 1- telephone screen 2- testing 3- face-to-face interview. If you can get your testing process online you can add a second face-to-face stage. Otherwise you just annoy candidates.

[Note: it should go without saying that your selection process should fall into line with all relevant employment legislation and HR mandates on things like discrimination etc]

3. Build your Employer Brand. This is very different from your corporate brand. Your corporate brand (i.e. the one you sell to customers) might be of tradition and authority. But your offices might be fun, creative and vibrant places. If you sell to potential employees that you're traditional, authoritarian, grey, when in actual fact you're cool, innovative and bright red, then you're missing a trick (and probably a heck of a lot of potential superstars).

This is a really brief post of something that is a much bigger story. If you're interested in improving your recruitment process across the board (and no it won't require you spending hundreds of thousands on 'consultancy' and revamps and the like) then I'd love to hear from you. I'll either be able to help myself, which will brighten up my day no end, or I'll be able to point you towards someone who can. This may be a colleague here at Omni, but it may just as likely be a 'competitor' or other brand; I get a kick out of helping however I do it.