Hi Neha Da Vinci,
So you are in the eternal search of Holy Grail of HR?...
Best wishes..
Quote:
I am a relative fresher in the HR field. I would therefore like to know that besides an academic qualification, what are the various ways of honing the integral qualities of an HR personnel.
What should a relative fresher practice in order to achieve excellence in this field?
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Integral Qualities ...to achieve excellence..
1. Integrity
2. Learn new things every day
3. Application of new learnings/knowledge..
4. Question the things/process and apply new thoughts in other words innovate as much as you can.
5. Have the ability to reach out to all people right from to the CEO to the worker of the company. Be passionate and show as much as respect and compassion to all..in same way you would like to be treated..
6. Try to get out of comfort zone as often you can..
7. Make periodic plans and review them from time to time..
Lastly..
8 Be happy despite the difficult situations around..
Since your header was about Capability of a Recuiter..suggest that you join this forum Electronic Recruiting Exchange
(
www.erexchange.com)..to read about the international forum
Would like share the article by Dr John Sullivan
Cheers,
Rajat
The 20 "Rules" For Great Recruiting
by Dr. John Sullivan
Originally published via the Electronic Recruiting Exchange
(
www.erexchange.com) on March 26, 2001.
If you want to dominate your competitors in the talent "war," you
need to act a lot differently than they do. If you expect to win more
than a majority of your head-to-head "battles" for talent, you must
take a deliberate approach to recruiting. The following 20 rules
outline just such a "deliberate" approach. They were developed in
response to a request by the Electronic Recruiting Exchange to
identify the "secrets to success" of world-class recruiting for their
recent recruiting conference. For those that could not attend, here
are "the rules" for dominating your industry in the talent wars!
Recruiting Rule #1:
You must declare war and act like warriors in order to win.
It takes an aggressive approach to get the best talent. Aggressive
recruiting starts with competitive intelligence and a strong desire
to win. It ends with the goal of continually improving everything you
do so that you can stay ahead of the competitors.
You must continually improve your recruiting processes on the
assumption that your competitors are continuously copying your best
practices and as a result, they will soon catch up. Warriors hate to
lose, so every time you lose a head-to-head battle for top talent,
you need to do a "post-mortem" in order to identify the reasons why
you lost. A fast-changing world with an uncertain economy requires an
agile approach if you are to stay on top. Unfortunately, HR often
changes "at the speed of rock" — so changing things internally
requires expert knowledge, hard proof, and most of all, enormous
courage!
Recruiting Rule #2:
The war for talent is over. And by the way… guess who won?
As long as the unemployment rate is low, managers need to realize
that the power has shifted from the company to the worker. Top
performers must now be treated like free agents and all applicants
must be treated like customers if you are to get them to leave a
perfectly good job and accept yours. This means you must do extensive
market research into identifying what these "customers" will and
won't accept. Because there are niche markets in recruiting just like
in product marketing, chances are that you will have to "mass
personalize" their jobs and their offers if you expect to sell them.
Recruiting Rule #3:
Talent matters and top talent matters most.
Just like in sales, there's an 80/20 rule in recruiting. 80% of the
profit comes from the efforts of 20% of the employees. This means
recruiting must prioritize its efforts and focus on the managers,
divisions, and jobs that have the most business impact. Instead of
treating them all the same, it is essential to put your resources
into the ones that make the most difference. You don't have the time
or the resources to do them all well.
Recruiting Rule #4:
Prove it works or stop doing it!
You can improve what you don't measure. As much as 50% of the
traditional practices in recruiting don't work during high employment
times. Be sure to include a feedback loop in everything you do to see
if the practice results in hires that become top performers within a
year. It is a continuous process to identify which tools produce
performers and then to drop the tools and sources that don't...like a
hot potato. You waste scarce resources and you lose credibility with
managers when you use tools that don't produce results. World-class
recruiters use metrics in everything they do. But if you can only
measure one thing, measure the performance of those you hire (after
six months and again after a year). Measuring speed or costs without
including quality is just silly.
Recruiting Rule #5:
Do it differently to create and maintain a competitive advantage.
Many recruiters benchmark which results in a "sameness" that
guarantees you'll have no competitive edge. If you want to win big
you have to take chances and do things differently than the other
firms. That means innovation and taking chances. The road "less
traveled" may be empty, but it may also be a shortcut! Incidentally
if what you do is unique, be sure and keep it a secret!
Recruiting Rule #6:
Speed is everything in hiring top talent.
How long is top talent in the job market? Normally the top 10% are
gone within ten days, so if you want the best you have to act
quickly. Top talent may even be gone in one day. Bureaucracy,
approvals, and processes are the antithesis of speed hiring. When you
find top talent that exceed your qualifications... make incision,
make an offer and make the sale and do in one day!
Recruiting Rule #7:
There is no shortage of talent… only bad tools designed for low
unemployment times. For any individual firm there is actually no
shortage of talent unless you're in the middle of the desert.
Corporations in big cities can easily find an excess of talent, if
they stop looking at unemployed people. There is a wealth of
experienced talent working across the street if you have the courage
and the tools to "poach" them away. Incidentally, if the ethics of
poaching bothers you, go visit your sales staff. They spend every day
trying to steal your competitor's customers without a twinge of
ethical concern. Consider other firms as your farm teams and lure
away their already trained productive people.
Recruiting Rule #8:
It take a marketing/sales approach to win. Recruiting is just sales
with a crummy budget. It's essential that you do a
detailed "discovery" of your recurring "target" in order to identify
their demographics and their "profile." By doing a profile of your
own top employees (what they do, read, and want) you will identify
the keys to finding other top performers. Odds are that the
candidates you are trying to attract have the same interests, hobbies
and reading habits as your own top employees (in marketing it's
sometimes called pattern buying). Then by focusing on the same media,
websites, magazines, and other sources that your employees use you
are likely to find great recruits in the same manner.
Branding is another important area to focus on. First, it is
essential that you know and manage what your employees say about you.
Then you need to make a conscious effort to build your image through
PR, getting on "great places to work " lists and getting written
about in targeted magazines and web sites
Recruiting Rule #9:
If you don't have to fight for them… they are not superstars. Top
performers are in high demand, regardless of the economic situation.
Managers and recruiters must be aware that the best must be "fought
over." The reverse is also true, in that if a candidate is easy to
attract and sell, odds are they are not a top performer. When it
comes to recruiting talent, the easiest ones to get are the ones you
want least. Focus your efforts towards hiring away employed top
performers rather than those who are actively looking for a job. The
best are currently employed and have multiple offers, a counter offer
and they expect more exciting jobs then those outlined in most
traditional job descriptions. If you're attracting people with no
other offers, odds are these are "ugly candidates" and they will
become bad hires. Send them to your competitors.
Recruiting Rule #10:
If you expect to win… everyone must be a 24/7 talent scout. There are
never enough recruiters in a company to find all of that talent in
the world. The key to recruiting success is to shift the
responsibility for recruiting to the managers and employees.
Employees, because of their frequent contact with other people,
become the largest sales force you have. Having them speak out to
friends, acquaintances, customers and people they meet about their
exciting job and their company is the best sales tool you can ever
have. Employees must become 24/7 talent scouts through the use of
sophisticated employee referral programs. In addition, you need to
solicit customers, suppliers, former employees and references to be
talent scouts for your firm.
Recruiting Rule #11:
If you expect to win… managers and employees must "own" recruiting.
If you take the burden of recruiting away from managers they will
inevitably "get lazy" and put little effort into it. The real key to
success is to shift the responsibility of recruiting to managers and
employees. They are the ones who suffer when a position is left
vacant and when bad hires are made. They also get the "reward" and
increased productivity when a great hire is made. Because there's
ample research that shows that the candidates want to talk directly
to managers and decision makers, it becomes even more essential for
them to be involved early in the process. Recruiting must make a
strong business case to convince managers to spend the required time
and effort on recruiting. Because of the rapid change in technology
and information it is becoming almost impossible for recruiters to
maintain their ability to sell applicants in technical positions.
Recruiters can do their part but managers must make the final sale.
Recruiting Rules #12:
Stop hiring strangers. Pre-identify and pre-qualify talent.
It is not uncommon for 30% of the hires not to work out. One of the
reasons for this is that we are primarily hiring strangers. Other
then through employee referral programs, most candidates are
relatively unknown. A few emails, phone calls, and two hours of
interviews do not really allow you to know the candidate. The secret
to great assessment is to start early and to make identifying and
assessing prospects a continuous process (regardless of whether you
have openings). If you continually identify top performers you can
build a "who's who" database of your prospects. You can then assess
their abilities over time and in a variety of ways. This makes the
possibility of a rushed assessment error a lot less likely. Pre-
qualifying candidates before you actually need them (pre-need) also
gives you time to sell them on the company and the job.
Recruiting Rule #13:
The very best require WOW's.
Top performers already have a job, so it takes a WOW to get them to
consider another. A WOW is an extraordinary management practice,
benefit, or job feature that is so exciting that they will tell their
friends about it. Top candidates don't want to work for mundane
companies. A firm has to do something that "everyone talks about" if
you expect to be in the top tier of the employers of choice. Examples
of WOW's include sabbaticals, onsite gyms, valet and concierge
services, a "cool" CEO, as well as free soft drinks.
Recruiting Rule #14:
Put the work where the talent wants to be/is.
In a global economy it's essential that you realize that a large
majority of the top talent probably does not live within a hundred
miles of your facility. When talent is in high demand, smart firms
think out of the box and put the work "where the talent is" or "where
it wants to be." This means flexibility on the part of managers.
Options might include working from remote locations, working at home
or putting facilities where there is a surplus of talent. For
recruiters, this might mean recruiting around the globe and it
certainly means recruiting outside the geography that you are the
most familiar with.
Recruiting Rule #15:
Treat candidates like customers.
Because the power has shifted to the talent, it is essential that we
learn to treat them in a customer service manner. This means
responding to inquiries rapidly, giving them feedback on how well
they're doing and doing post mortems to identify why they failed to
accepted our offer. Candidates need to be asked during and after the
process "how well did we treat you?" Manager satisfaction also needs
to be assessed. Remember to think in a broadest sense as a
businessperson would. We might not be able to hire them all but we
certainly can turn many candidates into our future customers if we
treat them right!
Recruiting Rule #16:
Managers must be measured and rewarded for great recruiting and
retention.
HR often says that people are our most important asset but this often
turns out to be a shallow phrase. In fact, few HR departments even
bother to measure and reward managers for great hiring, retention or
worker productivity. The most important factor in changing management
behavior toward recruiting is to distribute ranked metrics to all
managers on a regular basis. This has the double impact of educating
and occasionally embarrassing managers. The next step is to include
great recruiting and retention as part of their bonus. Add metrics
and rewards and you will see a rapid change in their behavior
Recruiting Rule # 17:
You have to learn at internet speed to survive.
The world is a rapidly changing place where tools and strategies are
quickly outdated. If you are going to win the war for talent you must
continually be on the leading edge of knowledge. This means
continuous and rapid learning about recruiting on chat rooms, list
servers and through benchmarking. I have found that the best way to
stay ahead of the recruiting game is through "parallel benchmarking",
which means that you look outside of recruiting and HR in order to
learn the most. Some of the best recruiting practices actually were
derived from outside of recruiting. You can learn a great deal from
outstanding business practices such as product branding, customer
response management, customer service and supply chain management. In
a rapidly changing world fast learning might also include forecasting
the economy and anticipating the future actions of your competitors
Recruiting Rule # 18:
You must have a well defined and communicated strategy in order to
succeed!
Recruiting is one of the few business areas that have no clearly
defined strategies. Most recruiters just do what they do without a
written plan. This can confuse managers because they don't know the
goals or objectives of the plan. Recruiting strategies can range from
focusing on: experienced people, hiring bright people," cheap people"
to a strategy of hiring raw talent and then developing it. Whatever
your strategy is, if it is to be effective it must first be
communicated effectively to the managers and second periodic
measurements must be taken to ensure that it's working and meeting
its goals.
Recruiting Rule #19:
You must use technology if you are to win.
Because of globalization and the need for speed most paper based
recruiting practices are bound to hinder a company. If you need to
move fast technology becomes the #1 tool. Whether you use it for
recruiting on the Internet, for market research, for gathering
metrics or just for communicating with candidates technology allows
you to do more, faster and cheaper. Incidentally top candidates,
almost without fail, use technology extensively and they will judge
your firm by how well and how often you use technology on your web
site and during the recruiting process.
Recruiting Rule #20:
You must use mass experimentation to find new things that work.
Recruiting is actually very conservative and has changed little in
the last 50 years. There are few corporate research and development
programs and almost no academic research on what works and what
doesn't in recruiting. As a result if you are to be successful you
must encourage your recruiters and managers to do mass
experimentation. The key to innovation is to continually try new
things and then to include a feedback loop that allows you to rapidly
check to see if it resulted in a high performance hire. If it fails
rapidly capture the lessons learned and move on. Is unlikely you'll
get all of the innovations right but without trying new things you
can never be the recruiting leader in your industry.
Conclusion
In this piece, I've outlined the critical success factors in advanced
recruiting. They come not just from years of experience but also from
looking at the data that firms collect on what works and what
doesn't. In case you feel these rules are just "common sense" I would
urge you remember that in recruiting, just like in life...common
sense isn't all that common!
Capability of a Recruiter 
Linear Mode
