Hi all
Here are my views on the subject
By Definition, Recruitment essentially is the process of finding and attracting capable applicants for employment.
Bad recruitment... Perhaps is a result of a bad recruitment process in place.
Recruitment process will have more or less similar activities with deviations that are industry and Domain specfic.
While Recruiting for any function, it is necessary to involve a functional expert in the recruitment team for a post. Now key lies in assessment of a candidate. According to me, the competency mapping should be applied at the time of recruitment also [I observed that they are used only in PMS, Training and Development and in some cases, succession planning]
The motive here is to bring objectivity in the process as far as possible, there may be different ways to achieve that.
If I rate a person 3.5 on a scale of 5, I should be able to capture somewhere why I rated him 3.5 and not 2 or 4.
Sometimes, we recruit a person not because he is right fit but he was best among the people those applied. We tend to draw comarisons between two candidates and forget what the job demands exactly. This results in person-job mismatch and when that happens we all know what happens. The primary reason why this happens may be that the job descriptions are not "Descriptive" i.e. they donot describe completely what we want out of that resource.
Since total recruitment process has got job description at the center, it is important to have a proper job description in consultation with the person who created the role request.
Then comes the question of reaching out to quality candidates [or prospective employees] This typically follows similar pattern that a sales cycle would be. You churn out your own and third party available databases to get 'leads' and than you contact them. You work on a 'funnel' i.e. out of 100 leads may be 30 are interested and out of those 30 you may end up shortlisting 9-10 and after whole selection process 1 will be selected.
Now, here you will be at advantage if your database is having quality candidates. Relying on third party is somehow an expensive proposition where companies take a call. You can have a system in place which will enable you to maintain fresh database of prospective employees.
Now for devising a proper selection process so that you select only quality candidates is what is company/sector/position/domain specific. You can standardise some of the processes but they have to be flexible enough to accomodate changing business needs.
In a nut shell, there is no algorithm to put an end to bad recruitment. HRM is more of an art than a science. The generalisations can be drawn on the basis of past experiences but the fact remains that those measures were taken in a different circumstance and at a different time that what is being faced currently.
This topic I believe is very near to the hearts of all HR practitioners and I just hope we all could collectively form few generalisations on what an ideal recruitment process should be. Since If we are getting the output that we donot want ... we should probably be looking at the input and the process.
Over to HR Forum
Thanks
Saurabh Kalra