Make Everyone a Recruiter
By: Tim Augustine
Your employees can be valuable referral sources. Here's how to put them to work.
Whether you work for a small business or a large multinational firm, your company's success in today's changing economy depends upon hiring the right people. The right person has the skills and abilities to fill your open position but most importantly, this person matches the personality of the organization. Finding the "right" person is often like looking for a needle in the haystack. Therefore, you need to have everyone in your organization become a recruiter.
To have a successful recruitment program, you need to have a solid repeatable process in place. This process should include requisition, sourcing, screening, interviewing, selecting and hiring.
Requisition
The requisition step begins the process. The hiring manager identifies a hiring need and communicates the need to human resources or an internal recruiter. It is imperative that the needs are fully understood. I recommend developing a detailed Position Description and Specification. In short, a Position Description should specifically communicate the position's role and responsibilities including the tasks, activities and expected results of the position. The Position Specification should communicate the skills, knowledge, education, experience, personality and cultural fit of the desired candidate. A detailed understanding of the open position will dramatically increase the quality of new hires and speed to find qualified candidates. These documents will also help the organization with performance reviews, career development as well as strategic staffing plans.
For each hour that you spend planning and documenting the desired skills, abilities and cultural fit of an open position, you will decrease the numbers of days to fill the position by 11 days!
Sourcing
Once you have developed the description and specification, the next step is sourcing for the position. This is where the magic begins. Get the word out. Develop a system to tell everyone in your firm about the open position. You want to have everyone in your firm know that you are looking for a specific position. A referral program is an excellent way to find candidates. First, a referral program rewards the staff for helping the company grow. Second, referrals can serve as an excellent measure of your firm's morale. If your staff loves the company, they will want to refer their friends who will most likely be similar to the personality of the staff member that referred them. Lastly, a referral program is a cost effective way to find and hire new employees. Based on my research, I found that the Employers of Choice source 60% of their new hires through referrals.
In addition to referrals, develop a sourcing strategy that uses a blend of Internet job boards, preferred recruitment agencies, media such as newspapers and trade journals, as well as targeted cold calling into your competition.
Screening
Now that you have sourced a number of candidates, you need to effectively screen them to compare their background to the skills outlined in your position description and specification. To streamline the process, I recommend categorizing your screening criteria into personality / cultural fit, skills / knowledge and education / experience categories. Most companies screen candidates via telephone interviews. The telephone interview should last 20 to 30 minutes and cover the criteria above as well as compensation, reason for leaving their firm, and most importantly, the reason they are interested in your company.
Interviewing
Once you have identified the qualified candidates, the next step is conducting face-to-face interviews. The role of the human resource generalist or recruiter should be to plan the logistics for the interview team, develop and provide the behavioral and legal interview questions for each area of focus (personality and cultural fit, skills/knowledge, and education and experience) as well as provide to the hiring manager an overview of the candidate's qualifications based on the position description and specification including the candidate's resume.
I recommend identifying an interview team of two to three people for each position. This will give you multiple evaluations of each candidate as well as provide the candidate will exposure to multiple people and personalities. Each interviewer should focus on one aspect of the position criteria. For example, the hiring manager should interview the candidate for personality and cultural fit as I have found this to be the most important aspect of a new hire. The experience and education criteria should include someone who has the experience required for the specific position. The skills and knowledge criteria should be covered by an internal customer for the position. For example, if the position is a sales support role, a sales person who will be supported should be the interviewer.
Selecting and Hiring
The final step will involve the entire interview team as well as the recruiter who should facilitate the meeting. The recruiter should have each interviewer provide their evaluation of each candidate based on their specific criteria and questions asked. In addition, the interview team should provide written notes from the interviewer to ensure consistency. This will protect the organization from legal issues by using specific consistent criteria to evaluate each candidate. It will also remove the typical "gut feel" from the interview process and allow the interviewer to focus on the criteria outlined earlier. Finally, it will provide the recruiter with constructive feedback which will improve sourcing additional candidates if needed.
Once you have identified the "right" person, the final step is to pre-close the candidate, which should focus on selling the opportunity and the company as well as providing a verbal offer consistent with the candidate's expectations and your internal compensation policies. I recommend that the hiring manager extends the offer. This will help cultivate trust and excitement with the candidate as well as help with any questions regarding title, role and responsibilities.
If you follow these steps, I guarantee that you will dramatically increase the quality of new hires, speed to hire as well as reduce your overall cost of hiring the "right" person for the job.
