Can Your Recruitment Staff Headhunt?

We all know good talents are hard to come by these days. You post an ad in the papers and in the Internet and then you get a lot of practically useless resumes and close to no one is good enough for the job. Is there really no available talents out there? There are great talents out there. The best of them are gainfully and happily employed and may not even be looking at  news papers or online job boards for opportunities. It takes a deliberate and creative effort to find them and takes a little bit more to reel them in.

Are you wondering why your recruiters go back to you empty-handed? Maybe this answers your question; if all they do is advertise, chances are they won't find what you want them to find.

As a manager of a company that does a lot of headhunting, I've interviewed recruitment specialists from various organizations and this is what I've come to figure. Most of them are trained to post vacancies and screen candidates, not to source and much less attract good candidates by pitching or selling the company's employer brand.

Equipping Your Line Managers/Supervisors to Handle Disciplinary Issues

Discipline is a line responsibility. This is not always how it is understood in many organizations. Often, people think that it is the sole responsibility of HR to discipline people. In fact, many managers' send their erring employees to HR for disciplining instead of acting on the issue themselves. Even HR sometimes do not understand the division of responsibility between them and the managers when it comes to dealing with erring employees. This is why many HR practitioners in the Philippines act like school principals, looking over people's shoulders and acting like the corporate cop they think they out to be. This is incorrect and ineffective for several reasons; If disciplining is relegated to HR alone, no body will know the company policy except for HR (which is true in many companies). Companies do not have enough HR staff to play this cop/school principal role. Line managers when fully equipped can do a better job of discouraging people from violating company policies, call their attention or apply disciplinary action if they err, better appreciation of policies will help them make recommendations on how they can be improved and implemented.

Do Your Managers Know How to Interview Candidates?

If you are in charge of or a participant in the recruitment process, you know very well this is an important question.

A lot of recruitment efforts go to waste because Managers take their part in the process for granted. They don't prepare for interviews, don't know which questions to ask and don't know what to make of candidates' responses to their questions. A lot of managers go by their gut feel when deciding who to hire. While I continue to believe that instinct should have considerable weight in hiring decision making, it should not be the sole basis for it. A lot of expensive hiring mistakes are made when managers fail to account for the necessary competencies when making hiring decisions.