It is axiomatic that great employees help a company do great things. There is no “company” per se, only great people banding together finding and helping customers. The better the talent in your company, the brighter your future. From my vantage point, talent acquisition is everyone’s job.
Take the New England Patriots. Not content to rest on last year’s talent (players), they went out and got Randy Moss and some others. This attitude of talent acquisition helped the entire team go 16-0 in the regular season. What are you doing to better your team?
If you are in HR, talent acquisition is your job. You must find great candidates for the hiring managers. If you can’t, it’s not the customer service manager’s fault—most likely it will be yours. I am going to give you a few suggestions that may help you.
The sheer number of applicants and candidates has never been higher. What with unemployment rising, and resume-blasting systems on every portal and banner ad, the typical HR manager is overwhelmed by the number of resumes and applicants. It is not uncommon for a single opening to have hundreds of applicants. How can HR possibly evaluate this number of resumes? Most HR managers will admit they can’t. They are not sure if they have actually discovered the best applicants to put into the interviewing pile for the hiring manager. Using whatever assessment tool they have, their hope is to get “close enough,”
and maybe the hiring manager can sift and sort all the candidates.
But the hiring manager feels the same way. His unspoken fear is the “garbage in-garbage out” rule. He only interviews those who HR sends his way. Down deep, he is a bit shaky in HR’s ability to find the gold nugget in the gravel truck. HR has a thankless and almost impossible job, thankyouverymuch.
Here are some ideas that may help.
1. Avoid using employment media that consistently use services that datadump candidates on you. Almost every resume-blasting database service scrapes your job off Monster and CareerBuilder. It is so easy for anyone to send you their resume, they will…qualified or not.
2. Find out which media the hiring manager likes. More often than not, he knows which advertising source brings in the best applicants, not the most. We had a situation at JOBDIG sometime ago, where the HR manager told our sales rep that, according to the hiring manager, JOBDIG worked much much better than the local newspaper, yet she was still going to use the daily newspaper because it was still an approved vendor.
3. Be aware of those suppliers who share your information with every other service. Every six months or so, Monster announces yet another privacy breach. Why continue to use them?
4. Develop internal tools and procedures that help you with each applicant. Ask any jobseeker to identify the most irritating part of the job search process, and they will tell you the lack of followup or contact from the company. This is rude behavior and poor company-employee branding. This will hurt your company in the long term. There are tools you can use that help you manage the process.
5. Extend your HR toolkit into the hands of the hiring manager. When we hire sales reps here at JobDig, our hiring manager creates files on each applicant–phone interview, initial interview, etc. He ends up with 4-5 files on each applicant JUST SO he can keep track of where he is in the hiring process. Tools like Applicant Tracking Systems are out there which should get out of the HR department and into the hands of the people who do the hiring.
If you can do this simple things, you will be able to locate your next golden nugget in the pile of resumes that arrived in your in box.
[tags] Jobdig, Jobdig applicant tracking products, helping HR find great applicants, help wanted newspapers, employment guides, employment newspaper, Peoria jobs, Milwaukee job openings, HR department tools[tags]
No user commented in " The Reality of Hiring Someone: It is Too Easy to Miss a Great Applicant "
Please stop perpetuating the myth that HR people should be involved in qualifying applicants before the hiring manager gets to them.
An HR generalist cannot tell if your skills in domain A translate to skills in domain B. An HR generalist will tell you that you need to have specific skills as listed by the hiring manager, because they do not understand the domain you will work in. They only understand HR. They won’t know, for example, that “Unix on Sun, HP, and IBM platforms” means “Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX” and you won’t pass the buzzword bingo game, because you wanted a clean resume, not a bullet list of buzzwords and jargon.
HR is a department that administers the benefits and make sure that the company complies to their legal responsibilities to their employees. They work for the corporate operations folks and deal extensively with the corporate legal department.
The same person cannot possibly know what will make an good customer service rep, janitor, nurse, IT project manager, database administrator, salesman, administrative assistant, and accountant. So they play buzzword bingo.
Bitter? You bet. Grinding axes? Probabaly. Grossly exaggerated? Proabably not grossly.
Thanks for your comment, Frank. It all depends on the company, of course. Most HR people are overworked and try their level best to find qualified applicants, trying to serve their hiring managers by presenting the most qualified candidates. It is a thankless job and sure to upset some folks. This whole area of talent acquisition is an area where HR people can make a name for themselves. Sadly, some don’t have time or energy to make it work.
A girlfriend of mine was passed over for a promotion (we’re in Government, so you have to apply for promotions) because she has a Bachelor’s in Anthropology and HR didn’t know what that was. They tossed her application. When she questioned them, they didn’t care what the definition was or that she qualified because the list was CLOSED and they were on to something equally as important to them. Even if you DO have that coveted PIECE OF PAPER, those of importance to your future can be under YOUR level, yet have ultimate power over what you want. Fair? Life ain’t fair. Now go look up “anthropology” so this doesn’t happen to anyone else!
Maybe the problem is not so much HR or definitions but that you are working in ‘government.’ HR folks, by and large, are overworked, under staffed and spend little time at the adult table. It is no wonder that this sort of thing happened to your ‘friend.’
But that is exactly why I say HR should not be part of the hiring decision.
In general, they are not qualified to judge a candidate’s fit.