Recruitment — Some Tips and Tricks
Over the past 6 months I have been leading an investigation into some of the recruitment practices that occur in and around the technology sector. I’d always considered myself a good hiring manager and an effective applicant until now.
Now I realise that there are simple mistakes that everyone makes that can be easily avoided. What follows is a list of tips and tricks you can use to to make your job hunt or recruitment process a lot easier…
As A Hiring Manager
Get your Job Title Right
The great example I found of this was for ‘Service Delivery Manager’, used differently in two different job descriptions. It was used to describe both someone who would lead a small contact centre team and someone who would be accountable for the delivery of all IT services — about 10 times as many people reporting and triple the salary.
Both these job adverts would appear in the same job search online making your advertising ineffective by reaching the wrong audience. There are things you can do to prevent this:
- Know your industry and use appropriate terms. ITIL has clear role definitions such as that for Service Delivery Managers. Do a job search for your expected role title and see how your job description compares. Don’t automatically reuse the title that fits your company org structure.
2. Run it past your recruitment consultants. Especially if you are using third party recruiters. But even if you are not, ask friendly recruiters to review your job title and specification, it’s all part of their service. Also ask them to review the salary. That leads nicely on to…
Every Job has a Price
It might seem a bit ‘crass’ to overtly publish a salary with a role, after all you are offering a great company and a great role, the price shouldn’t matter. Well it does for a number of reasons…
- It helps frame the role, is it a senior at six figures or junior for just above living wage? This will help filter out inexperienced candidates.
- It places you in the market. Don’t try and sell yourself as a big company if you can only back it up by hiding low salaries. This lowers the risk of candidates dropping out when they find out the salary.
- It shows you are able to budget, your company knows it’s figures and where to spend it’s money. Well organised companies are more attractive.
Plan Your Recruitment — With Dates
Recruitment is highly sensitive to a number of factors. It is filling a vacancy with the the perfect combination of:
- Right Role — with an accurate and clear job description
- Right Candidate — with skills and culture
- Right Location
- Right Salary
- Right Technology
- Right Company and Industry
- and most tricky of all Right Time, that someone who matches all of the above is available and looking for work in the time window that you are able to recruit and fill the role.
So it’s nearly impossible then. A recent study by Leadership IQ found that 46% of new hires will fail within 18 months. Particularly in locations and sectors with a technical skills gap you will have a greater chance of hiring the best candidate if they don’t find another job before you have a chance to interview them.
To avoid this, run recruitment like a project with due dates and milestones. You should be able to pencil in interview dates and publish them with job adverts and recruiters. If you genuinely can’t commit to a date, then understand why. Does the budget really exist? Will we wait as long as it takes to find a specialist skill? Do we really need the extra body if we can wait more than 4 months for them to start?
Get your Role Signed Off
Maybe this should be first on this list, it’s amazing the number of times I have seen this during my investigation. It is a massive source of frustration to both recruiters and candidates and all it takes to solve is a bit of patience.
The urgency is understandable, your team is under resourced and there is a big project to deliver. There is a technical skills gap and you need to build your empire. You just can’t wait to bring in fresh blood so out you go to find candidates. The job goes out to recruiters who do what they do best, understand your requirements and start the hunt — at their cost. They return with 3 excited candidates ready for interview all suitable and it’s just with you to meet them and chose one.
But there is a problem, your boss and your boss’ boss haven’t signed off the budget, indeed they don’t even have the role in their forecasts for this year. Their earliest plans for recruitment are next spring. So it’s on your shoulders to go back and disappoint the recruiters and those 3 excited candidates who are now going to look unfavourably at any recruitment you may get to do next spring.
Don’t be that hiring manager, get the budget signed off first.
Use your Media:
Attracting great candidates can be as complex as attracting new customers and it will take effective marketing and HR processes to be effective. There are many mediums for marketing and all are valid, such as…
- Company Website
- Job Boards
- Recruiters / Head hunters
- Social Media
- Word of Mouth
- LinkedIn — a special case.
Each has it’s strengths and weaknesses and should be target appropriately rather than repeating content across platforms. Your company website careers page is unlikely to get a lot of job seeking traffic (sorry). Instead target it at those who have seen your role advertised elsewhere and are seeking the definitive, more detailed description of the opportunity and the background to the role.
Job boards cannibalise each other, jobs posted on one site will soon be replicated on others, target your posts carefully to reduce duplication so that candidates only see one version of the truth. Also be wary of subscription boards. For some specialist skills they may buy you an audience, but these are rare. Likewise, with recruiters chose your supplier with purpose and take time to understand what is on offer. A bit more on these later.
Social Media, Work of Mouth, Networking Events and Refer a Friend Schemes can be a cost effective route to market. Whilst recruiting directly comes with a certain amount of assurance — ‘Well if Jon recommends him then he must be good’ — they also come with a certain amount of baggage. If we don’t hire him and we annoy Jon, then we’re two people down. Be clear on what your recruitment criteria are, what your recruitment message is and what qualifies for a referral — Just because you recommend them doesn’t guarantee a hire.
LinkedIn has become the one stop shop for all of the above, even company websites. Whilst not fully replacing job boards and recruitment agencies yet, that is definitely their ambition. You can’t avoid LinkedIn, so use it intentionally, put your advert on there for people to share and find.
Be at One with Your HR Department
I’ve seen this done very well and very badly. An effective HR recruitment team understands the managers needs well and how they fit with the needs of the business. They can help sell the company and the role and lead the candidate comfortably through the process. If HR make you feel welcome as a candidate it is reassuring for how you will be treated as an employee.
If HR is a formal process cut off from the rest of the business then recruitment will be desultory and costly. Emails will sit in inboxes causing frustration to all parties and delays to getting your role filled. Hold meetings with HR before starting recruitment to understand their process needs and what you can do up front to prevent delays.
Know your Recruiters
It’s easy assume all recruitment consultants are the same, interested in nothing more than taking a fee. In reality there is a very broad church of services available at varying levels of quality. Generally, there are three tiers of Recruitment Agencies:
Tier 1 — Head Hunters and Executive Search
Tier 2 — Recruitment Consultants
Tier 3 — Agencies
Most technical roles will be in Tier 2 where consultants will specialise in industries or technical specialisms. Rates will be between 10% and 25% and Consultants will be dealing with up to 20 vacancies at a time.
Below this are Agencies that specialise in volume. They make their money though low rates and high volume of lower skilled or less specialist roles that can be filled quickly. Head Hunters are the direct opposite. They will place senior or specialist roles one or two at a time, utilising a detailed understanding of candidates and the hiring business.
Tier 2 recruiters can work at a scale anywhere between these two extremes, but there are some services you should always look for in a specialist tech recruitment consultancy:
- Review and Publicise Vacancies
- Find and Approach Candidates
- CV Sifting and Shortlisting
- Interview prep and Possible Stage 1 Interviews.
You will be paying up to 25% of the employee’s final salary for this service, so try not to duplicate this work in HR or your own team — you’ll be paying twice.
To PSL or Not To PSL
If you believe all recruitment consultants do the same job (they don’t) then you might be led to believe that creating a Preferred Suppliers List will save you between 5% and 10%. This can work and if you have a programme of recruitment the savings can add up. But you need to be sure that (1) You have the right consultants on your PSL and (2) you will put enough vacancies their way to leverage the deal. Good recruitment programme management can deal with point 2, but point 1 is only learnt from experience.
To build experience you can’t start out with a PSL. Try out a few roles first, meet with the recruiters and attend their events. The core differentiator for recruitment consultants are:
- Their network — this is the core of what you pay for, who they know and who only they can entice away from one company and into yours.
- Their industry knowledge — especially in IT, when you are looking for your recruitment partner to sift CVs containing acronyms and terms: ITIL, COBIT, Java 8 -it helps if they know what it means rather than just keyword matching. A 10-minute conversation with them will soon uncover if they know their sector well enough.
- Their location — in the digital age this shouldn’t matter, but local knowledge still counts. Understanding what is a reasonable commute to your office, what other businesses (indeed your competitors) are in the same region and the benefits of near by cities / countryside are all valuable when selling to candidates.
Once you have a feel for the local recruitment market you might feel like you’d be able to do everything yourself. At that point you are just about ready to start selecting a PSL.
As a Job Seeker
The perfect new job will not land in your lap. It may come from referral, it may arrive when you’re not actively looking, but is not by chance. When you do find yourself on the job hunt, it pays to look effectively to save your time and disappointment.
Know thy Self
Know your Area of Destiny, know your abilities, what you want to do and what jobs exist. With this knowledge target the role, or roles, you want and have a realistic chance of completing the entire recruitment process for.
Remember, at the end of the process you will be face to face with the hiring manager and looking them in the eyes. You will be giving a personal commitment to sign the contract, deliver your skills and do the job. If you only started looking at this role ‘out of interest’ and things got out of hand then you are going to disappoint a lot of people soon. It’s better not to start.
Know thy Value Part 1
You see a job advertised that sounds exactly the same as what you already do, but is paying 10% more — it’s a no brainer to apply right?
But that new role will add 10 minutes onto your commute each day (over a year of a $40k salary that equates to $833. The working day is 8:30 start so no more dropping the little one off at school and as for flexible working so you can see the school play, forget about it. How do you put a price on that?
Understand what you look for in a role and where possible work it back to a nominal figure so there is a tangible metric that you can use to compare very different propositions.
Know thy Value Part 2
You are more than a job title and a salary. You have experience, tacit knowledge, relationships and ideas that are valuable to the company or their competitors. Understand what differentiates you in the job market and put it on your CV.
Again, try and put a price on this too. Maybe $40k becomes $45k.
Don’t Counter Offer
Realising all this you might be tempted to play the pay rise game or just decide to leave. You know the market and the shortage of technical skills, you believe this is the time for an increase in salary.
If your heart and head says leave it won’t be because of the money and more money will only delay the inevitable until after the new opportunity has gone.
Despite what office protocol says people do discuss (your) salaries around the office. If you are genuinely underpaid that is a reason to have a talk with your manager, not to hand in your notice immediately. Being known for ‘only staying for the money’, even if not true, is not a great place to be. Don’t jump for a counter offer and remember the real reason your started finding a new job in the first place.
Don’t have a CV
Have four. Four? Yes, Four — multiplied per job description you are interested in.
- A short teaser CV with 2 pages of highlight to submit for job applications and job boards
- A long detailed CV with up to 5 pages of your relevant career history and a description of your skills and experiences. Send this when the recruitment consultant asks for more details.
- A short consultant CV with 1 page listing your skills and technical experience
- A long consultant CV, a 2-page extension of above with case studies of work you have done.
The technical job market now is not solely focused on permanent opportunities, having a consultant / interim CV alongside a permanent one means you are ready for any opportunity that comes along.
LinkedIn can serve two purposes here. You can keep it short as a teaser or have it long as a reference repository to refer people to. Either way remember to keep it up to date.
Note: Even with 1 CV, keeping track of which version has been sent to which recruiter can become difficult, always offer to send an updated CV.
Can I Review your CV for you?
It will only cost $100, also you can subscribe to my specialist Job Boards for another $100. For $400 I will introduce you to my network and find you a job.
If you are struggling with job applications this might sound very tempting. More exposure is never a bad thing is it? Wrong. If you’ve had feedback that your CV isn’t any good and you genuinely have no friends or friendly recruitment consultants to advise you then consider paying for a professional service. Always ask for feedback on your application to learn if it is just your CV that’s the problem. It is in a recruitments consultant’s interest to represent you in the best possible way and many will help with CV writing to achieve that.
Subscription Job Boards are of limited value and are really there if things are getting desperate in your job hunt. For very specialist technical or executive roles they have more purpose; but if you can still find relevant jobs on free board then you will find many on these jobs replicated on subscription boards. It is rare that a hiring manager will have the budget or the plans to exclusively advertise on subscription only jobs boards.
Time Waits for No One
Your timescales for a new job are not always the same as your potential next boss and it works both ways. They want an immediate start, you have a 3-month notice period. You want to start next week while they are waiting on HR. Be patient, be clear on what you offer and need and finally realise:
“Some opportunities are just not meant to be, but there will be others. It will all works itself out in the end.” — What other people say
There are Only 2 types of Job Vacancy
Regardless of industry or professionalism there are only 2 types of job that you will be applying for. It is important to realise the difference and which one you are interested in.
- Business As Usual
These are roles are in well performing companies where someone has moved on and there is an existing vacancy to fill. Or the company is gradually growing and they need to replicate a role to fill an existing team. The job description is well defined and not expected to change over the next 5 years or so.
2. Change Leadership
At any level in the organisation these roles exist because the employer is going through a period of transformation. It may be a restructure, accelerated growth or expansion into new markets. These roles need you to bring in knowledge and experience that the employer doesn’t currently have. The job will be pressured, exciting and anything but routine.
Job 404 — Role Does Not Exist
Be wary that up to 50% of jobs advertised on a jobs boards may not actually exist. This is not malicious; it is just poor house-keeping. The reasons for this include:
- The job description has changed and the new advert exists alongside the old one.
- The hiring manager never had the budget signed off and the role was advertised before it existed.
- Multiple recruitment agencies have been engaged on the chance of a new role being created and are collecting applications based on what they think the role might be.
- The role existed and has been filled, possibly internally, but the job advert is still live.
Once you dig into a role and speak to the recruitment consultant you will find out the certainty of an opportunity. Unfortunately many are unable to publicise the employer which makes joining up multiple adverts to a single role very frustrating. All you can do is speak to the agency and try to work out what role is actually on offer before sending your CV.
And Remember…
In the end, don’t choose a job or a company, choose a boss. It is them you will be working with, accountable to and spending up to 40 hours a week with — enough to qualify as a ‘significant other’ in your life.
Yes, your cv might look better with X employer or Y title, but you have to live your job day in day out, choose the right person to support you. Job parameters will change; your boss may not.
Reference Available on Request
