“I need a new person for this position, ASAP! Hire the best one,” says the boss. After few days, he will come back to you to get a response he wants to hear but then, you’ve got nothing. “Is it that hard to find a person for this role? I’m sure there are lots of applicants dying to get this job.”
Hiring the best people seems easy as one, two, three but what others do not know is that, it takes sweat and blood to get the perfect fit for the position. For the Human Resources personnel, it’s an everyday challenge to recruit the top talent.
What was wrong? It’s not you, it’s…your process. Perhaps you are fixed at the traditional methods of recruitment. Sure they have been proven to work for years but in this day and age, it pays to exert extra effort to level up the hiring process if you want to keep up with your competitors.
Understanding the traditional recruitment process
While it’s proven and tested, the traditional hiring process is manual and outdated. This includes job postings for the open positions at newspapers and other print advertisements; or enlisting a recruitment consultancy, collecting paper resumes and applications, passing applications to and from different departments and scheduling phone screenings and/or interviews. That being said, these manual steps can make the hiring process chaotic.
Most recruiters use these approaches to seek the best candidate for the job:
- Local newspaper advertisements
- Searching at local employment offices
- Tapping temporary employment agencies
- Internal hiring
The problems
While the traditional recruitment process serves the Human Resources personnel well, you have to at least be open to try other means of hiring to get the one you needed the most. Sometimes, the old-fashioned way couldn’t meet what the 21st century method could do.
- Speed- Traditional method takes a lot of time; from posting the job vacancy on newspapers to waiting responses for a week or so to processing the applications. Employers should be more direct and quick in this dynamically changing workplace.
- Costly- Because you are using print advertisements to announce a job opening, may it be a full page or one-liner ad, consider the fact that it is way expensive rather than posting it online for free.
- Reach- With your ads on newspapers, it does not guarantee you a 100% pool of candidates. Sure it reaches a nationwide market but how long will it be there? A week? Perhaps, only a day. It appears for only a limited time.
- Quality of the candidates- Since you’re the traditional type of recruiter asking the usual interview questions, most likely, the applicants will visit sites coaching them the “right” answers to your questions. It will make the hiring process easier and faster but it won’t help you identify the best candidates.
Truth be told, traditional hiring methods that have relied only on the information presented from resumes and general first impressions through interviews, is not sufficient for selecting the best candidate for a role.
From old to modern approach
We are not saying that you should abandon the usual traditional recruitment process; all you have to do is to step outside the box and level up your techniques. How? Consider social recruiting.
Social recruiting has major advantages over the traditional method.
It leads you to better connections faster. HR personnel can possibly interact directly with the candidates faster than waiting for a pool of applications from your job posting in a periodical. In the traditional hiring process, it could be several rounds of resume reviews before applicants and employers got to connect on a personal level. With social media, the connection happens instantly and with less time wasted.
It also helps you to discover candidates who want to be discovered. Most companies source candidates online. Social recruiting allows you to see how the candidates represent themselves and what companies they are connected with.
Online presence also gives a better rate of success for recruiters. Your job post on your own site or on pages linked to social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn stays there for as long as you want. Thus, making the chances of people visiting the page becomes higher and so does the success rate.
And because of the rise of social media, most job seekers are found online. They use social media as their primary tool for job searching. It reaches out to people beyond boundaries of geographical and national restrictions—making online methods give a wider reach as compared to traditional method.
It does not hurt to try new methods once in a while especially if it’s for the company. If HR isn’t evolving, neither is the company.
Both methods have been proven to be effective. However, before choosing which method to use, it is best to list out the requirements and priorities first. A combination may also be used, depending upon the organization.
