The job market isn’t dead, and Canadian businesses are pouring intensified efforts into investment and hiring plans for the latter half of 2021.
But in unprecedented times with competing priorities, there are just as many businesses with a recognized need for talent, but no roadmap.
Recruitment can be a long, arduous process, and is often done without a structured plan. But playing fast and loose (or long and overdrawn) with your talent pool can have major impacts on your bottom line.
If you’re ready to make moves with attracting and retaining top talent, it’s worth the investment in strategic recruitment practices and tailored tactics that ensure you’re avoiding dreaded outcomes like employee turnover, loss of top candidates, or poor candidate/role fit.
And if you’re not quite there, we’re giving you our 3 basic principles for narrowing your focus quickly to ensure you’re striking the right balance between quality of hire and speed of selection.
Narrowing Your Focus Quickly
Getting it right the first time – i.e. hiring the right person for the right role – is imperative to avoiding bottom line blowout associated with expensive employee churn and burn, and while the game has changed, the basics of preliminary screening haven’t.
Early recruitment efforts are about narrowing your focus within the applicant pool, and identifying early front-runners for successful job fulfillment. This shouldn’t be a drawn out process if you’re following 3 key basics:
- Identify Must-Haves for the Role - ensuring the role’s job description is up-to-date with the required core skills and qualifications needed for the candidate to successfully perform a role is essential. This makes scanning resumes and cover letters for key knowledge and skills and eliminating those without much easier.
- Clearly Outline the Role Expectations - again, via the job description, it is important that the role is outlined as close to reality as possible. Job hunting goes two ways - if a candidate is placed in a job that is different than what is advertised, you risk them leaving early.
- Organizational Fit of Candidate - this is where you have the opportunity to evaluate personal attributes and emotional intelligence pieces that may support success in a role. Mining people for personal details is a no-no, but gauging their ability to handle stress, manage emotions and work through the types of problems they are likely to experience in that particular role is telling.
With your focus narrowed, you should now be working with an applicant pool that is reflective of quality over quantity. At this stage, more time can be invested in building personal rapport and getting to know more about each candidate to determine if they truly are the best fit for your organization, team and role.
