Where did all the candidates go?

Hiring managers need qualified candidates who don’t waste their interviewing time. Here are a few tips to help you get the most from your recruiting firms so that they can provide you great candidates the first time around.

Date: March 27, 2007

Category: Training

A Few Tips To Find the RIGHT Candidates

By Amy Fields, Senior Recruiter

From start to finish, here are a few time-tested tips to help hiring managers get the most from their recruiting firms while reducing anxieties for themselves and saving their companies time and money.

Start: Companies want staffing firms to find them the best-qualified candidates.

Finish: Recruiting firms wants to provide them.

From start to finish, a key points for hiring managers to consider when using a staffing firm to find the right consultant for a specific task:

First, understand the biggest impediments staffing recruiters face in getting you qualified candidates:

Not having adequate, and accurate, job requirements clearly spelled out that meet the needs of the entire team using the consultant;
Inadequate communications between the hiring manager and the recruiter.

Second, a written job spec that helps the recruiter target the right candidate(s) quickly:

Job skills need to be listed in descending priority. A recruiter uses the highest priority skills as the first filtering process;
A complete description of the project which becomes the focal point in candidate discussions. This information is not only part of the filtering process, it is vital to convincing a good candidate to accept your particular job. In today’s tightening market, candidates usually have several opportunities occurring simultaneously.

An analogy: if a project’s functional or job specs are not complete, developers spend endless hours writing code that doesn’t do the job. Then begins an endless loop: from analyst to developer, developer to tester, back to analyst, back to developer. All the time, and cost, wasted on code that doesn’t accomplish the task.

To ensure great job specs that will help your recruiting firms find the best candidate quickly, a few suggestions to consider:

First, bring everyone together in the company involved in the project to present their “wants” and “needs” so that the job spec is thorough.

Second, have a face-to-face meeting between the hiring manager and your recruiting firm(s). Realizing your time is limited, a telephone conference is a great substitute. During this discussion:

Provide an overview of the project and how the requested position fits into the bigger picture;
Go over all the technical details and rank them in order of need;
Provide your recruiting firm(s) with selling points to help lock-in a desired candidate.

From start to finish, recruiting firms want to succeed for you; it’s important that hiring managers see us as part of their team, not simply an “outside source” to be dealt with.

If you can incorporate these suggestions into your preparation and spec-writing process, your recruiting sources can do a better job of helping you find the very best candidates.

And now a shameless “plug” for NetEffects:

At NetEffects, we pride ourselves on doing a better, faster, smarter job of recruiting quality candidates. We have developed our exclusive “Net3 Process” to meet our own “better, faster, smarter” commitment:

Net1: Screen all resumes until we find THE few candidates whose skills match a job request.
Net2: Interview selected candidates for their technical as well as their interpersonal skills. It’s important that a person be able to mesh into the client’s corporate culture immediately. Once the right candidate(s) is identified . . .
Net3: Educate the candidate(s) on the client’s corporate culture to ensure a personal fit. Using the information gleaned from the job description and direct contact with the hiring manager, sell the candidate on considering your particular job.

If after this third screening NetEffects feels comfortable that the candidate(s) can effectively and immediately become a productive and integral part of the client’s team, then and only then, will we submit the resume(s) to the hiring manager for consideration.