The Corporate Recruiter

I confess

2008-03-30T17:27:00Z

I am a fairweather blogger. As soon as my non-web life gets remotely complicated I'm off.

And like that candidate you promised to call with feedback but didn't, my blog has been nagging at my consciousness for weeks. And the longer it goes on the worse it is. If it was you, wouldn't you rather have the bad news, chalk it up to experience and move on? That's how candidates feel too.

We're afraid. Afraid they'll argue with us, get upset or do that disappointed sigh our fathers did whenever we confessed to not studying. In an old recruiting job I had, I had to call 10 or so candidates A DAY with bad news. In the 8 months I did that job, I never had a candidate cry on me. Never.

They already know. They just want you to confirm it so they can move on.

So do it now. Better late than never, but better to get it over and done with. Like jumping back into blogging.

How to write an advert

2008-02-03T18:35:00Z

Most job adverts are written like a shopping list. We'd like x and x technical skills, super people skills and someone who will work hard. Sometimes, they are just a list of responsibilites (in company jargon) and you have to guess whether you have the skills or not.

When writing an advert, you need to first think about the people you're trying to attract. Imagine where they are, and what they want from their next step. Then you can write an advert which is attractive to them - advert writing is more like marketing a product than shopping for one.

Once you have the picture of the ideal candidate in mind you can write to a formula:

1. Explain the context (what are you looking for, why, what kind of team)
2. Explain what the candidate will get out of the role (excitment, learning skills, working with cool clients)
3. Explain what your offer is (salary, benefits)
4. Tell them the minimum skills you need.

You don't need to write in a stilted corporate way, if your culture is cool and funky, write something cool and funky.

Like all skills writing adverts gets better with practice - if you don't have to do it very often, ask the advice of someone who does, or look at Monster etc for some inspiration.

Preparing an offer

2008-01-22T06:18:00Z

Like everything in life, offers go much more smoothly if you prepare. Smart candidates know that it's not just the salary figure that counts, and when they start asking questions, and your every answer is 'I'll have to ask HR' you start to feel stupid. Here's a (probably not comprehensive) list of things you might be asked about;

*Salary review date and methodology
*Bonus and how it's calculated / when it's given
*Pension type and contribution
*Healthcare type and contribution
*Car allowances
*Gym membership
*Other benefits
*Relocation package (where appropriate)
*Golden hellos/handshakes
*Holiday entitlement and holiday year
*On site facilities
*Hours of work and flexitime methodologies
*Place of work (for those working on multiple sites)
*Training opportunities
*Nursery vouchers

Very smart candidates (and you only hire those right?) will also ask about start dates and what they can do to prepare themselves for the role.

Can you add to this list?

What's it like being a corporate recruiter?

2008-01-18T12:56:00Z

Google search about corporate recruiters often leads people here. As I've been too busy corporate recruiting to blog this week, I thought I'd share what it's like on a day to day basis. Corporate recruiters are usually responsible for a vacancy from start to finish. We are contacted by hiring managers when a vacancy is a twinkle in their eye - or when an employee has handed in their notice. Corporate recruiters have to be very good at conflict resolution and expectation management. The employee who has handed in his notice, will probably leave in 4 weeks. The recruitment process will probably take 8 weeks minimum and probably closer to 12. The hiring manager will be looking for a direction for his stress.... if you thought working in a corporate gave you an easy life, you thought wrong.

We help managers with the computer systems which allow them to advertise their requirement, create a job description and person profile, an advert, get it all submitted and then make sure that the advert goes out to the right people. In the company I work for currently, we have a back office team located 300 miles away who do our processing, but sometimes admin assistants work directly with recruiters.

We make sure suitable CVs come in, help managers evaluate them (though I'd never make a choice for them), and then one of our assistants arranges the interviews, and sends the candidates all the details they need to attend. Co-ordinating diaries for candidates, hiring managers and recruiters can be a challenge, and one I'm glad I don't have to do!

We meet with hiring managers to arrange an interview format, and decide how much help they need at interview. Sometimes a hiring manager wants us to ask all the questions, sometimes just take notes. I love interviewing, although colleagues have said they find it really boring. It's probably not for you if you don't find people endlessly fascinating. We help hiring managers make their decision, and then it's back to the system to raise an offer. Making sure you have sign off for hires in corporates is very important, and can be hard work, so massaging each request through the layers of sign off, and then making sure an offer is created within an SLA is a big part of my job.

Eventually, someone starts and we give them their initial induction before sending them off to work. There's nothing like walking into a department and knowing everyone there, and seeing them productive and happy.

As a corporate recruiter I've handled as few as 20 jobs at one time and as many as 80. Keeping 80 jobs, hiring managers, candidates, interview times, offer processes and starters straight, when your day is taken up with interviews, advising hiring managers and talking to candidates. I live by my spreadsheet. Recruiters tend to hate admin and reporting - we're much more 'fly by the seat of our pants' kind of people, but without the spreadsheet I wouldn't know which way was up!

Any questions? Leave a comment!

How to interview internal candidates

2008-01-07T10:16:00Z

Interviewing internal candidates can be difficult. You already know the candidate, their capabilities, their personalities right? Wrong.

Candidates had a life before they came to your company, and even if they are in your team, there may be experiences they have had which could be used which you don't know about. They have a life outside of work, which may include training, volunteer work or family experiences which could be useful, but which you don't know about. They have ambitions, desires, wants and needs which you may not know about but which affect the way they work now, and the way they may work in a new role.

Internal candidates should be interviewed in exactly the same way as external ones. Take them through the standard question set, giving them the opportunity to tell you everything an external candidate would. Put aside any perceptions you have, listening to the answers as if you don't know them. Sometimes, the round peg in the square hole flourishes once a round hole is found. If you have the opportunity to provide the round hole, and get a candidate who already knows your company, it's language and the way it works, why wouldn't you?

How do I finish?

2008-01-04T12:52:00Z

The end of the interview can be an awkward moment... you've decided that the candidate really isn't right and want them out of the door. They sense this, and are desperate to redeem themselves so keep talking.

Practice your poker face. For reasons we have discussed before, the candidates should have no inkling that you don't think they are suitable. Carry on being your normal, pleasant, helpful self right till the leave the car park. If they have been asked to bring paperwork or id, take it, check it, put it to one side as if it is as precious to you as that of the perfect candidate.

Make sure you have answered all their questions. Even if you have no intention of employing them, make sure they go away with all the answers. You don't need to answer at length: with a candidate you want, your answer to 'Do you have a training plan' will be an indepth sales pitch, to one you don't, yes we have a comprehensive training catalogue and everyone goes on at least 2 courses a year is fine.

Tell them what the next steps are. We are interviewing this week and next, and expect to make a decision on Friday. This stops them calling every day for a week asking for a decision, and gives them a clue that they are not your only choice!

Offer your card. Remember, they may not be a great candidate, but their friends or relatives might be perfect for your next role. Give them the opportunity to send a thank you note, or call to follow up. And if they do - answer the phone! We are nice to all the candidates because that is the face of our company remember?!

Don't forget to thank them for their time, and tell them it was nice to meet them. With feeling. Even if you hate interviewing, you just spent an hour not doing your report for your boss, got one step closer to finding the next member of your team, met one of your company's fans. It was nice right? And even if it wasn't.. think about them. They got up early, put on a suit, prepared for your interview. That deserves some thanks.

5 no cost ways to advertise

2008-01-02T06:37:00Z

1. Referrals.

Make sure everyone in your company, your peers in other companies, your friends, your relations and even your hairdresser know you are recruiting and what you're looking for. You never know where the next recruit will come from.

2. Your website

Every website should have a jobs board - even if it's just a blog where you list the titles and job descriptions. And while you're there.. why not tell the candidates what a great place to work this is?

3. Reed.co.uk

They've just started charging, but there are number of free listing spots in a year. From personal experience - worth doing.

4. http://www.ctp.org.uk/ctp/employers

Places people coming out of the armed forces. Free to advertise and a source of well trained, effective team members at all levels.

5. Newspapers

Not in the jobs section - but articles about your latest product or initiative. Make sure the journalist adds a line about currently looking for.... and your follow up information.

Why do I need an application form?

2007-12-17T20:34:00Z

Sorry I've been gone so long. There are now no boxes in my house and a whole new office!

While I was gone I was having a discussion with a friend about application forms. Some companies require application forms, and some done. Local government is more likely to, small family firms less likely. However, big corporates and moving down to medium sized corporates are increasingly using application forms.

In the company I work for, application forms are required for internal candidates, but not for external. My hiring managers hate them. But this application form, they say, in a wingeing tone, it doesn't say what they do outside work, it doesn't have any personality, I can't tell when they went to school or if they're married.

No, Mr Hiring Manager, it doesn't. But it does ensure you only have the information which is allowable to you by law. It ensures you have the same information for all the candidates and can compare them. And it has this little box where they sign to say they have told you the truth. And that's why we have application forms.

Personal News

2007-12-01T17:31:00Z

I'm moving house today and expect to be off line for a couple of weeks.

See you again soon,

Wendii

New Years Resolutions

2007-11-27T13:12:00Z

About this time of year, we begin to think of next year. With 4 weeks to go till Christmas, you may be finishing up performance reviews for this year, looking at targets which were or were not achieved, and creating targets for next year.

This is a good time to look at your recruitment needs for next year. There are 3 areas to look at:

1. Financial and Performance Targets
Would you have met a target if you had an employee more skilled in excel manipulation or engineering plastics? Are you over or under budget on recruitment, training and retention? Do you need to strengthen your team's soft skills?

2. Team Dynamics
Do you suspect that the worst or best performer's reaction to your performance review will be to start looking for another role? Are your team reaching change of life birthdays, family events or just showing an awful lot of interest in yoga?

3. Changes for next year
What changes do you expect in the organisation next year? Additional clients, amalgamation with another group, changes in IT tools or do you expect to move on?

These things together will help you create a recruitment and rentention plan for next year, whether it is a formal document, or a mind map of your thoughts. When you do need to recruit, you'll be able to look at the additional requirements of your team, and recruit not to the job spec from 2 years ago, but to your future demands. Training your team well to meet current and future needs will improve your retention and help you meet targets more easily. And, in my experience, the manager with the plan gets more of the budget next year!

The Answers you really want to know.

2007-11-19T19:26:00Z

Something a little different today: HR World's article "30 Interview Questions You Can't Ask and 30 Sneaky, Legal Alternatives to Get the Same Info" at http://www.hrworld.com/features/30-interview-questions-111507/ is causing a little controversy in the comments.

There's a divide developing between those who believe finding out what days someone is available to work is reasonable, and those who believe that circumventing the law by being duplicitous is worse than breaking it in the first place.

Personally, I do think that we have equality laws for a reason, and as a woman of childbearing age I would be very upset to be asked 'do you intend to have children' or 'are you married'? However, managers, especially the old school managers, do want to be reassured about candidate's commitment to their employer, that they have outside interests, and that candidates are local.

As professional advisors we are charged with giving those in the organisation what they want, AND keeping them safe. Sometimes that means finding a sneaky way to get the information they need without breaking the law. The law changes overnight. Managers don't.

Do I really have to do all this?

2007-11-15T19:23:00Z

Today I interviewed with a hiring manager who is interviewing to increase his team, in a very small field that he has worked in for 20 years. He knows all the players, the history of the projects and has worked with many of the candidates before.

I was only there to observe and take notes. So I did. The hiring manager briefly explained to the candidates why the team is increasing in size, what the long term plans are, and how he's wanting the team to work in the future. Then he took the candidates through their CV, and in a very relaxed way, asked them about highlights, found out their motivations for wanting to join the team, and how they felt they had contributed to the projects.

It all felt like a friendly chat between two professionals ... in fact.. there really should have been beer! At the end of the day he told me he's made the necessary actions on our computer system and asked if I was going to check what he'd written... and was surprised when I said no.

He had a method. He asked all the candidates the same questions. He knows the candidates. He's very clear about what he needs for his team.

He didn't need a formal interview, any psychometric tests, presentations, or to grill his candidates. And nor do you. Just use enough to find out the answer you need. There's no point in putting yourself, or the candidates through a process when you don't need to.

How to recruit a team

2007-11-13T20:29:00Z

So, you've got to recruit a whole new team. Or you're in the unenviable position of having a large percentage of your team leave. Or you're expanding rapidly. There's a myriad of reasons for recruiting more than one person at a time, and it is different from recruiting one person into a team.

When you recruit one person, you kind of know the box they're going to fit into. You can be pretty specific about the skills and experience they'll need and the kind of industry background you're missing in your current team. When you recruit a team, you can be a lot more flexible. You can let your recruiter or agency know this - that you're willing to look at a wide variety of backgrounds, because you never know how two people you see will complement each other.

To work out which candidates to choose for your team it's easiest to draw up a table with the relevant skills and the candidate names to enable you to see most easily how the different candidates balance off against each other. Choosing all the people you like, or who are similar to you but who have the same skills is a mistake. A car doesn't run with all the wheels on one side.

What's the point in conditional offers?

2007-11-07T20:56:00Z

In our business you don't get an offer till we've checked you out. We work for the government, so checking candidates out is taken seriously. And it can take weeks.

My hiring managers are always asking for conditional offers to go out. So I say yes (good customer service!) and I produce a conditional offer. But it says on the top, we do not advise you to take any action based on this letter. And the hiring managers complain - but I want them to resign. I want them to be working their notice period while you do your stupid checks. For some reason legal are the worst at this. Well, for hiring managers everywhere this is why:

If we find something we don't like, that the candidate lied to us, is a terrorist or a medical condition which makes this role dangerous, and you have made a firm offer which has been accepted, we can't take it back. If we tell them to resign and don't offer them a job, they could take us to court for breach of contract.

Employees have drug problems, marriage problems, financial problems, medical problems, truth problems. Wouldn't you rather not add another problem to your team?

Be patient, let us do our checks and don't learn the more haste, less speed lesson the hard way.

Getting feedback on your technique

2007-11-05T20:41:00Z

No matter how often you interview, you should review your technique once in a while. It's easy to get lazy, to think that you can sum up a candidate by what they're wearing, to only hear what you want to hear, or to forget that the candidate hasn't heard your welcome quite as many times as you've said it, and needs it to be fresh and exciting.

My advice would be never interview alone, so you can easily ask your interviewing partner to give you some feedback - even as simple as 'how do you think that went - did we get everything we needed?'. If you can, try and interview with different people occasionally, either for your own team or someone else's to see if another style pays dividends.

You can ask HR to sit in occasionally - most recruitment professionals would be glad to see a hiring manager taking an interest in hiring well.

You should take an in-house or external hiring course at least every two years, which will bring you up to speed on the latest legal issues in hiring, as well as the latest in thoughts about style and technique.

Review your questions occasionally too - it can be easy to sound rote when asking them, and again, this gives a poor candidate impression, as well as being boring for you! You can also change the way you record answers - instead of using a book, use a grid, or loose paper - somehow a different format shakes the brain up and makes you listen harder.

What to do when the candidate obviously isn't right

2007-11-01T07:28:00Z

Sometimes, you just know, after the first couple of questions, that the candidate isn't right. They arn't confident enough to deal with your environment, havn't had the experience of a particular process or used a piece of software in years.

Your instinct can be to cut the interview short, and get back to your day job. This is a mistake. To start with, you have no idea what other candidates will be like, and this one may be the best of the bunch. Confidence can come with experience of the role and lack of it could just be interview nerves. Experience of a process and software can be taught, and shouldn't be your deciding factor.

Secondly, an interview is an expression of your company in the same way a sales call or procurement meeting is. This candidate's impression of your company bad or good will be communicated to others who may be your customers, so they should leave with a good impression and not a feeling that you didn't listen or give them a fair hearing.

Thirdly, first impressions can be wrong. Candidates do sometimes warm up suddenly a few questions in, they sometimes have a skill which would be magically useful in your department and changes the dynamic of the team, sometimes digging gives you evidence of the skills you're looking for.

Fourthly, if you were the candidate - wouldn't you want a fair hearing?

Why recruiting like House is not all a bad idea.

2007-10-25T21:04:00Z

You know House? The obnoxious, but brilliant doctor on TV?

The story so far, is that at the end of Season 3 he fired or otherwise drove his whole team away. And at the beginning of Season 4 he is trying not to recruit a new team. However, he's being forced into hiring, so rather than do interviews, he takes a whole class full of people and gets them to work out what's wrong with new patients.

Now, he does it in his usual non-pc, cringeworthy way, which I wouldn't recommend. But testing your candidates skills by presenting them with problems, that perhaps even you don't know the answer to is definitely valid.

You can present a problem ahead of an interview, just before or within the interview. You can ask for a presentation, an essay, or just ask the candidate to discuss with you what they think. Whichever fits the profile of the job you're hiring for.

Try not to be too obnoxious though!

Why should you answer the phone to potential candidates?

2007-10-23T20:31:00Z

I know, you're worried that if you publish your phone number, you'll be inundated. I've had my number and name published in national papers and on the internet and not been indundated, and there's at least 6 positives to this approach:

1. Candidates will self select out if you don't answer their questions and you may talk to someone great who you would have missed otherwise.

2. Talking to a candidate allows you to ask questions and waste less time interviewing the wrong candidates.

3. Because CVs lie, and it's easier to find the lie when you're talking to someone.

4. Telling someone else about the position helps you describe it to yourself more fully.

5. It helps you eliminate any bias you might have in the selection process - you already like them!

6. Candidates suggestions about how their experience fits can make you think differently about how they might fit in.

Any more?

Should I advertise online?

2007-10-21T21:23:00Z

Recruiting on line is all the rage - and it's the first place most of us look for our new jobs, so it's an obvious to place to think of when we want to advertise a job in our team. However, advertisting on line can be more expensive than you first think - some job boards lock you in to long term contracts and though this job board might be good for this posting, it might not be suitable in the future.

On line recruiting is like any other recruitment advertisment - first make sure you know what kind of person you need, and where they might be looking. Then put together an advert which is attractive to them and answers all their questions. Then, and only then, work out the most cost effective way of reaching them.

One trend in on line advertising is the increase in specialist boards. Less advertisers on the big generalist boards might mean less candidates too.. so the move to specialist boards will be increased. Check with boards their demographic, number of hits per day and other statisitics in order to make sure you're getting value for money. You can also use the NORAS reports to http://www.noras.co.uk/ to double check the figures!

What is a halo effect?

2007-10-18T06:18:00Z

Halo effect is the name recruiters give for falling in love with your candidate! Candidates are easier to interview when their personality are similar to our own. And so, we meet a candidate, find it easy to talk to them, forget all the negatives about them, imagine the wedding...and not the marriage.

The reason we have the same questions for every candidate, a structured marking scheme and a list of requirements before we meet the candidate is to make sure that we look at each candidate without being swayed by our feelings towards them.

And yes, (I can hear you asking), there are certain personalities which would be better in your team than others. But a diverse team will make different and better choices. So, do the brave thing as a manager, and hire the best candidate. Not the one who is similar to you.