Searching Talent At The Time of Crisis

Staffing solutions have become critical in recent times. The economic rundowns, new criteria for employment, changing technologies, finding right talent and such like have affected the recruitment process and talent pool of companies to a great extent. While finding the right set of candidates has become challenging, there are certain measures which can be useful towards hiring at the time of crisis.

• Often it has been observed that organizations hire or rather look for talent only when they have an opening. This means the company is already in crisis when it starts looking for recruits. This approach affects the company objectives in the long run. So, it is better to start off early. Regular analysis needs to be performed regarding the future talent needs of the company. The talent pool should be evaluated at regular intervals and forecasting regarding future talent needs is crucial.
• It is essential to specify the demands of the job role along with the skill set requirement. The hiring manager should identify the team in which the recruit will work and consider the company culture impact on the job role in order to find the best match.
• Talent pool development is one of the fundamental measures to handle recruitment crisis. The sourcing of the talent pool should be channelized among employees, social media platforms, network channels and such like for a compressive database of candidates. Even the candidate peers can be asked for nominations.
• For a successful recruitment process, an organization requires a set of well trained and high caliber interviewers who can successfully analyze candidate’s knowledge base along with professional behavioral pattern, problem solving abilities and soft skills. Reference checks can be effective towards past experience verification and it is better to involve the top stakeholders in the assessment process.
• Recruitment process goes both ways towards impression creation from the employers as well as candidate end. So it is better to keep the door open for questions in order to perk up the candidate interest. It is also essential to involve technicians and hiring managers along with HR professional to close the deal. In case of higher positions, C level employees should be involved in the process.
• Integration of the fresh recruit within the system should be performed with systematic on boarding of the candidate and proper support towards working systems to be provided by the team members and managers.

While these measures can assist towards effective recruitment even before the crisis rises, there are certain things which should be off limits.

• Going for the recruitment at the nick of time. When a company is desperate to hire, that’s when the worst decisions are taken. No one wants to end up with a bad recruit. So, refraining from hurried recruitment is a best approach,
• Generic competency models should be avoided at the time of recruitment.
• Ad hoc approach towards talent search results in a disorganized process.

Lastly, delaying selection for too much perfect match or settling for a candidate at first instance, both may result in crisis in after years.