Recruitment is a skill - but luckily it's one that can be taught. Sam Spoors, founder and CEO of talent acquisition partnership Talentheads, explains more about making sure the people in charge of your recruiting are up to the job.
If you want to attract the best people to your organisation, you need to know who you’re looking for and how they operate.
And to do this, you need to already have the best people responsible for recruitment in your business.
Despite a popular misconception, recruitment isn’t a role just anyone can do – although it’s often the case that it falls to a number of different people within a team. In fact, in small companies at least, there’s often not scope for a dedicated HR team, and so the task falls to line managers, directors and office support teams. In short, people with no formal training, and who may lack confidence in the process.
However, there’s much more to successful recruitment than posting a job description on the web and picking the person you think best fits the bill, and skilled recruiters need a range of qualities and experience.
Which is why making sure you have the right people recruiting at this stage of the game will save you lots of headaches further down the line.
The good news is that you can easily train your hiring team, which will have benefits both for your business and their career progression. And remember, offering learning and development opportunities are, in themselves, vital for recruitment and retention, so you’ll really be practising what you preach (and benefiting from the rewards).
So, what benefits can you expect from making sure you have a highly-skilled recruiting team?
Firstly, first impressions count, so look at your recruitment process as your first ‘shop window’. A competent, engaging team will do far more to attract (and retain) the candidates you want than a team who are unclear, disorganised and inexperienced.
Secondly, it’s a candidate’s market out there at the moment, so you’re vying with countless other businesses to attract the right talent. Skilled hiring teams can assess what you need in an employee, where you’ll find those people and how you can attract them so they choose to work for you.
Connected to this is the fact that 21st century job seekers know their worth; the days of the employer holding the cards are gone. This means that your recruitment process and the candidate journey will all form part of their decision-making tool process.
Making sure your hiring team are trained to do the job takes the pressure off you to oversee every stage of the process, allowing you to focus on your own priorities – namely, growing your business.
However, if you still want to be involved in the hiring process to some degree, having talented, experienced hiring teams onboard is bound to make everything run smoother. Well-trained recruiting teams will be able to deliver more targeted and accurate candidate summaries, which allows you to make a more informed decision.
Because that’s what Talentheads is all about – making sure spaces aren’t just filled, but filled with the right person.
Too often, we see firms claiming that ‘they can’t get the staff’. More often than not, they’ve just not taken the time to get the right staff, leading to a situation where you’re trying to fit a round peg in a square hole.
At Talentheads, we approach recruitment differently – and, dare we say it, more successfully. We’re not just about bums on seats; we’re about recruiting holistically, embedding ourselves within our clients’ businesses to shape and define their hiring practices, with the ultimate goal of setting them up for recruiting long term.
And now, we’ve taken that approach one step further, by offering a range of training sessions on all things recruitment and retention.
Our practical workshops, which started in August and will be held in Newcastle throughout the rest of the year, equip recruiters, hiring managers and anyone involved in the hiring process with the skills, knowledge and confidence to navigate the challenges it brings.
Topics covered include planning your recruitment strategy for long-term growth and retention, sourcing the right candidates and best practice for shortlisting. Each session will be hosted by the talented Talentheads team and will answer all the questions guests have on their particular topic, along with practical skills to put into practice in a real-life business setting.
For more information, call the Learning Team on 0191 300 8688, email hello@ talentheads.co.uk, visit www.talentheads. co.uk or register at www.eventbrite.com/o/ talentheads-69131364663