It is the best of times; it is the worst of times, for recruiters. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are out of work, actively seeking employment. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are employed and won’t budge for fear of LIFO.
Hiring managers can afford to thoroughly assess candidates, but they still need to proactively recruit.
Successful recruiters can manage this unique employment market by melding the initial assessment and sourcing through a dual-purpose recruitment tool: ideal profiles.
The ideal profile is not about elevating nice-to-haves to must-haves in your list of job requirements. It’s about using your knowledge of a top-performer KSAs and competencies to target your recruiting and do a more thorough, objective assessment of candidates.
What Is an Ideal Profile?
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In Part 1 of this article series, published in February, we discussed how to identify your organization’s culture. I argued that by adding a fourth dimension ó corporate culture ó to your traditional set of hiring qualifiers, hiring managers and human resources can determine “cultural fit”: that is, whether the candidate will be able to fully utilize the other three dimensions in the organization (i.e. maximize performance) and be satisfied doing so (retention). Now we’ll discuss how to use this important information about your corporate culture once you’ve identified it. The key to incorporating this “fourth dimension” of recruiting into your recruitment and selection process is to add more value, not more work. Use what you have; just reframe it. Here are some specific steps you can take. Competencies Identifying cultural competencies will be an important part of your recruitment and selection process. If you have competencies in place for benchmark jobs, update them to include company-wide cultural competencies. For a customer-focused organization, you probably have the following competencies for the customer service staff. Consider including some or all of these in all jobs:
In many ways, Jack was the ideal candidate for International Widget. A respected, high-priced executive search firm had recruited him. After two rounds of technical and structured behavioral interviews, skills testing, and personality profiling, management and HR agreed that he would be a great new hire. Jack got the 15% salary increase he requested as well as a 10% sign-on bonus and three weeks vacation. He came on board and jumped right into his work with enthusiasm. So why after six months of employment was Jack leaving? Despite all the care, time, and expense put into recruiting and selecting Jack, one crucial element had been neglected: No effort was made to see if Jack matched International Widget’s corporate culture. Corporate Culture: The Fourth Dimension of Recruiting When recruiting and selecting new hires, most organizations use one or more sets of qualifiers (dimensions) to determine job fit. In order of use, these dimensions are:
It is the best of times; it is the worst of times, for recruiters. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are out of work, actively seeking employment. Millions of high-quality potential candidates are employed and won’t budge for fear of LIFO.
