Coming up in June’s edition of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I break down the best practices and nuances needed when addressing large volumes of hiring. I spent time with staffing and HR leaders from the Gap, PNC Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, and Children’s Medical Center of Dallas to understand how companies gear up for holidays, expansions, new product launches, and new builds.
In the article, six different process stages are outlined: Needs Analysis, Sourcing, Screening, Assessment, Closing the Deal, and Acceptance/Onboarding. Each step of the recruiting process is detailed, and a checklist of nuances captured at each step, gleaning from the best practices of the interviewed group, as well as the experiences I see each day setting up client workforce strategies.
Below are five tips (or landmines) from the nine-page article which has almost 40 such tips, which together serves as a roadmap for talent acquisition leaders as they plan for the economic recovery and aggressive staffing.
#1: Don’t try and move around management and interview individual contributors simultaneously. Hire all the management first for the incoming individual contributors, and make sure they are trained on the project, interviewing, and have all the bandwidth they need to allow for incoming applicants, interviews, and assessment. If your timetable is truncated, you can start sourcing for individual contributors when you are closing the deal on all the new managers.
#2: Post with sensitivity. Make sure that you have made an effort to broadcast this position to media outlets or local government agencies as much as possible. Not only does the PR do you good and get you applicants, but it also indicates that you are not snubbing the local government agencies or trying to avoid their out-of-work populations.
#3: Visual screening can be executed by non-recruiters. Visual screening needs to be done by people who have clear instructions about what to look for in order to match the qualifications of the job. Managers can do this activity, but likely for every 10 applicants, less than five make it to interview, so do you really want hiring managers spending time on anything with 50% productivity? Consider having a task force or special team assigned to this.
#4: Be prepared for no-shows. It is going to happen. Some hotshot candidate won’t show up, or a plane will be delayed or there will be traffic. Just roll with it. But also realize that you may want to invite more people than usual to interviews. Try adding 10% to what you think, just as a buffer.
#5: The offer approval process will likely need to be truncated. It is not unusual to have two steps for checking the offer. Plan on having no approval on the offers. As long as it is within the approved target range, it should be able to be extended.
Anyhow, find out more in the Journal if you’re a subscriber (or if you’re nice to Todd and signed up for the next big conference I bet he’ll hook you up with this issue for free, and maybe some other high-volume hiring Journal articles about the Border Patrol, Census, and Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare). Also, if you want to check it out, there’s still a video online from my 2010 ERE Expo panel, about recruiting transformation, that included representatives from PepsiCo, PNC Bank, and ESPN. (And you’re not done with me yet — I’m talking with Todd about doing something again for the March 28-30 event in San Diego.)