New concrete example of socialization : the recruitment process. Here again, we’ll see that it’s possible to do things without Copernican Revolution or harming anyone.

The situation

Enterprises have to hire people. Even if the market is sometimes hard for applicants, no company can work without people. The need is clear : hiring people who fit both the job description and the corporate culture, in the shorter time. If all these conditions are met, there is a kind of economic optimum : the right person according to the job means he/she will help value creation, compliance with culture means that he/she won’t leave after a few months (what implies a lot of extra costs), and as soon as possible means that internal costs will be as low as possible.

A structured approach that’s not infallible

From the job definition to the hiring, there’s no place for luck. A good recruitment is a challenge that’s important enough not to be treated in an offhand manner. Large businesses have a clear methodology to source and select applicants. Impossible to bypass it. This is logical since many of them have quality certified process, what means “we write what we do and we do what we write”. More, if everyone does things his own way, things may be confused if not unmanageable at the enterprise scale.

But sometimes it’s not egnough. Said in other words, the official method may fail to deliver the expected results. This may happen for many reasons. For instance : need to hire someone in emergency (sourcing is too slow), need for a specific or new kind of profile (not necessarily a big name, but there is an increasing need for new profiles that HR dept are not comfortable with yet, can’t source and qualify as well as traditional profiles), lack of applicants…. Of course it’s only about a few part of the offers. But there there those on which a lot of time is lost, or those for which a very special profile is needed. Quantitatively low, qualitatively high.

So, recruiters face the following challenge :  trying to find the gem within the time limite, without puting the process at risk. So the purpose is not to beat about the bush but, on the contrary, to stick to the existing process and increase its bandwith.

[Read more...]