Want to improve your recruitment process? Follow these five key steps

Dr Tim Barnett of the Charles Fellowes Group explains how you can improve your recruitment by adding 5 steps to the process.

As a recruiter, there may be a lot of pressure on you to get the right person in post with minimal output in terms of time and money. But as many an experienced recruitment professional will tell you, short term economy can cost dearly in the long term. The people who work in your organisation are, after all, key to its success - so investing in the process is also an investment in the business.

Too often, recruitment becomes an exercise in finding ëthe best of the bunchí. However, a successful recruiter should always be looking for an effective ëfití between the organisationís needs, and the experience, knowledge, skills and attitude of the candidate. An interview on its own simply canít achieve this.

Adding to your talent pool
At Charles Fellowes we favour a more comprehensive and diagnostic approach. We believe that, when recruiting for key posts, you should be aiming to find a candidate who has something to add to your organisationís talent pool. This means taking a broader view than just looking for someone with the capability of filling the current vacancy. To really assess a candidateís long term potential value to your organisation, you will need to add more to the recruitment process than a stand alone interview.

Whilst the interview will remain a key recruitment ingredient, and probably the focal point of the recruitment process, the challenge is including other strategies to drive and add to the overall process. This way, the interview becomes a more effective tool in your repertoire.

Try improving the value of the interview by constructing a number of activities that are geared to help you assess the necessary ëfití between the capabilities, expectations and aspirations of the candidate, and the current, and likely future, requirements of your organisation. Our experience in the recruitment industry has shown that, whilst there are a range of viable activities, these can be narrowed down to five key steps which will enhance the recruitment process.

1. Reverse the Process
Aim to make the recruitment process a two way exchange of information by creating a structure which enables short listed candidates to meet and question those who will have an impact on their success in the role e.g. their immediate manager, peers and direct reports. If done properly, this will help the candidates to develop a good understanding of your organisationís culture, working practices and ethos, as well as gaining an insight into the opportunities and requirements of the position. This also helps the recruiters to build their understanding of each candidateís approach, attitudes, expectations and values - key considerations in determining a fit between individual and organisation.

2. Capability Testing
An interview is a performance and can only tell you so much. As a recruiter, you need to know what the person sitting in front of you can actually do; this is where capability testing comes into its own. Decide upon the key criteria for the position you are offering and design or buy in activities that will realistically test a candidateís capabilities against these criteria. A possible positive side effect is that this process can also help your organisation by providing new insights on current unresolved problems or opportunities.

3. Psychometrics
A widely used tool itís true, but all too often a tool that is still not being used to its full potential. Essentially, psychometrics allow you to look beyond the skills and experience that a candidate has and assess their overall potential. They provide objective, scientific data about a candidate and can help to predict how that person will perform in a given situation. Psychometrics analyse how people see themselves, what qualities they have and how these qualities can enhance or undermine their performance. They also add more value to the interview process as the results often throw up queries which enable you to ask more relevant and penetrating questions in interview.

4. Research tasks
We have never had such ready access to so much information, but this can bring its own problems. The ability to manage and present knowledge has become a key skill in successful organisations. Whilst an interview allows a candidate to offer a view of their experience and capabilities in this area, it canít demonstrate how they would go about researching, managing and communicating information in practice. To see this for yourself, give the candidate a project to research, then observe and assess their ability to manage the process: do they ask the right questions, how do they go about collating and evaluating all the data at their disposal, how would they analyse, distil and present that data to others? Asking a person how they would do it is simply no substitute for seeing them in action.

5. Recruitment Centres
Our current processes are still too heavily geared to ëbringing people in for an interviewí. However, the greater the investment or cost of making a wrong recruitment decision, the greater the need for a more rigorous assessment of a candidateís capabilities. Recruitment centres involve all of the activities mentioned above, plus interviews and two-way feedback ñ it is the ideal scenario if you are able to commit the necessary time and money. The added value of this process is that it also helps to build a two-way understanding and relationship between the successful candidate and the centre colleagues, which can in turn ease the successful candidateís integration into their new position.

The people who work with you or for you are an investment. To make the right choices you have to put the time and effort into making the selection process as rigorous as time and budget constraints will allow. It may be unrealistic for you to adopt all of the steps outlined here, but at the very least take the time to review what you are currently doing and add in the step that is most likely to add value to your process. After all, getting the right person for a key position will have long term benefits which more than justify the extra effort you put into recruiting them.