Tips for maximising your recruitment game

Many businesses are struggling to attract skilled workers at the moment. While some of these issues are unavoidable, there are some ways you can shake up the recruitment process in order to give yourself the best possible chance of bringing candidates in the door.

Rethinking the role of the recruitment process is a worthwhile starting point. According to Lauren Karan, director at Karan and Co, businesses are lagging behind because they’re not planning for the future.

“I have seen the importance of understanding the bigger picture for talent management. It’s not just about what you’re recruiting now; it’s what’s the growth projection of the organisation, where are we consistently seeing gaps in talent, [and] what should we be talent pulling for? Because we know that that is critical for us growing in the future,” she said.

“We had one client, a Sydney consultancy, that had had a role vacant for six months. They had the role title wrong. So, it was essentially a management role, but they called it a consultant. And simple flexibility, they didn’t realise that 80 per cent of that market had flexible working conditions.”

New approaches may be necessary as traditional hiring methods have shifted through the chaos of the pandemic. In this new age of work, fresh ways of working can give employers an edge over the competition.

“Whenever you go back to market for a role, if someone has retired, if someone has moved on or been promoted, you need to revisit what success looks like in that role in the current climate and landscape,” Ms Karan explained.

“One thing we know is change is constant now. There’s AI, there are new technologies, [and] there’s remote and flexible working as well. And all of the challenges that come around, a new style of management for that, too.”

Understanding that the workforce has changed and adjusting processes to cater for this change can help organisations to remain empowered.

Ms Karan commented: “When you’re looking at it, you’ve got to first sit down and rescope it, and then also go, well, how do the deliverables in this position align with where we want to go as a business? What values do we need to grow or double in size in 12 months? We need people that are agile and have a growth mindset, and we know what we need.”

“So you need to look at that and be really strategic when you’re hiring and looking at a position. You need to look at what’s the market doing.”

While thinking outside the box and adjusting processes can be helpful, one area to steer clear of is panic hiring, said Ms Karan. Recruiting anyone and everyone to fill positions can leave you worse off in the long run.

“The mistake that a lot of companies make is they go to transactional straightaway. You need to get someone as quickly as possible. So, their whole goal is the longer I have this seat vacant, the longer I’m losing money or turning away work,” she outlined.

“I do understand that pressure, but then there’s also the cost of getting it wrong. So, if you rush to hire, the cost of, you know, that person replacing them, then the cost of that impact on the business, the time lost training, the loss of productivity of dissatisfied team members around.”

Getting the basics right will help to promote strong hiring. Candidate experience should always be considered, as it will help with attraction and retention.

“It’s [about] going back to the drawing board when you hire and also looking at your candidate experience,” Ms Karan said.

She added: “If the person’s coming from a role where they’ve already got flexibility, what’s going to make them jump and leave somewhere where they’ve already got those benefits? It’s about us identifying and working with them to see where it’s going wrong because there always will be somewhere that there can be an improvement.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Lauren Karan, click below: