Deciphering Recruitment Process - Part 1 : Shortlisting of Candidates

Recently i have read an article on "Lotus Notes" where as part of a study on Organization Culture, the resumes of first 40 employees including the founder were sent to HR department ( Changing their names, and this after the firm being extremely successful) for open positions in the organization.These people comes from extremely diverse set of backgrounds most of which are not related to the work done in the organization. Unsurprisingly, none of these people were shortlisted for any of the vacant positions in the organization.These are the very people who had built the organization to the heights it had reached but in the process also put in structures & policies in place which exclude people like them. If such a scenario is by choice, its fair enough.

But more often than not its the result of shortlisting candidates based on some set criteria like educational qualification, years of experience in particular functional area, industry, tools they have worked or clients they have served.All these factors serves as filters in navigating through the deluge of resumes received for every single position in an organization. The more employer of choice an organization is, the more stringent filters would be. Its true that such filters help in screening the initial lot and would be very effective when combined with an element of human judgement. But with the penetration of recruitment tools which does activities from shortlisting to sending standard regret mails, there is very little chance that some of the would be superstars   would ever get a chance to present their case.

But the problem with such a rigid process is that over a period of time, organization is filled with employees who are very much similar to each other because these people would have come with same or similar educational background, work experience and since people who would interview these candidates remain the same, the selected candidates would be effectively clones of existing employees. It might work very well for some organizations especially in the service sector where the focus might be more on following the existing processes rather than innovation and there is a requirement to higher volumes. 

But as the saying goes "one size doesn't fill all" ( or is it some thing different?), caution is required in over relying on technology for shortlisting candidates.True at very senior levels, generally the task is handed over to head hunters with specific requirements. But even at lower levels there are quite a few positions where it would make sense to deviate from regular standard requirements.It would reap benefits to keep a look out for such positions and ensure that shortlisting for such positions is not completely left on some predetermined filters alone but rather involve some one who can see the big picture rather than trying to tick mark the checklist of requirements required for that position.

One other most important and  anomaly found in shortlisting criteria is the number of years of experience. Now, every one agrees that years of experience does not directly correlate to expertise level. Even the recruiters knew about it. That's the reason one can find that even for positions asking for 5-7 years experience, more often than not, we can see people with much lower experience levels getting the job.Fair enough. But the most glaring mistake is when as a title for the position , it would be on lines of "Looking for experience levels of 2-4" and in the qualifications & experience section , it would be written Minimum 5 years of exp required. Next time, just have a look at job openings, keeping this observation and you would be surprised to see the frequency with which it keeps recurring even from the most reputed names

The point is that, these experience criteria is often taken on approximation or based on experience levels of some one doing the job currently which may or may not be a right indicator. It would make more sense to keep experience level generic like say 2-7 years and rather focus on kind of experiences one should have as a criteria for people to judge whether they would be considered for shortlist or not

to be continued.... :)

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Recruitment Insights across Countries

Disclaimer: The opinions I mentioned are personal based on my limited interactions and may not be generalized :)


Thanks to the regional HR role, I had the opportunity of observing how people respond to interview process across different countries and how much culture of their country plays a role in their approach to the interview
So here goes , some experiences country wise

Indonesia:
Among the Indonesian candidates I have seen so far, no one confirms the offer during interview but would give a standard answer that they need to discuss with their wife before accepting the offer. Also during the salary negotiations all that matter is monthly net salary, medical and car benefits ( btw unlike in India, Indonesian employees are provided with car or car allowance from pretty early stage in their career). So year end allowance, quarterly pay out etc doesn't have their intended effect.
High cost of medical care and very bad public transport infrastructure explains the reason for Indonesian employee's high emphasis on these components.
 Will save detailed discussion on compensation in Indonesia for some other post

Now moving to one other very interesting country,

Australia:
It took me exactly 5 revisions and a call lasting for more than 1 hour before the candidate finally signed the 27 page employment contract. During the process the candidate appointed a lawyer for verifying the employment contract, who true to the fees he has taken, sent me close to 3 pages of comments and a lawyer from my side to finalize the contract.
The clarifications varied from as trivial ( Atleast in India) clauses like indemnifying the company in case if the candidate uses company mail in contravention to any local laws to his insistence on mentioning that he would be granted a week leave after one month of joining to attend his father's birthday.
Australians seem to be very particular about very minute details. For ex, when one of the employee resigned , he sent a mail stating that he would not be available for company purpose from so and so date from so and so time onwards. Car is definitely a provision and expected on day 1

South Korea:

The candidate we interviewed here was very insistent on adding a compulsory employment clause for 3 years irrespective of performance or business of the company. It may not be so much to do with culture specific as we are still establishing our permanent presence in Korea and the candidate is worried about stability. Nevertheless the clause stumped me because generally in these cases , candidates tend to demand a premium on salary for taking a job with ambiguity. Any how like in India , Employment contract is more open ended in Korea and candidate is quite ok after we shared our plans in Korea

The last of the series is Vietnam

Vietnam:

The candidate started the process by asking some questions even before the first  question was asked and the entire interview was more of conversation discussing about business of the organization rather an interview for the job. Final twist is when the question of compensation came up. The candidate said that he is not expecting to discuss about salary part in the first interaction, rather he will write to us his queries and if every thing goes fine, we can have a separate interaction to finalize the compensation

So that's about the experiences so far and honestly I have never read my employment contract so sincerely and with interviews for Singapore and Philippines lined up in the next few days , hoping for more enriching experiences

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Some quick thoughts on recruitment process

Recently I got to see the interview sheets ( where each panel member of the interview is asked to rate candidate on different parameters or competencies) and a final decision based on overall rating. One surprising finding is that the candidate who is shortlisted for further consideration is actually scoring low than some of the candidates who were rejected. The reason(s) in this case is pretty obvious. Lets see some of them:

• The interviewers went by their intuition on whether a candidate is good or not and used scoring sheets only as a justification at later point of time ( in this case they didn't bother to compare scorings with previous candidates). Each interview lasted on an average for more than 2 hours , so there is no doubt on how the candidates are assessed, but the point is the interview sheet which the company uses became more for the sake of record keeping rather than an evaluation tool

• Lets see another case. In this case the interview panel had thoroughly followed the process. But when it comes to making a final decision it depends on the senior most member in the panel, thus giving a scope of introducing bias in the system based on personal preferences of the senior most person.

There might be many other cases, but for now will stick to these 2 aspects as one can be solution to solving another.

when ever a senior member is involved in the panel, it makes a valid sense for each member to rate the candidate individually with explanations for ratings and discussion can happen based on the points written in the interview evaluation sheets. HR professional can facilitate this discussion phase as he is more likely to be objective as subject expert in the interviewing process

Now on a completely different topic, if a candidate is interviewed for a position which involves working in a team, it makes sense that the team leader who has a grasp on personalities of team members be involved in the interview process. It need not be leader in all the cases , some one who spent considerable time with the team can be a observer
In this case , the goal should not just be the best candidate but some one who can improve the performance of the team and who can assimilate better in the team
It should not be confused that selecting a candidate just to fit into the team at the cost of quality, some one who can question the underlying assumptions of the team and who can rationally question the team is fine , but some one who  can disrupt team cohesion would be a big NO

Lastly ,  As the saying goes "what u reap is what u sow",Getting right people on board helps achieving the organization goals in the long run

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Role of recruitment in achieving business goals

Disclaimer : For simplicity sake ,i would avoid using jargons as far as possible :P

Most often we hear the cases where candidates in a job recruitment are selected for one strength , made to do the job which requires
completely new set of skills and finally conduct performance appraisal on those parameters which are not relevant to the job

The problem here is that there is no coordination between the skills looked by the person who hires, who manages the employees work and who designed the performance appraisal system. So the employee often finds in a conflicting situation where his manager asks him to do some thing which is not what his performance target says (this problem is severe when pay is tied with the performance ratings, which i wont be discussing now)

what can be effective solution:These are my learnings from my Employee Resourcing class, Readings and my personal views

What ever is envisioned by the top management should be percolated across all the levels in the organisation . So even the goals should follow the top-down approach . This in the sense , the top management generally decides how they want to position the company in the next few years , say for ex: the company wants to aggresively increase its market share for range of products

so lets see how various people and the processes in the organisation are impacted by this decission:

Top Management : Instead of saying they want to have max share in the market , they should clearly define whether they are looking at 50% share or 80% share and convey the same to the middlemanagement.From recruitment perspective , these are people who have good information on what it takes to be successful in the market few years down the line

Middlemanagement: These are the people who are in a position to influence the work force and have a good idea on customer needs . Being the managers , these people know what are the behaviors that helped their reportees to excel in their jobs and what behaviors leads to low performers. So when the goal of company is to increase the market share , the HR department should collect information from these people on characterstics of people which leads to this objective (good sales persons)

Lower level (sales people in our case) : The most important stake holders in the entire process. The incumbents in the job (especially those who are able to constantly clock good sales figures) and those mediocre people (who are recruited from other companies for star performance but slipped to mediocre sales here). Both these categories of people gives a good indication on what takes it to be succesful in the job and what are the processes that are hindering in their job ( Too much beuracracy,policies,incompetent managers,lack of training etc).

Once all the inputs are taken , the HR personnel should be able to identify all the qualifications(both technical & behavioral) required for the job

Now there are some elements in profile which cannot be trained like motivation to work. so these factors should be given more importance while recruiting . There are other factors like say specific technical knowlege which can be trained , these people can be recruited provided we have training facility and we have time to train them (Infy does this , where they clearly mention learnability is what they see and not what u already know )

Finally interviews should be done by stake holders : ie a HR manager is best person for checking the behavioral aspects where as reporting manager can check the technical skills . This step even though is followed , efforts should be made to make it fool prrof as a wrong hire costs the company a lot

well , started writing a small article but it snowballed and looks very scary now :P

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