Hire Smart People And Let Them Innovate

Hire Smart People And Let Them Innovate

“When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove that you are smarter than they are.” — R.H. Grant

Talent acquisition is the talk of the hour in the recruitment industry. Amidst several requirements, innovation and lateral thinking are something you invest in when you opt for quality hires. As a recruiter, it is essential to judge if the candidate you are interviewing has the potential to step up with his own ideas.

If you are hiring smart people, you are paying them for their innovation. But if your hire has the mindset of just following the superior’s orders, you have hired a wrong candidate. Smart people are not to be taught how to do their work. Instead, you can have their out-of-the box ideas to grow your business.

When investing in top tier talents, do not forget to tick the innovation checkbox if you want a sustainable solution for your organization.

How is innovation the key to success?

Innovation can evidently become a competitive advantage for your company in this cut-throat era. It is essential to ensure that your talent acquisition strategies understand the importance of innovation. Here is how innovation can help your organization to stand out in the crowded talent space.

  • Perspective: If you are allowing your employees to share their ideas, you can figure out how you can do the same thing in 1000 in other ways. Indeed, you can crack the nut that seemed hard enough earlier.
  • Area of improvement: Innovation moves your organization towards improvement. Knowing where and how to use innovation is essential if you are looking for sustainable growth.
  • Identify weakness: It is the innovation that can expose the weakness of any strategy and tell you how to make that strategy fool-proof. If your employees stick their necks to the desk and follow your orders only, no one will ever tell you about a minor error that can be a backfire later.
  • Competitive advantage: Innovation can actually take you two steps ahead of your competitor. Be it figuring out your competitor’s next move or independently designing a strategy to beat them; you cannot do it without innovative employees.

Why opt for innovative talents?

If you are paying your employees, it is not just for the paperwork they do. When hiring top talents, you count on their contribution to the growth of the company. That is only possible if they can think, unlike you, with adequate reasons.

High-performance is undoubtedly on the top priorities of quality hires. But if you need to tell them what to do every time, do you think you have invested in the right place? Innovation opens up a broad scope of opportunities for your company. Therefore, if you are using your authority to curb it, you are actually harming your organization.

Investing in innovative talents ensures that you have made a smart choice for your organization.

Is investment in innovation overhyped?

Never. If you have innovative minds working for you, you can expect breakthroughs are on the way. Moreover, you can just avoid the hassle of passing orders on how to do and what to do on a project. Moreover, if you value your employees’ ideas, you also get the result in retention rates.

How to bring out innovation?

An innovative mind can be overburdened and destroyed if the superiors always practice their authorization rights. Therefore, it is essential to educate your managers on how not to say a straight ‘no’ to every idea that counters their ideas.

When a new employee enters a company with innovative ideas, you must teach them how to pitch it and where to pitch it. Brainstorming sessions not only bind your employees as a team but also ensures the exchange of ideas to figure out the best solution.

One thing that you must ensure is that a failure of a new idea does not become a barrier to the employee’s participation in any discussion.

The Bottom Line

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” — Steve Jobs

The contribution of innovation is undeniable in any success. A sustainable business plan is actually based on innovation. Therefore, undermining innovation in your recruitment process can be a grave mistake that you should avoid.

Pragna is a competent recruitment solution for hiring the most innovative minds in the market. With us, you can definitely get access to quality hires. To know more about our services, please check our website.

 

A Perfect Blend: Right Skill Set with Right Mindset

A Perfect Blend: Right Skill Set with Right Mindset

Right Mindset

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.” – Henry David Thoreau.

In the recruitment industry, competition has always been acquiring the top tier talents. In most cases, the recruiter hires the candidate having a resume brimming with skill sets. But does that fulfill the intrinsic needs of the organization? The degrees on the resume do speak of the hard skills of the candidate, but the soft skills like effective communication, team spirit, etc. cannot be assessed just by going through a resume.

The right mindset plays a crucial role when you look for quality hires. Employees having the appropriate skill sets along with the right mindset ensures the sustainability and growth of the organization.

Skillset vs. Mindset

If there are 100 candidates, 75 of them will have the right skill sets. But if you are looking for 5 quality hires, how will you assess the candidates? Out of these 75 candidates, 25 are top graduates. If you want to ensure quality hires, you must check out which of the 25 candidates have the right mindset that can actually lead to your company’s growth. In this cut-throat competition, you will always find a large number of people who have the right skill sets.

But why is the right mindset essential for growth?

  • A candidate having good communication skill ensures smooth execution of operations
  • The flexibility of employees ensures better team performance
  • Commitment to deadlines is crucial virtue that cannot be taught
  • Loyalty to the organization can save your back in the worst situation
  • An improved working environment guarantees better productivity

How to ensure quality hires with the right mindset?

Skills can be taught, but the mindset of employees cannot be mold. The expression of mindset is through the attitude. Therefore, when a recruiter is looking for the right mindset, the candidate must be analyzed based on his/ her attitude.

  • Assess the candidate’s interest to engage

Indeed, you will be greeted with an obligatory smile when you are interviewing someone for a job. But what makes the difference between a candidate with the right mindset to stand out in the crowd is his/her attitude towards the interview and company. Therefore, as a recruiter, always check if the candidate is interested in engaging himself.

  • Check if the candidate’s goal aligns with that of the company’s

If you want your hires to vouch for the substantiality, in the long run, make sure you do not hire the one who just performs his tasks to just earn money without any interest in the company’s goal. In talent acquisition, it is essential to make quality hires whose goals align with the company’s agenda. Surely, a candidate with the right mindset and attitude can work whole-heartedly for the organization without just limiting his thoughts to his salary.

  • Background check with the candidate’s previous company

A background check is usually a routine thing while recruiting. However, instead of just viewing the company’s name, it’s always better to inquire about the candidate from the company. This will surely provide you a clearer vision of the candidate’s mindset and attitude.

  • Stress tests

Stress tests have been neglected even though it comes as a significant step in the selection process. It is under real stress that people show their true colors. As a recruiter, you can get a glimpse of how the candidate reacts. Indeed stress tests help you assess the mindset and attitude.

Final Thoughts

Talent acquisition in the recruitment industry is challenging, especially if you are looking for quality hires with the perfect blend of the right skills and right mindset. It is essential to ensure that every employee has the right attitude and frame of mind to help organization grow. Recruiters have to be tactical to ensure that every hire does have the right attitude and mindset along with required skillset.

“Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.” W. C. Fields

Pragna offers you the best assistance when it comes to recruiting the perfect blend of skills and mindset. Our comprehensive selection and recruitment process ensure that every hire is a quality hire for your company. For more information please visit our website www.pragna.net.

 

Channeling Your Focus on Quality in High Volume Recruiting

High Volume recruiting is a common process in the recruitment industry. Usually, an established company hires 5-7 employees every day. But does that mean the quantity can overpower the quality? No, the talent acquisition professionals ensure that your company recruits talented and high performing candidates for your organization.

High volume recruitment with quality candidate is a challenging job. Be it an outsourced or in-house process, it is a hectic job to focus on quality over quantity. Every candidate applying for the job are screened through several stages of selection process. Here we will be talking about the challenges of high volume recruiting and how the task of recruiting quality over quantity can be made easier.

Challenges Related To Volume-Based Recruiting

You will find a vast number of applications for the job. It becomes tough to find the best, at the same time, the needy candidate to hire among them. Here are some most critical topics that, as a hiring manager, you will face linked with a large number of applicants.

– Longer Time to Hire: A volume-based hiring method takes more time to evaluate. A hiring manager needs to go through each resume, and when its applications are in a high number, it makes it more challenging to decide which one deserves of a screening phone call—more the applications, more the rings, which takes up a lot of time. 

– Hard To Identify Top Talent: When you have a single vacancy and multiple applicants, you might miss the best person for the job. You have to review each candidate, and you can’t give much time to each one; in this process, it is the most substantial possibility of missing out of the deserving one. 

– Poor User Experience for Candidates: The recruitment process involves a recruiter and a job seeker. Of course, each one of them will have the experience, good or bad. A recruiter can’t attain each candidate with a similar emotion. He has to deal with many people to be the negative user experience for an applicant. That implies that applicants can end hanging in for weeks, waiting for a response.

Hiring for Quality Over Quantity

Even though hiring quality candidates through high volume recruiting is a challenging task, here are few tips that can make your job a bit easier.

Use of AI

With the advancement of technology, the primary screening can be made easier with the use of suitable artificial intelligence. In the process of high volume recruitment, it takes effort and time to screen the application based on skill and experience. You can eliminate this headache by the incorporating AI into your recruitment process. Artificial intelligence can help you segregate quality candidate suitable for the job based on the recorded data of skills and experience of each candidate. Manually, this process can take days and even be subjected to bias or unconscious faults. With the help of AI, you can screen more than thousand applications in just a few minutes.

Tacking recruitment performance

For high volume recruiting, most companies analyze the cost per hire to understand the efficiency of the recruitment. The cost per higher strategy is also essential to understand where you need to spend more for recruiting the top-tier talents of a field. Tracking down the recruitment performance with the right metrics such as hiring budget, hiring velocity and performance of hired candidate helps you to get a clear picture how you should manage your recruitment process to hire quality candidates in high volume. 

Identify Top Candidate Through Cognitive Aptitude Test

Cognitive aptitude is the right method to verify the candidate’s ability to work. A single test can make you understand multiple things about the applicant. What does an aspirant needs for a job? Problem-solving skills, presence of mind, quick decision-making abilities, communication skills, presentation skills, attention to detail should definitely be on your list. Cognitive aptitude helps you verifying all these aspects of the candidate. You can test his every skill until you get sure about it. It is the positively opted strategy to finalize someone for a job. 

Hiring someone is not a difficult job, but hiring the right one is tricky. As a hiring manager, it is your responsibility to select the correct person so that your company and the candidate can work in synchronization. If you are seeking quality recruitment over quantity, Pragna is an ideal partner for you.

At Pragna, we have experienced recruiters who can help you in quality hires within the desired time frame. Our analytics-based tool helps parse resumes very efficiently and significantly reduces hiring time and also cost per hire.  To know more about our recruitment solutions, check out our website.

 

Art of Recruiting: Think like a Marketer on How to Attract Best Talent

Art of Recruiting: Think like a Marketer on How to Attract Best Talent

Gone are the days when the recruitment process revolved around referrals and newspaper advertisements. With the growing accessibility of the internet, the recruitment industry witnessed a drastic change on how to attract best talent. It has become a convoluted and multi-step process to hire a qualified candidate for the right position. Talent acquisition and high volume recruiting are two aspects that are a paradox in the recruitment industry.

If a recruiter wants to attract top tier talents in the field, it is necessary to think more like a marketer and present opportunity in right manner. Through this article, you can explore some exclusive tips that will help you as a recruiter on how to attract best talent in the market.

Why Recruiters need Marketing skills today?

The market is full of potential talents, but why should they choose to work for your company? As everyone has a smartphone in their hands, they do have access to several job opportunities for them. What makes your company stand out?

Instead of just briefing your candidate about your company during the interview, create a brand that ensures credibility. This can only be done if your recruiter can think like a marketer. Recruitment marketing involves not just posting about jobs every now and then. It is about creating engagement to attract qualified candidates to your company.

Tips to Attract Top-Tier Talents

Now that you realize why your recruiter needs to think like a marketer on How to attract best talent, let’s explore the answer to HOW?

Creating Employee-Friendly Brand Image

In this competitive market, the top tier talents become the picker of their employer. Therefore, if you want to attract the best talent in a field, you must portray your company as a company that cares for its employees. Every company has a ‘core value’ section enlisting every noble value to attract talent. But if you ‘practice what you preach,’ you can have employee reviews on reputed platforms like Glassdoor or Google that will surely make your company stand out. A company with several employees vouching creates public goodwill attracting the most qualified candidates in the market.

Optimal Utilization of Social Media Platforms

Social media is a powerful tool that can help you in attracting high-volume talents. You must have noticed that a large number of recruiters are using LinkedIn to attract the target pool. Social media indeed serves as a key to successful recruitment. But will it be effective if you only post job ads? No, as a recruiter, you must use social media platforms to create the brand image, post stuff that engages your target pool, and maintain an up-to-date social media page for your company to attract talent pool.

If a recruiter has marketing skills, it can make it easier for your company to hire high-performing candidates who would already be interested in your company. Moreover, it won’t be difficult to find the talents who align themselves with your business goal. If a recruiter has excellent marketing skills, you have an edge in talent acquisition.

Clear and Visible Call-To-Action

Do not hide your ‘call-to-action’ when you are looking for quality hires. Whenever you are posting something on social media, ensure that your ‘call-to- action’ is clear and visible. You can use a different color font or backlinked icon to invite CVs or urge people to look into your website or company profile. The message should be clear to the viewers.

Engage Your Potential Targets

A person may not be looking for a job right now, but if you can engage him through your activities, there’s a high chance that he/she will think about approaching your company when they are open for a job. Moreover, if you are successful in engaging through your social media posting or email-marketing, you get a competitive advantage to attract as well as retain the best talents in the market.

Final Thoughts

The recruitment industry has changed over the years and has become an amalgamation of technology and marketing. Using the marketing strategy in recruitment has become vital as the competition is increasing day by day. Acquiring and practicing the right recruitment marketing skills does affect your hiring output. 

At Pragna our talent acquisition specialists are fully trained to be marketers to attract right talent. They understand the importance of brand building and social media presence which is becoming important day to day to hire top talent. To know more about Pragna capabilities visit our website.

 

Art of Managing Virtual Teams

Art of Managing Virtual Teams

The Internet along with other technologies has made remote working a reality for employees and has completely revised the way businesses operate in the today’s modern world. But this change is also one of our greatest competitive strength. We can hire talented people from any part of the world.

We live in a connected world so, connected that we don’t even need to leave our comfort zones and still get the work done on fingertips. Modern day jobseekers and businesses all over the world are adopting the same in the form of virtual teams.

So, before learning how to manage virtual teams let’s first understand what it is?

Virtual teams are teams entirely consist of remote workers. A virtual team is a group of individuals or employees who are geographically scattered across different locations locally or globally and different time zones sharing information and cooperating in real-time using various technology tools like online communication, cloud applications etc. Managing virtual teams has its own set of challenges and benefits, but overall the benefits outweigh the difficulties.

Here are few tips on how you can manage your virtual employees

Choose right communication tools

Communication is one of the tops challenges for virtual teams. It requires a plan to drive it. Since teams aren’t together in a co-located office, everyone needs to be dynamic in creating a communication schedule⁠. Discussion that takes place in an office can sometimes be immensely helpful and productive, generating new ideas that might not have come to light in another context. Email, in particular, is a solid tool for conversation, Skype or Google Hangouts are great for quick instant messaging. Virtual phone systems centered on cloud technology can be used for quick calling and task management. Also, Project management tools can help you keep your communication in a lot more organized manner and you can refer to it whenever you want. It also helps new people when they join, as they can refer to the previously discussed points. Also, using screen sharing tools like TeamViewer, join.me etc. comes handy when you want multiple people to see the same screen in real time.

Promote remote team building

Remote team building won’t happen naturally and it’s not an overnight process, it requires constant efforts on your part as a virtual team manager, also from your team members. Some easy ideas for team building are a daily video standup, a weekly meeting where the team can share about their personal life along with professional thoughts like what they did over the vacation or weekend. Additionally, setting professional goals contributes to being systematic and puts people in the right mindset.

Track working hours

In a flexible environment, it’s becomes difficult for a manager to actually find out how many hours team members are working or even if they are working at all. In this case you need to track work hours by using software to make sure that your team members are working on the tasks at hand, few software can help you see what projects are being working on, which websites team members are visiting, applications being used, and even time spent working and time on breaks in real time.

Make expectations clear

Simply telling verbally someone to do a task is usually not the best way to go about managing teams. Put your expectations into writing exactly what you expect from your virtual employees including work deadlines, work hours, availability, and response times. Also include small details that are specific to your business which can cause trouble when working with virtual employees.

Build trust

It is important for the executive team to cultivate and encourage an environment of trust and give team members the benefit of the doubt. This should go without saying. Leaders are still bringing the idea that remote work does not mean less work. Build trust in your colleague’s by giving them space to speak openly to discuss individual ideas without ridicule or judgment.  Employees should feel comfortable while having conversations where they can be honest and frank with each other as this will help build strong relationships not matter which part of the globe they are located.

Over Communicate.

More communication means more trust-building, less confusions and misunderstanding and better teamwork. Also, not to mention, it is one of the key components which adds to the broader success of the organization in long run. Effective communication can the solve the problem of many employees who feel isolated working outside the office. The individual may overthink about the quality of their work judged or just feel out of the loop. While communication is essential for remote teams, overloaded information can quickly become a problem where no one understands anything.

Rewards & Recognition

Have you heard of the saying “no good deed should go unrewarded”. Make sure you set up a reward system to keep your team motivated and its better pinpoint the team members that can take on more responsibility. You do get up personally and praise your employees and probably pat on their back when they do something good. Remote employees work just as hard as employees based out at an office. And they need the occasional praises to stay motivated just as much, if not more.

With time, teams are becoming more and more spry and less constricted to a physical location. Managing a remote team is fun and challenging at the same time. Ultimately it has proved to be rewarding for many companies across the globe. If you want to remember anything from this post, it is to bump in with your remote team frequently, and make sure everyone gets the time they need. If you’re planning to build a virtual team, then keep the above tips in mind and arm the tools you need to be successful.

Keeping Your Recruiting Team Engaged Midst Uncertainty

Keeping Your Recruiting Team Engaged Midst Uncertainty

Since the time we came to know about our family and life responsibilities, our struggle starts for a stable life. Your every step means moving towards the financial stability of yours. Somehow, if it gets hampered, it means you a lot because it hinders your job and the entire family. Uncertainty in work is a very crucial stage for an employee. The office is the place where an employee spends almost 12 hours a day. So, how an employee can digest the condition of uncertainty in his career? 

What is uncertainty? Let’s consider the current situation of COVID-19. It is the most uncertain condition from the era, where nothing has left unaffected—the schools, the offices, the workers, etc. The employees are losing their jobs in vast numbers. Everyone is a bit insecure about their stability in the work. So, as a manager, what will you do if your team feels discouraged due to this uncertain time. As a leader, it is your significant responsibility to keep your recruiting team engaged amidst uncertainty. I am presenting a few techniques using which you can make your team encouraged.

First, Take Care Of Self 

I will consider “taking care of yourself” as an essential point before you start to finish with your employees. If you are not fit, you are stressed, you are not confident and relaxed, then how will make your team feel full of energy. It would be best if you stood with a positive attitude, and then only you will able to involve your team at work. Don’t show them that you are stressed. Get each one involved in the book. Ask yourself, “How can you support someone in this unstable time?” “what do you want to be to deal with such a condition?” If you get the answers to these questions, you are ready to go to your employees.

Give Them Your Compassion

You are the leader. But, you reached the position of stepping being an employee. So you are very well known about the feeling that if your leader doesn’t listen to you, how it affects your work. So, it is essential to listen to the team one on one, know about their issues, and try to make them comfortable. Keeping your doors open and regular check-ins are the most promising way to show you are ready to cope with their issues. They can get relax by involving you in their shoes. 

Communicate Like You Never Been Before

You are the boss, so don’t go with the thought of being the boss. Pin drop silence kills the communication, and it is not always beneficial. Ask your team for the updates, even if you are not new to it. This small action comes as in, the employees are still the priority for you, even in the crises. Even though you have learned Business Continuity and Crises Management rules, it does not teach how to deal with it. Problems don’t come up with the shape and menu card. It could sometimes be worst than your imagination. So, your sense of action defines you, how you treat the employees. 

 Share Your Calculated Decisions

This tiny thing can get your team into confidence. Don’t be afraid of sharing your calculation chore before your employee approaches you for the permission. Making decisions for paid leaves, adjusting working hours to taking care of the family, and remote work schedule emphasizes your employees’ significant impact. Sharing these details before your team contacts, make them feel comfortable and involved in bookworm. 

Being a senior, it is not always essential to be a leader. No one has a book that can teach the art of dealing with the crises. It is you and your way of thinking that makes you the boss. If you have the powers, it is equally important how you utilize them, making your boss.

Just like every other sectors, the recruitment industry is amidst uncertainty. Pragna solution can be your key to hassle-free recruitment. We are a team of competent consultants and HRs who target and get you quality hires even in this COVID 19 situation. For any assistance for recruitment solutions, Pragna solution can offer you the best recruitment services. To know more about our services, check out our website.