by admin | Jun 5, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition
Candidate sourcing is starting point of the Recruiting Process. In a series of blogs I will try to capture some of the nuances that I have learnt.
In the first part, lets look at maximizing the results from job boards like Monster, Dice, Hotjobs etc. They are a great resource for finding active job seekers. But the common complaint from every client is that they have either seen the candidate profile already or they do not have the ideal skills/competence etc. Why so?
The reason is that every recruiter looks there and looks at the top few pages of results. No doubt that one should look for low hanging fruit and quickly pounce on new candidates. But good recruiting also means looking beyond the most obvious and easy to find candidates. That’s where your IMAGINATION comes in to play to hunt down the right kinds of profiles in the vast repository of millions of profiles. Here are some ways to do imaginative searches to look for such candidate profiles:
- Competence search – This is the most basic searches where you are trying to match competency/expertise requirements of the job. For example, if you are looking for C# and .Net developers with Networking experience, you will use those keywords in your search. Here again looking for alternative representation / expressions of the technologies, tools etc. will certainly help (for example look for “protocol development” or “TCP/IP” while looking for Networking since they are similar)
- Company / Competitor search – Look for companies that are similar to the company you are looking to hire for – they could be competing companies or complementary to the business. So add a bunch of company names in addition to some technical competency for example (“Intel” or “Honeywell” or “Yahoo” or “HP”) and (“.Networking” or “Protocol development” or “VOIP” or “TCP/IP”). That way you will likely located people who worked in these companies before or worked on projects for these companies
- Top universities / school search – always produce good candidates; identify top schools and try to put them in your search term as “OR” options so you will likely find good candidates – For example looking for Indian universities can be (“IIT” or “Indian Institute of Technology” or “NIT” or “Anna University” or “SJCE”) and (“.NET” and “Networking”). Some examples of top university lists –
http://www.4icu.org/top200/
http://www.successcds.net/engineeringentranceexam/Top-100-Engineering-Colleges.php
There are plenty of such lists - Ethnicity and locale search – Certain pockets of people / ethnic groups or universities have made a name for themselves and become specialized. For example I have seen many Russians are extremely good at Maths. So for positions that require good analytical skills, they are a good ethnic group to look at. So your search terms can include special groups in addition to some competencies like (“Russian” or “Russia” or “Poland”) and (“.NET” and “Networking”) so you are looking for specific pockets / ethnic groups that are normally successful.
One word of advice is that when you are adding specialized keywords like university or ethnicity, then expand your search to include candidates who have updated resumes in past 6 months or 1 year as well. That way you could dig deep into great candidates who might be dormant for a while.
Next up, lets look at Social Networking.
by admin | May 17, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition
At Pragna, we took upon the challenge of improving the candidate hit rates for Full-time (FTE) hiring. Improving the hit rates obviously provides significant advantage to Organizations – They can spend more time with project work and employee training than interviewing loads and loads of candidates for each position.
Here is a snapshot of the process that enabled us to achieve 100% or better improvement with candidate hit rates:
1. Sourcing:
- Working with hiring managers, we prepared a very detailed profile of the position
- We employed targeted headhunting through social sites to identify pool of passive candidates
- We used a team that worked round-the-clock (from Seattle & Bangalore) to cover all timezones and international candidates
2. Technical Screening – Written
- We prepared a technical screening questionnaire tailored to each position and the job level
- The written answers are throughly evaluated by competent technical people (not recruiters but sr. engineers)
- We shortlisted candidates based on written test and examination of resume (spend 20 mins on reviewing/understanding resume vs. 2 mins
3. Technical Screening – In-depth Pragna Interview
- This interview is done by senior engineers of the same job level
- We did live meeting interview to visually see the coding abilities
4. Prepare a Candidate Scorecard
- We prepared a detailed analysis report that Pragna sent to hiring managers with details from our interview
- We identified strengths & weaknesses along with detailed descriptions of the problem we worked with the candidate
- Then we submitted the candidate with all the above documentation (saved managers precious time to weed out 90% of the candidates)
5. Optimization
- We reviewed feedback on candidates after each client interview
- Based on each candidate (successful or not), we optimized and updated our process to improve it
This resulted in significant gains to the organization in terms of both saving their precious time as well as getting better candidates and hires for the organization.
by admin | May 13, 2010 | Blog, Talent Acquisition
Many folks have asked me – How does one determine if a resume is suited for Full-time (FTE) vs. Contract positions? The fundamental difference is in the intent for the Contract position is a specific short-term skill need whereas FTE is a hire for company for a specific skill with long term horizon where the employee could perform different roles/jobs in the company over time. There is no fool proof method, but below are certain characteristics that hold good most of the times, if not always:
Full-time or FTE hiring:
- Average tenure in previous jobs (atleast 3 yrs or more in US; so candidates have longer term horizon)
- More emphasis on academic qualifications
- Look for professional growth (has the candidate grown in skill/level of performance over time)
- Focus on overall candidate strengths especially in core fundamentals / concepts and Analytical skills vs. only specified skills (this is an important aspect since specific skills can be learnt over time and may become less important once a specific project is completed)
- Check if candidate has experience in a similar type of company (size, functional area etc.)
- Emphasis on soft skills like team management, program management etc.
Contract hiring
- Focus on good matching of required skills and experience wrt to job requirements
- Look for breadth of project experience and types of projects and compare against current project they are going to work on; match the two as much as possible
- # of years of experience as a contract or consultant
- Ability to adapt quickly (e.g., flexible with process; deliverables etc. vs. having own strong views on them)
- Look for special attributes identified by hiring manager (for example, Analytical skills maybe important for a particular manager but generally less important for contract positions)
