For people involved in hiring and recruiting, it would seem like finding the right person shouldn’t be difficult, especially with unemployment rates staying steady over 5 percent at the state and national levels over the past few years. Additionally, Baby Boomers are retiring, leaving positions open for the first time in decades.
So why is it so hard to find the right person? It has become increasingly important for businesses to look beyond a carefully crafted resume and well thought out responses in interviews. In fact, even a perfect combination of education, experience and skills doesn’t guarantee a candidate will be selected even for an initial interview.
Today’s businesses are concentrating their recruiting and hiring on finding the best fit. This means going beyond the right fit on “paper” with the right combination of education, experience, knowledge, skill and ability. This is important because employee turnover is costly and can significantly hurt a company’s bottom line.
It doesn’t seem like it should make a huge difference with a person quitting here or there coupled with a termination or two, but it does make a huge difference. Not only does a company face increased unemployment insurance rates with high turnover, but there is the time and resources it takes to recruit, hire and train replacements. This can amount to thousands of dollars.
Businesses have decided to get smart for the start about how they recruit. While they are still using traditional methods of recruiting -- newspaper classifieds, career fairs and postings on company Web sites -- recruiting efforts have expanded out to partnerships between management and marketing departments. Professionals and public relations campaigns are being used to match candidates to a company’s culture.
Businesses are going as far as creating mobile applications that send text messages to candidates the moment an opening is posted. Social media have paved the way for real-time recruiting not only of potential candidates but also to a candidate’s center of influence.
On the outside, companies might seem to be overly selective in their recruiting and hiring efforts. But these companies are paving the way for operating more efficiently, effectively, and in turn being more profitable, by taking the right steps to find the right people for the right workplace culture. Each company that chooses to recruit with this mindset is taking on a big challenge, but the dividend is huge -- employees that will stay on the job a long time and bring real value to the company.
