by Priya Ranjan

Created on: August 27, 2009

If you ask a company's CEO about the most critical issue to address, she/ he will say hiring and retaining talent. Talent is available in market, but how to reach them and make them excited about your opportunity is a major challenge. In a way, recruiter's job is a mix of sales, branding, domain/ technology awareness (to map candidates with the opportunity), hunter and negotiator. Recruiter not only finds the right candidates for the job but also acts as a company's face for the prospective employees.

Each and every step in formal selection process is research oriented and shall be followed diligently. Because, recruiter would not like to loose a right talent at one hand and would like to avoid wrong hiring on the other hand. Let us now discuss on the steps involved in due course and dos and don'ts of these steps.

Requirement collection: Recruiter collects the requirements from the stake holders of the respective divisions. This must be explained to recruiter with utter clarity. Any ambiguity here may cost in screening wrong candidates, eventually leading to wastage of efforts. The requirements shall mention the required and nice-to-have skills. If any special soft skills such as communication and presentation skills are required, must be mention in the job description.

Search prospective employees: Search can be done through multiple media. Job sites, headhunters and advertisement in news papers are the usual ones. Recruiter go extra mile and search for candidates in social and academic networking sites such as linkedin.com. In due course, a recruiter's inbox may get flooded with resumes. She/ he should have the right mechanism to weed out the wrong ones. This knack comes with experience but it can be learned it is no rocket science. After screening, recruiters can talk initially to the candidate over the phone to understand her/ his interest level for the job and identify the suitability in this short discussion.

Interview with the panel: Interviewer's job is not only to test the skills of the prospective employee but also to make them feel good about the company. The company would not like to loose its face to the prospective employee by giving interviewing responsibility to some arrogant and egoist interviewer. So the interview panel should be handpicked.

Interviews are the most critical part, so must be done diligently and should not overkill the entire process.

Salary negotiation: After the candidate is found suitable in multiple interviews, salary for the job is fixed. Generally it remains in a band, say 100K to 110K dollars/ annum. But the recruiters' responsibility is to get the expectation from the candidate before sharing any figures. Ideally, it should be as per candidate's expectations. But if there is some limitation, it must be informed to candidate before offering for the position. If the expectation is too high, the case must be handled carefully. Recruiter would not like to offer somebody who is dissatisfied with the company from day one.

Extend the offer and follow-up till joining: Once both parties are happy, recruiter extends the offer letter to the candidate and mention the joining date in it. Now, the candidate might be seeking opportunity with the other companies in the market as well. So recruiters should follow-up with the candidate and keep her/ him excited till joining.

To sum up, recruiter's job is very challenging and not well defined at each stage. Some part of it comes with experience and others she/ he learns from the company's culture.

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