Evolution of Recruitment

Recruitment as a function is the backbone for any organization's success. All companies thrive to succeed in their specific domains and their dream of becoming a successful venture only happens with good talent. For any company to succeed or expand their business horizons hiring the right talent becomes the most important factor.

Often Recruitment (or whole of HR) is seen as non billable resource and always get undermined to just a support function. Wherein the actual fact is, recruitment is one of most important (if not the most important) functions within any organization. Many companies with great products / ideas have failed / suffered just for the fact that they couldn't find / hire the right talent.

But recently companies have started realizing the importance of having a strong recruiting partner / team who could cater to their in house hiring needs. Also thanks to the startup culture there is a huge demand in the market for talent and every company who looks to hire great talent is competing with others at a very extreme level. The importance of hiring the right resource holds the key for success.

Same ways making a wrong hire can cost heavily on the money invested on the resource to time spent on training to delivery goals not met to buggy code (in case of devs) and could also end up creating a ripple effect within the organization.So hiring and that too hiring right resources definitely holds the key for any companies success.

Typically the overall recruitment life cycle has multiple phases. It starts with getting a job description of the requirement, understanding the same, targeting right candidates, selling the job, interviewing, offer, follow up etc...

One of the most important phase of the overall RLC would be Sourcing or identifying the right candidate.

Recruitment in itself has evolved a lot over the past decade and sourcing strategies has also taken a dramatic shift from the traditional approach to a more rational or social way.

Traditional approach usually involves creating sourcing strategies around using Job portals, Job posting (both on Career page and job portals), employee referrals, Internal Job Postings etc...

Then came the era of business networks / social networks and among them LinkedIn (of all) as a company played a very important and a crucial role in evangelizing the way recruitment is done. It was quite unique and smart in a way that the product doesn't directly sell you anything (that was initially but now they do) but a recruiter can use this platform to identify and get connected to people and start conversing about the possible opportunity.

When LinkedIn initially burst on the scene it actually became more of a fashion statement to have their profiles created on the platform and increase their social presence. Now the product itself is so successful that it's almost a must for everyone to have their profiles created on LinkedIn.

I got introduced to LinkedIn by my manager way back during my consultancy days but never paid much heed to it. Eventually as time flew LinkedIn became one of the most important sources from where I hired many of my key resources.

Now or the new age recruiters use various strategies in identifying talent across the internet and certainly there are many channels available (that too for free) to find them.

Hiring has become so intense that there is a huge dearth of good talent v/s the number of jobs available in the market, and every company wants to have the best of talent working for them. This creates a huge amount of opportunity for the candidate pool but at the same time increases the pressure for recruiters to identify, connect, attract, sell and retain them until they take up the offer and later join the company.

The traditional approach may give you the desired outcome (not always) but banking on only that would make you left behind in the crowd of ordinary recruiters.

So it becomes very essential for all recruiters to evolve themselves and try look / explore all unconventional approaches. This would definitely help them re-ignite their passion towards recruitment and at the same time opens up a whole new dimension of sourcing from various channels and certainly would help them improve their networking skills as well.

Every job becomes monotonous over a period of time and recruitment is no different. To have the passion or the desire to identify and hire better candidates one has to have the eagerness to look at unconventional ways and this needs self interest and desire to try experiment new things and the urge to learn.

This learning would go a long way in shaping a recruiters career and will certainly give him a better view of looking at job specifications, plan accordingly and target right set of people from the right channel.

Some of these approaches outside the traditional way includes,

• Running boolean searches, x ray searches on search engines (Referyes and Boolean bars makes the job much more easier)
• Using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc...
• Posting jobs on hasgeek / hasjob (this typically works well with hiring junior resources), iimjobs/hirist, instahyre, Quora, angellist etc...
• Scraping data from coding sites like Github, TopCoder, Stack Overflow etc... and then find their details on the internet
• Organizing and attending meetups, conferences etc... 

There are many more places / sites available (other than the ones mentioned above) which provide similar options of identifying talent and getting connected. Contacts we find / make in these forums are typically passive job seekers and their profiles may not necessarily be listed anywhere else.

However patience is the key here. And patience coupled with interest one shall get a chance to explore a whole new ecosystem of candidates. It's always a trial and error approach in these cases and once you get a hang of it, this gives you a new level of confidence, puts you out from the rest of the crowd and certainly will ignite the flair for Recruitment all over again because as you dig deeper the possibilities are limitless.