Discipline always seems easy from the outside. The famous story about Dali springs to mind. Someone asked him to draw something on a napkin. He draws a picture and then demands a million pounds from them for it. They refuse. “You only took 30 seconds to draw that!” to which he replies, “Yes but it took me years to learn how.”
We cannot claim to be the Salvador Dali or recruitment. Who
could? But what we and the dedicated professionals within recruitment do, takes
years to hone. To succeed, one needs experience and knowledge, usually within a
specific sector. This cannot be taught in a classroom and must be lived.
A problem with the perception of recruitment is that the end
product does not belong to the recruiter. The recruiter must step away before
the final part, that of the candidate starting their role and excelling. It is
this lack of seeing the job through to the very end that gives people the
impression that recruitment is easy and a bit of a lark, really.
There is a kind of alchemy at play here within the skills
needed to be a successful recruiter. The role they play can be very different
each time, but they play an integral part in joining up the loose ends between
the role and the candidate. Sometimes they search and find the candidate.
Sometimes they communicate the company culture to the candidates. They may
rewrite a job spec that isn’t clicking with prospects. Maybe they know the
databases or areas to search. Perhaps, like many recruitment partners, they did
all of the above. Regardless of what part they played, the ability to identify
and complete the task needed to make the process run smoothly, is one of the
reasons some feel that little effort is expended.
Anyone who has attempted to recruit without a recruiter
knows that it may seem easy from the outside but, as mentioned above, there are
many elements that go into finding, screening and hiring a great candidate. It
may become more apparent if you need to hire a team, with the recruitment
partner being what is needed when it is needed, over and over, to pull a whole
highly-skilled team together. Then the amount of stress and strain required for
such a campaign can be seen.
Having the staying power to go through that again and again
is what separates real recruiters from those who try it and move on to something
more well suited.
What makes recruitment hard? You must have a marketing brain,
marketing the job role so that it is an enticing proposition. And when the
tried and true measures fail, innovation is key as well as looking at
situations from different perspectives. Empathy plays a major role.
Recruiters will have already gone through the slogging away
part and will have already entered the working smart part. By this, I mean, they
will have found ways to simplify and speed up their processes, but they will
have found out the hard way, how to do that. Newbies have that all ahead of
them. They must be able to handle the tricky balancing act of utilising just
the right amount of time for the correct level of importance. Multitasking is
paramount. This comes from experience.
Networking, self-promotion and influencing are all part of
the job, even if they aren’t in the job description. Not everyone can brand
themselves and those who do so successfully, have been working at it for years.
Great connections are forged through great word of mouth and great working
experiences. There is no short cut for such things.
Dali could draw on those napkins day in, day out, and always produce something special. Recruitment partners can guarantee you the best chance of finding those amazing candidates too.
Curious about how Zenshin Talent can help your organisation? Contact us today for a no-strings conversation about your needs and our experience.
Yes, we always talk about recruitment because that is what
we do, we are a recruitment partner. Even so, we still understand that the best
way for a firm to operate is to make the working environment, both literal and
metaphorical, as welcoming and open as possible in order to retain staff.
Retaining employees just makes sense. If you have invested
time and money in a new candidate and they are out of the door soon after, you
have spent precious resources and you have nothing to show for it.
Losing employees means losing part of your knowledge base
and it also means you are losing productivity. If your business has a revolving
door of staff, that does not make for a cohesive team. The atmosphere will be a
tense one, as, with each team member who leaves, their responsibilities fall on
the other members of the team. Resentment can set in. This is not a prime
situation for new hires to enter. It can become a vicious circle.
So what can be done about it? Well while markets can take
some of the blame and the generally accepted amount of turnover is under ten
percent, the main cause of turnover is job dissatisfaction.
To counter this, it takes effort but at the end of the day,
that effort is really worth it. It takes making steps to understand your workforce.
What are the pressure points? What are the annoyances in their roles? Do they
feel appreciated? Have you fostered an atmosphere where they can air their
grievances or problems without judgment?
Respect in the workplace is key. Nobody wants to be disrespected.
Pretty much everyone wants to come to work, do a good job and be rewarded in
terms of money and also in terms of gratitude. The gratitude thing is a two-way
street, as, when you give it, you get it back. A happy workplace is also a
healthy workplace. There are less sick days. And it all comes down to respect.
Respecting your workforce’s points of view and experience pays off many times
over.
As a continuation of that, allowing your staff to be
creative, share their ideas on how things can be done better and to vent
frustrations. What would you do if a team member had a business idea that
utilised things they learned at the company, or perhaps, the company’s
technology. Bad companies would either deny them further access to the tech or
bring in lawyers to maintain that the idea is the company’s because it was
originated on company time. A good company would enter into a partnership with
the employee, as long as the idea is good of course.
Companies can also incentivise the work in accordance with industry
standards, offer rewards and perks. These kinds of steps take little effort but
can demonstrate that the company is empathising with their staff in order to
make their company as enticing as possible.
The work-life balance must be respected. If your employees do not have time for leisure in their lives, some way to let off steam, there is a greater chance of burn-out. If a team member burns out, they are no good for your business, and they are no good for themselves either. This is where the responsibility of the company comes in. Just because you can work your employees to death, does not mean you should. The action that makes most business-sense is to allow your workers to have enough time to engage in activities outside of work, so that they do not feel like they have nothing else to live for. If you are made aware of staff who are overworked, they should be allowed some time off or at least a re-examination of their workload.
Curious about how Zenshin Talent can help your organisation? Contact us today for a no-strings conversation about your needs and our experience.
Inclusive and diverse workplaces don’t just happen overnight.
By rights, they should, but they don’t. The hold of ‘this is the way we have
always done things’ is a strong one and it will take a bit of effort to change
things.
If you wish for your workplace to reflect the world we live
in now, representation and equality have to be baked into your hiring policies.
Whether the diversity is religious or racial, around sexuality or gender, or whether
your employees have disabilities or are neurodivergent, what is required is an
open mind and an appreciation that every person is different and may having differing
life experiences and viewpoints.
Experience and knowledge vary from person to person and can lend
a diversity of skills which will benefit the company in the long term. These
acquired attributes, and the need to find them in prospective candidates, will
drive future growth and adaptability.
Innovation will speed up and business decisions will become less
theoretical. A more inclusive workplace results in greater work satisfaction
and higher staff retention. And all it takes is a little work to start off with.
Unpaid internships create a situation whereby only those from
higher socioeconomic backgrounds can afford to partake in such an invaluable
opportunity. Targeting internships at those from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds and those from diverse backgrounds helps the next generation get a leg
up and also helps you discover them before your rivals do.
Whether its via your website, your marketing collateral or during
interviews, it is always important to convey a sense of diversity and
understanding. Your branding should reflect how the business as a whole views
diversity and the values that candidates should come to expect.
Swiftly becoming a trend is the idea of ‘blind recruitment’.
Some companies require the candidate to submit a photo of themselves but we
feel that that is quite unnecessary. Blind recruitment takes it a step further,
so that the candidate’s name, address and educational record are not to be
viewed by hiring managers. This weeds out any unintentional bias in the recruitment
process.
Job adverts should also be double-checked for signs of any
bias sneaking in. If we look back into the not-so-distant past, specs have been
written with language that brings to mind whether the job is viewed as
masculine or not. There may have been unnecessary requirements of education
which could be viewed as exclusionary. Whatever the past mistakes, we must make
sure not to continue to make those same mistakes into the future.
Where the candidates are sourced from can help. Job boards
have been used previously as the go-to place to find candidates, especially for
contingency recruitment firms. Spreading the net wider can help deepen the
experience well. Utilising your workforce’s networks can also help.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to a change of
mindset which leads to a change of work culture. It isn’t difficult but it can
require some soul searching. Does the colour of someone’s skin matter really,
when, after getting to the heart of what your organisation values, they are a
match in those terms? Many companies are shooting themselves in the foot when
not tackling long-held assumptions head-on.
There are recruitment partners who can point you in the right direction, if needed, and the results will help ensure a strong future for your company.
Curious about how Zenshin Talent can help your organisation? Contact us today for a no-strings conversation about your needs and our experience.
The Cloud is an exciting place right now and there are areas of growth that anyone involved, however tangentially, should know about. We have compiled a list of three of the most important upcoming trends.
1. Cloud Budgets
A third of all businesses run a Cloud budget of between two
and a half million dollars and twelve million dollars. Things like AI, IoT,
CaaS, etc. are growing in popularity, lending truth to the claims that Cloud is
swiftly becoming a major focus for IT departments.
There is an inordinate amount of waste currently happening
in the Cloud and, now that it is being identified, streamlining is finally
happening.
Without an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses,
you cannot make use of the solutions out there at your disposal. Without
knowledge of your own situation, you cannot reduce your budget. Optimisation
means improving your unique situation with tools that enhance said situation.
If you try to cut corners and lowball the budget, which most businesses usually do by a quarter, this deepens difficulties where there should be elegant solutions to these difficulties.
2. Multicloud or Hybrid Cloud
Moving from physical servers to multiple Cloud vendors is a
large undertaking and can seem daunting at first, until it is underway. As the
Cloud is entrusted with more and more of a business’ information and workload,
the increase in multi-cloud is increasing exponentially.
Cloud-native will replace the need for providers.
Organisations will gain a greater understanding of what they require, what is
available and what needs to be developed, in order to get to where they know
they can. Capabilities within the Cloud will always, of course, impact this but
with the technology now catching up to the ambitions, companies can move with
great agility toward the next trend.
Investment in this will always be ongoing as there will
regularly be updated technology, offering the chance of further savings and
shortcuts. Functionality and ways to reduce risk will always be things worth
investing in and striving for.
Hybrid Cloud offers the best of both the public and private Cloud, depending on what your company needs at a specific time. Balance is the keyword here, allowing you to benefit from the flexibility of the public Cloud while enjoying the compliance and efficiency of the private
3. Cloud.Sustainability
Values are how organisations are being increasingly viewed
by their customers. Sustainability and a prioritisation of the environment
signals to prospective clients that you have real values and 4/5 of consumers
feel this is an issue of great importance.
While a net-zero future is being touted, how does this relate to the Cloud? Migrating infrastructure to the Cloud can result in a saving in energy and carbon emissions of over 50%. Evaluating processes and migrating the most resource-heavy processes off physical servers and onto the Cloud is where the savings happen, and where you show your savvy plus your sustainability bone fides.
Curious about how Zenshin Talent can help your organisation? Contact us today for a no-strings conversation about your needs and our experience.
Recruiters know how overwhelming it can be trying to find a
candidate when the job market is contracting and the number of prospective
candidates applying can usually number over 200, if not more during tougher
times. Finding them is hard, working through them can be considered laborious.
These CVs are then whittled down, contact made, phone calls,
video chats and then more interviews. And if none of the candidates are up to
snuff, then the recruiter must start the whole process all over again. Then
there are the back-and-forth meetings and calls and emails and reports for the
client.
You can understand why many folks in the industry would
consider AI as a panacea for their ills. Automation of repetitive tasks such as
scheduling and screening. There is an idea that it can also reduce bias but, as
we have noted in the past, that is a tricky thing to eliminate if the program
has been created by a human originally, and, of course, they always are created
by humans, since AI has not yet become as sophisticated enough to develop ones
on its own.
Apart from that problem, there are other pitfalls within
this strategy. While it can work through tons of data on job boards, it can
only seek thanks to lists of short key words. This is helpful because it saves
many work hours, so that the humans can be busy with other important tasks, and
can compile data from different sites. The great plan can fall apart due to the
fact that, unlike humans, AI cannot evaluate how good a CV actually is. The
content within resumes, to our brains, which are basically fleshy
supercomputers, is easily absorbed and evaluated on many levels such as
grammar, logic, questionable information and sensible career progression. When
we read a CV, we are using all of our years of experience living with humans to
work out whether the person behind the CV is the one we require to fill this
position. We can read something jargony or slangy and understand, or figure
out, what it means even if we haven’t encountered it before.
AI can only looks for the key word or mistakes that it has
been told to look for. Everything else is not taken on board as being relevant.
The AI can become inefficient if recruiters must refine constantly, especially
if geography is concerned.
We are not trying to be down on AI. Hell, we love AI and the
innovations our amazing clients make within that space. The point we are making
is that AI is great for certain things and on other tasks, it has still got a
long way to come.
To put it another way, we believe in people power. We
believe that, even when AI becomes much more powerful and can fill in for
recruiters in some aspects, it will never have that human element, some would
describe as indefinable. Our clients make a difference because they have the
best humans, found by great human recruiters, to help make that difference.
Only with the perfect staff for an AI project, can that project excel. And only
with gains made there, can AI reach a height where it is then able to possibly
find candidates.
People are at the heart of what we do. Utilising their expertise to get the job done right. AI is a tool that can help but in a business, like recruitment, which is about human communication and human potential, the best tools will always be the ones that keep humans front and centre.
Curious about how Zenshin Talent can help your organisation? Contact us today for a no-strings conversation about your needs and our experience.
