Recruitment is a responsibility!!!
(3 C’s for a Recruiter)
Recruiters hear it being said every now and then, “You have an easy job. Millions of people in the world are in the search of a job and you’re the one who makes their wishes come true”.
Huh :/
Only if an inch of this was true in real. This certainly reminds me of the nursery rhyme:
If wishes were horses,
beggars would ride.
If turnips were watches,
I’d wear one by my side.
If “if’s” and “and’s” were pots and pans,
There’d be no work for tinkers’ hands!
I’d rather say recruitment is as much of a responsibility as choosing a spouse for oneself. Lemme try putting it across through the 3 C’s :
- Career carrier
- Coalition carrier
- Culture carrier
All that a recruiter does can be summed up with the 3 C’s above and if I can lay it straight, it is a responsibility to carry all these together in every position that a recruiter closes. Begins from the entire cycle of getting requirements from the business heads, to building strategy to brand and advertise the particular job/company, to funnelling down the applications, to screening the candidates for the best fitment; hence ensuring the candidate has a figurative career in the said role, the company finds the utmost value addition with the candidate, and the company culture is as much imbibed in the new hire as in the recruiter itself.
These 3 C’s are entwined in each other so intensely that missing on any one is sure to mess the other two. Here’s how Recruiter carries his/her responsibility with these:
Career carrier
These days the employment platform has become so dynamic that choosing a figurative career pertinent to one’s interests has lost it’s relevance. Out of desperation and pressure people end up taking any jobs that come their way or if not that, garbing of one role into other by the job sellers tends to take the job seeker covered on all sides; leaving no room for stepping back. Talking of the ideal scenario, a recruiter needs to ensure that the platform that he’s searching his recruits from, has high germane to the role he’s on a lookout for. This is equally valid for the job seekers, they ought to know where do they need to be present when intending to search for a job.
(I’m not talking of the traditional method of being available on job sites or career platforms. I mean the real world work, for example; Github, Bitbucket, Stackoverflow, etc in case of Tech candidates).
Coalition Carrier
The candidate when begins a new job, the initial coalition between him and the company plays the major role in making him decide on the further steps that he imprints. This, in the first place, begins with the clear understanding of the role by the recruiter and in turn finding the apt candidate. The alliance between the candidate and the company/coworkers is what counts in for building a longterm career for the candidate. All the promises made and the expectations set by the recruiter are weighed against what the candidate sees at the workplace in the first few days/weeks. Hence, keeping all the instructions and promises real (or most close to reality) is an unexplored responsibility of a Recruiter.
Culture carrier
Culture, in today’s world, seems to be a word coined to describe each and everything that defines an organisation; begins from the Founders, goes on to people, to policies, to how people’s career is shaped to, what business impact does the company make, to how they treat their customers (internal and external both). And, the Recruiter owns the responsibility of being the culture carrier. Each new joiner that the recruiter inducts in the company ought to have the so called similar ‘cultural genes’. Quoting an example of my current organisation, Kayako, here I try bringing in people who showcase the traces of the values we live by. Kayako, being a customer experience platform, needs people who are ‘Customer Obsessed’ and ‘Act with ownership’, ensuring no job is someone else’s. If there’s a broken link and you can fix it, go leaps and bounds to fix it or raise an alarm at the least.
Having said it all, I’d emphasise, being the culture career is a very critical responsibility, recruiters take no chances with it.
Closing it with Jackson Brown’s saying at it’s best, “Choose your life mate wisely because from that one decision will come 90% of your future happiness or misery.” Recruiters got to be choosing their recruits with all care and responsibility, from that one recruit come in tons of follow up decisions; and last one being finding a replacement ;)
