One fine day I realised my shirt fittings were too tight! Though I blamed my washing machine, I invested on a treadmill and started jogging. I stuck to my plan and jogged regularly. Everyday I jogged I realised the cost of the extra bite I ate during those late nights and the lovely English beer and cheese! To lose weight, I realised I have to push myself and jog a little bit longer than the day before and so on. I couldn’t stop even when I had lost the extra weight. In fact I realised, I have to run longer and harder in order to maintain this fitness.
I see a HR’s life is akin to a Joggers life or in my case a fat joggers life! When the economy is doing well they have to run around to find candidates who are hard to come by. During economic downturn they have to run even harder to find best candidates from thousands of applications. With such a large pool of highly qualified candidates during recession, it can be extremely difficult to filter the right candidates. Below are some tips for streamlining your process and to narrow down the best candidates that suit your requirement:
Numbers are on your side. Use it wisely In a difficult job market, you are bound to get plethora of CVs. I suggest you to have a strong process or a job portal to easily filter through those CVs to narrow down to a few right candidates. Don’t settle for the first qualified candidate. It is also important to understand how the candidate will fit your job profile and company culture
Conduct Online Assessment Tests
During recession, I would say online assessment tests are a must when recruiting for graduates or junior positions allowing recruiters to quickly narrow down from thousands of candidates to few hundreds. Online Assessment Tests don’t have to be expensive. Portal like Campus Interaction, offers this free for companies.
Video profiles
Video interview is an excellent way to reduce your recruitment cost and time but unfortunately in India, this may be a challenge to say the least. We experimented with this before but must I confess we failed miserably because of lack of infrastructure. A lesson learnt was to opt for recorded videos, which worked like a charm. Get your candidates to video record an answer to your HR question. This way you can quickly scan through video profiles to narrow down on candidates with good communication skill. Portal such as Campus Interaction has excellent video integration platform with fool proof way of getting this done
Take advantage of free recruitment portals to reduce recruitment costs During recession, a recruiter is not only expected to get best candidates but also expected to get the job done on a shoe string budget. The good news is there are many sites, such as Campus Interaction, that makes a recruiter’s job a tad easier.
For more information visit Campus Interaction and register as a HR.
