New ideas in recruitment

This post is inspired by Gautam Ghoshs post that pointed me to an excellent resource for recruiters- written by an old acquaintance of mine, Mohan Kannegal of Merit Trac.


The free e-book for 'beginners in recruitment' is a good black book for -not just novices-but also for regular practitioners-as it does us back to basics. I would recommend any body involved in hiring-including the hiring managers-to peruse it as it does give us a good checklist.


To me, the interesting takeaways were the 'new ideas' mentioned by Mohan- which included


a) recommendation of a 'standardised' biodata form to be advocated by all job boards, and employers- in order to help ' searching and retrieval' of the 'key words'- to enable higher recruiter productivity!


Personally -while I do agree most of the candidate do not always provide all information in their resumes as required, this exercise totally negates the fact that -each individual is indeed unique-and to me, the bio-data or a resume ( or CV) -is actually an extension of one's personality!! It would be a shame to try and compress an individual to a bunch of tabulated skills.



b) the use of airconditioned staff buses- as an USP for improving 'company loyalty' and perhaps a great retention tool- as well as a medium to impart 'communication and training'! Brilliant- one could not have got a more captive audience -twice a day-for an hour like this :-)!


c) The killer idea though is the 'using sms' as a good tool to improve recruiter productivity!

"Assume you are a Recruiter who wants to schedule interviews for a hundred candidates. You have the names and mobile numbers of these candidates in an Excel sheet. You fill out the date, time and venue of the interview for each of these candidates on the same Excel sheet. The Excel sheet can be uploaded onto an SMS based software application which SMSes the date, time and venue to each of the hundred candidates within a few minutes and provides a report of deliveries. Candidates who receive the SMSes can send back an SMS to confirm their participation. A report can be run off the application which tells you how many of the hundred participants have confirmed their participation.
Those who have not confirmed their participation can be reached by making phone
The advantage of the software application is that in ten minutes, it is possible to SMS a hundred candidates and receives confirmations. This substantially reduces the amount of time Recruiters spend on the phone, scheduling candidates. Further, SMS is most likely to be delivered and read compared to email or phone calls. Since most candidates are in meetings during a working day, they would not answer a phone call. Also, most candidates check their personal email ids once a day or once in two days. But, they certainly check SMSes during the day. "

Infact, I was instantly reminded of a new service-Mobismart launched by a Hyderabadi company..that uses bulk voice mail messages.

Just imagine- a personalised message that could trigger off a desire in an otherwise content start performer??



d) And yes, here is an attempt that is picking up...companies rehiring
professionals who worked for them earlier!!

PS-I am very keen to know your responses /opinions !! How would you feel as a colleague - especially since you have been loyal to the company and have stayed backwithin the system during the period-and the return of the prodigal-perhaps at an elevated position & higher salary!!