I am glad I invested a day long training program in honing my skills on Saturday the 19th!
There is enough and more information on the internet. Tons of amazing insights are shared by several practitioners and passionate professionals, that help us to be 'better than yesterday', courtesy tweets, blogs, podcasts. But there is no real substitute for the 'human touch'.
Raghunandan Patre and Ashfaq Ahmed simply regaled some 25 plus participants on how as sourcers /recruiters, we could be prepared for the #futureofwork ! Their firm, Skill Scaler Learning Solutions is a Recruitment Capability Building organisation that endeavors to improve
-candidate/client proximity
-recruiter productivity
-process excellence.
For a person whose learning was very much self taught, by trial and error, picking up nuggets from the social media buzz, it was awesome to be tuning into a structured presentation- as Raghu played the role of the philosopher & Ashfaq the hacker! The mantra - to not just unearth the unique candidates, but to engage and influence them -and 'manage clients' -in a market that is increasingly becoming in favour of the candidates.
Let me record a few takeaways for posterity :
-Hiring per se hasn't reduced in the post Brexit/Trump/Demonetisation/GST era. Only the pattern of hiring has changed. Expectations have rised. Customer focus and delighting them is the only route ahead.
-All the sourcing tools essentially help in identifying just those 'who are willing to leave their social media footprints'. Would you believe 70% is Dark matter?
-With sourcing increasingly becoming AI/ML focussed, the art of engaging candidates boils how to asking the right questions!
- It is essential to deconstruct a job description to be able to understand the real need of whom we are looking for. In a keyword infested world, to be in sync with what the client wants- it is essential to get under the skin of how the candidate conveys the competency!! ( for eg :Technical keywords showcase skills, Functional keywords help understand the nature of work and the Anchor keywords relate to identifying roles.)
- Horses for courses. Every search engine or social networking site is driven by algorithms-that often get changed. While there are n number of tools that are being generated daily -to help us hack our way, the trainers got us to be sensitive to the subtleties -and pivot our way. Be it in Naukri, LinkedIn, Facebook, Git Hub or Stackoverflow. Understanding the logic is imperative before we dive deep into the search.
-The basics of talent branding in an increasingly cluttered world!
As I refer my notes today, I cannot believe the range of tools and best practices that they alluded to. I already have doubts if I can navigate -with the ease Ashfaq the magician -did!
Well, knowledge is available on demand. It is how one applies it -that makes the difference between the best and the rest, right?
I look forward to a new day today..
And with a thought that ought to be a wake up alarm.
Amateurs practice till they get it right; professionals practice till they can’t get it wrong.
