If at first you don’t succeed
…try and try again! Granted, a phrase we are all familiar with, but not necessarily one we’d want to attribute to the recruitment process. The fact is sometimes we have no choice. Recruitment processes differ from one organisation to the next,but they all have one thing in common – they are designed to continually hone in on candidate key skills to find Mr or Mrs Right. If you want to avoid the route that Richard Curtis took when auditioning for what was to become the Oscar nominated Four Weddings and a Funeral, where he auditioned over 70 people before finding Hugh Grant, then intelligent technology can provide a helping hand.
Intelligent technology can help you to refine candidates without having to go through a detailed qualifying processes or sift through endless CVs. Capture technology can extract the key data from CVs, plugging it into an internal database. At this point the recruiter can search and match key skills and capabilities to rapidly identify the front-runners for the position, consequently shortening the recruitment process by focusing on those most suited to the position.
However,what happens when an ideal candidate becomes unavailable at the last minute? As galling as a last minute drop out can be, what it actually does is provide the recruiter with yet more understanding of exactly what they need in order to find the right candidate to carry out the job required.
If a recruiter has decided on a suitable candidate and is about to make a job offer only to discover that this person is no longer available, then having intelligent technology enables the recruiter to go back and conduct a ‘find me more people like this’ search – keying in the skills, experience, qualifications and other requirements which make up that ideal profile. So whilst it might be frustrating, from a management perspective a deeper understanding is gained into what is needed to fill a position successfully and from an operational perspective, intelligent technology enables additional searches to be made across a number of sources in order to find a suitable match quickly.
So don’t be too hard on the person who drops out at the last minute, they may have just provided the opportunity for the perfect candidate to rise to the surface.