MEENAL SINHA COUNTRY HEAD, IMPERIAL SERVCORP, INDIA Interesting Times Ahead Meenal Sinha (Country Head, Imperial Servcorp, India) terms recruitment and selection as a number game Issue Date - 01/03/2013 |
 Recruitment and selection is a number game. The greater a recruiter’s access to a wide talent pool, the better his or her chances of effecting a ‘good fit’. An area of core focus for the entire industry has always been – and will always be – generation/expansion of access to a bigger talent pool and the ability to effectively screen the accessible talent to find the best fit.Online social and business networks have expanded their roots and penetration. Recruiters who have learned to leverage online networks have managed to exponentially grow their access to talent pools. This has had a significant impact on the recruitment and selection space in two distinct ways: 1. More and more recruiters are leveraging online networks to disseminate their requirements. Information flows through a channel of discerning and discriminating professionals, which makes for greater probability of hitting the right target audience. 2. With more and more professionals leveraging networks like LinkedIn, the chances of finding credible common points of reference while evaluating rise phenomenally. It will be interesting to watch how HR professionals evolve this tool to make it more incisive, discriminatory and precise. The biggest challenges faced in the screening process are the intrinsic presence of human bias, and the tendency to present a rosy picture of individuals in one’s network. This process of bias elimination is being honed and sharpened constantly by HR professionals. This augurs for the proliferation of more ‘quantifiable metric’ based systems while screening. The main challenge will be to make the quantification precise without trading off too much of the qualitative evaluation which is so critical to finding the right fit. On another facet of offline recruitment, organisations – including recruitment firms – are adopting reward systems for people who refer the right candidates as a way of encouraging people to leverage their networks while simultaneously streamlining costs. It will also be interesting to see how soon the recruitment process through online networks becomes rewarding for the points of reference and what shapes these rewards will take. |
Shishir Parasher
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