Successful Recruitment in a Week: Teach Yourself

Nigel Cumberland

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781444159943
• eBook ISBN: 9781444159967
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

The ability to recruit the right people to work for you is crucial to anyone who wants to advance their career. Written by Nigel Cumberland, a leading expert on recruitment as both a coach and a practitioner, this book quickly teaches you the insider secrets you need to know to in order to build a brilliant team. The highly motivational 'in a week' structure of the book provides seven straightforward chapters explaining the key points, and at the end there are optional questions to ensure you have taken it all in. There are also cartoons and diagrams throughout, to help make this book a more enjoyable and effective learning experience. So what are you waiting for? Let this book put you on the fast track to success!

‘Attracting top-notch talent is key in continuing to deliver superior returns for our investors.’

John Howe

This chapter explores how and where you could find candidates, by asking:

• Are there possible candidates already working in your company?
• Do you look for external candidates locally or further afield?
• Do you have a database of candidates from previous recruitments?
• Do you ask your staff to give names of people that they might know, something called employee referrals, potentially giving a financial incentive to your staff in the form of a fee for a successful referral?
• How might you contact past staff, your alumni network, to seek candidate referrals? Or perhaps contact professional associations and chambers of commerce?
• Should you be trying to find candidates at job fairs and, if you need to hire graduates, might you consider some form of campus recruitment?
• How might you work with recruitment firms to find candidates?
• Is it best to advertise your job vacancies in the newspaper and or other printed media?
• How might you use the internet and various websites to help you source candidates?
• How long will it take to find potential candidates?

Recruit from within your organization?

Before starting to look externally or outside for candidates, I would always advise you to find out whether there are suitable candidates sitting within your own business – maybe in other departments or offices – who could be suitable for your role and for whom the new role would be a promotion (it might be hard to move someone if their current job is more senior than the one you are trying to fill).

The benefits of finding an internal candidate are:

• They already know about your organization.
• The organization already knows them.
• You do not need to invest time and money in searching externally for candidates.

Today, it is common practice to look internally as well as externally – with both internal and external candidates going through the same recruitment processes of interviewing and being assessed.

Searching your database

I would encourage you to keep on file all candidates that have applied to your company for any reason. Such a database could be maintained online, using one of the many online candidate databases. Ideally, you could search all of the candidates by key word to find suitably qualified ones for any new job openings. Such a database could be linked to a recruitment portal or page on your company’s website and each candidate applying to your company would have their CV and key information automatically saved in the database.

Note: In many countries there may be privacy and information laws relating to retaining someone’s private information that you would need to abide by, for example having to give a candidate access to any information you might store about them on your database.

Looking locally or further afield?

When planning how to find candidates from outside of your organization, an important question is from what locations are you able and willing to consider candidates?

Do you only want candidates from your town or side of the city (so that they have short commuting or travelling to work time)?

Are you more open and able to accept candidates from anywhere in your country? Or even from overseas? And in such cases, who would pay any relocation expenses?

The answer to these questions will determine how and where you will search for candidates.

Employee referrals

You might consider asking your staff whether they know of anybody, from among their friends, ex-colleagues or family members, that they could introduce to the company as candidates for any job vacancies. Your staff understand your company’s working culture and style and should be quite good judges of who can succeed in your company.

In such cases, some organizations offer a referral fee, which is paid to the employee who refers a candidate who is subsequently successfully hired. Such a payment is normally paid only after the candidate has passed a probation period (which is normally the first one to three months of employment). The fee paid might vary and might include an in-kind gift or might be paid as cash, and might equal anything up to about US$ 5,000 (£3,212).

Do note that you will have to be diplomatic when rejecting a candidate who has been referred ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half Title
• About the Author
• Title
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Sunday Defining Your Recruitment Needs
• Monday How to Source and Find Candidates
• Tuesday How to Attract Candidates and to Create a Strong Employer Brand
• Wednesday How to Interview with Success
• Thursday How to Choose the Ideal Candidate
• Friday Ensuring that Your Chosen Candidate Accepts Your Job Offer
• Saturday Transforming a Candidate into a Successful Employee
• Surviving in Tough Times
• Answers
• Copyright