Hiring staff is a nerve-wracking experience.
There’s only so much you can tell from speaking with someone during a 15-minute interview, and especially in such a controlled environment. If you hire the wrong person, you’ve likely wasted thousands of dollars.
The hiring process is essentially broken, and businesses are always trying out new tactics to game the system. Whether it’s Google and its interview process which drags on for weeks, or Microsoft and its wacky questions, companies are always trying to make the risk in bringing on a new person disappear.
With the new financial year upon us, businesses are in hiring mode. And like every other year, businesses are trying to figure out new ways of hiring the best people possible.
“There’s often great changes in hiring,” says Our HR director, Margaret Harrison. “The trend changes from one year to the next – something will be popular one year and then not so popular the next.
“It just depends on the mix of the company at the time.”
With so many businesses attempting to hire new staff, we spoke to a few human resources experts to determine the most popular hiring methods – and how you can use them to your advantage.
Searching for candidates through social media has been a popular method of hiring for a few years now, but LinkedIn has really ramped things up a notch or two.
Now the website is a listed entity, LinkedIn has been moving into recruitment services to keep things diversified. And it’s actually a pretty useful tool.
Margaret Harrison says in this year especially, she’s noticed more companies are relying on LinkedIn to find candidates before they even have to put up an ad on job site Seek or in a newspaper.
“I know many recruiters who use LinkedIn all the time to shortlist people,” she says. “Many companies are using it to save themselves some dollars.”
With LinkedIn pouring more money into its recruitment services business, it makes sense SMEs would pick up on these types of tools. For one thing, it saves them money on a recruitment company, and brings them in closer to the hiring process.
“But I’m not sure you can judge the culture of the person through LinkedIn,” Harrison warns, adding that businesses “may have to shortlist more candidates that way”.
Abiramie Sathiamoorthy of E&I People Solutions notes that when using LinkedIn, you make your own company “kind of a smaller recruitment firm”, or at least an alternative to paying recruiters.
When businesses place an ad on LinkedIn, the recruitment service automatically shortlists prospective candidates. You barely have to do any work at all to get started.
But as Harrison says, there are clearly issues with this type of approach. For one thing, you have no idea about who you’re getting.
The key lesson when recruiting through LinkedIn, she warns, is to make sure you double-up on making sure you’re bringing in the right people for interviews. Check profiles rigorously, look for inconsistencies, and above all, look for signs the person will fit within your culture.
“The main recruitment factor is a cultural fit, and that doesn’t change.”
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Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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