Effective recruitment could be tough. Hence, getting it right requires a good balance of automation, human skills and a right balance of data-backed, and intuitive knowledge from experience.
Recruiting right is perhaps even harder in a country like Nigeria where there’s increasing shortage of professional hands in a number of roles; largely orchestrated by actual and proclivity to brain-drain in the country.
While this on its own may seem to be a bad problem; it could interestingly be a good one for some businesses. This is so because ability to attract and recruit better staff – out of the few available – may in practical terms give a business some strategic advantage over its competitors who are not able to recruit them. After all, in the recruitment landscape, many organisations grapple for the best of talents who could facilitate the timely achievement of their business objectives. Yet, only a few are able to get the best. And those who get the best are by that means better positioned to compete.
From posting job openings, sourcing candidates, scheduling interviews, up to conducting assessments and analyses, Teoaris employs variety of skills, tools and experience to recruit highly talented and versatile employees for our clients.
In our consulting experience, many questions/concerns are often raised on how a business can get its recruitment right. Some of those questions range from interesting to heart-rending.
- Why don’t we attract “quality” staff?
- We are so unlucky with staffing; the staff we get don’t always seem to be the right ones.
- Remuneration is always an issue for us when it comes to hiring right.
- Staff loyalty to organisation is rare these days; you just can’t find it.
- John is competent; he just can’t seem to be able to perform well.
- He performed brilliantly during the recruitment processes, but from day one we discovered we got the recruitment wrong.
Organisations are – now and then – awash with above worries and many more. These worries often arise from practical challenges to recruiting right. Some of these challenges, which include:
- Attracting the right candidates
- Engaging qualified candidates
- Fast and efficient hiring
- Placing objectivity above subjective factors
- Creating an efficient recruiting process
- Matching person to organisation or “culture-alignment”
- Matching remuneration with competence
These are real concerns and could be overwhelming. Furthermore, they often lead employers with recruiting the second-best-available rather than what they really desired.
So, how does Teoaris Consulting get hiring right? We simply dare to do it differently, and more efficiently!
How we do it
Our goal when recruiting for an organisation is not just limited to filling the position for the moment, we are passionate about building a talent pool that will improve the business of the organisation today and also give it a sustainable advantage for the future.
With that, we take a strategic approach to recruiting over the oft-shortsighted approach of filling the position now without putting into consideration what will happen in the next few months, two years or another five years. What does this mean? Except for short-term requirements, we only want to recruit staff that will contribute to and enhance our client’s business – today, in the short term, medium term and in the long run. Hence, our recruitment philosophy avoids the usual off-the-peg approach. Rather we take each recruitment as a project, and apply our rigorous procedures, applying unique skills, experience and technology to hire the best.
THREE CARDINAL ELEMENTS OF TEOARIS RECRUITMENT
Applying the 3 cardinal elements of recruitment
These three elements fit together. In other words, we implicitly apply the three in every recruitment engagement. These elements are applied in each of our recruitment processes (profiled below).
- Why are you recruiting? Where it all starts from
As a professional principle, Teoaris does not start a recruitment process without having a good knowledge of the client’s business, the recruitment objectives of the business and the corporate culture. For us, getting the right fit starts with how the role being filled fits into the overall business goals of the business. Hence, the knowledge of the business, its industry, its plans, and its structure is very important to us. Juxtaposing this knowledge with the job role and requirements enables our consultants to apply decades of business consulting experience to create a “candidate personae” that fits the role. This process takes some diligence in analysis but we are always pleased to undergo it as it sets the right foundation for hiring right.
- Sourcing candidates
Built from experiences and contemporary realities, we have been able to develop an automated system that garners diverse pool of job applicants. The resume aggregator currently has over 10,000 resumes from diverse backgrounds and different locations across the country. Fresh submissions from each job posting and other sources are automatically updated, sorted, organised and filed unto the systems library. This gives us quick and easy access to hundreds of potential right candidates for each job position/role.
With the help of this tool, we are able to set skill and experience benchmarks based on the brief of the client and are able to filter qualified candidates at the first level. This pre-shortlist is however subjected to further evaluation by our experienced consultants who carefully evaluate each candidate’s skill set and experience, to validate the software’s recommendations.
- Scheduling interviews
A major factor in recruiting high quality staff that recruiters mostly ignore is the ability to attract the right candidate. It’s one thing to shortlist a candidate for a job, it’s another for the candidate to be willing to make herself available an assessment process.
The recruiter’s brand and the right approach usually do the trick. Teoaris is positioned as a highly competent and professional brand working for highly discerning clients. Even without disclosing the identity of the client, we’re able to generate interests from candidates which ultimately rubs on the entire recruitment process.
- Conducting assessments
How do you assess skills?
Recruitment may be a tough thing but the answer to the all-important recruitment question of why do you hire a staff is both straightforward and simple. To get the job done! Right? Employees are engaged by organisation to perform certain responsibilities. This is where competency comes in, but competence alone doesn’t the job done efficiently.
First, we often need to get the job done while interacting, influencing or co-operating with other people. Second, these interactions are done within an environment (bordered or borderless) bounded with rules, policies and ways that guide our engagements. Every organisation has its culture, whether written or unwritten. These are set of beliefs, ways and principles guiding the way things are done. And these – often silently – are great determinants of the performances of the organisation, perhaps its destiny.
At Teoaris, our recruitment processes are fundamentally embedded with assessments of candidates on 3 major areas, albeit the way and manner these assessments are carried out will vary from one job to another and from one level to the other. Furthermore, we engage multiple tools to achieve our goal of recruiting the best. Depending on the level and the pre-assessment judgment of our consultants, candidates may be evaluated both orally and with written tests.
Competency Assessment:
These assessments attempt to validate the acclaimed competencies of the candidate. With over 5,000 competency-based questions spread across diverse roles and professions, we grill and distil the functional/technical competencies of the candidate and arrive at an intermediate position on the suitability of the candidate. Nonetheless, candidates are further subjected to the oral interviewing sessions with our consultants to establish how rated they are.
Cognitive Assessment:
As part of the pre-employment testing, particularly for lower levels, we administer computer-based cognitive assessment for the candidates, as may be applicable. This principally tests the problem solving and critical thinking skills of the candidates.
Personality Assessment:
Personality tests are conducted to assess a candidate’s personality across 15 main traits. Here, we evaluate personal effectiveness, communication, business etiquette, teamwork and other behavioural qualities of the candidate.
This is particularly useful for providing insight into an applicant’s intrinsic motivation for the job, and the ability to cope within the culture of the potential employer. Our experienced recruitment consultants further conduct culture-fit assessments on the candidates to validate the computer-based results (where applied).
The Crux:
Computer-based tests and oral interviews are means of data and information gathering about the candidate. The advanced skills relating to recruitment duties ultimately lies in the collation of the data collected, alignment of conversational engagements and intelligent observations with computer results, and the incisive and smart deductions from the analyses.
The tools we use
- Job aggregators
- Applicant tracking systems
- Screening and skills assessment tools
- Social verification tools
- Background check tools
Conclusion
Skills, intuition, right judgment from experience plays a lot of role in getting the best candidates. Dare to do it differently.
