Ravi was in a tough spot. As a recruiter, he had a requisition for one of his clients that he just couldn’t find a solid candidate for through all his usual avenues. It was a senior-level network engineer with some management responsibilities. It required 10+ years of experience and Ravi was having trouble finding a handful of candidates who even came close to meeting all of the qualifications required by his client.
This was one of the first requisitions he had such difficulty trying to fill and he began to consider his options. Should he recommend altering the job ad to his client? If the client altered the role, he knew he could find more qualified candidates. Yet this didn’t seem like a great choice. Should he recommend his client interview and hire a candidate who isn’t fully qualified and try to get them up-to-speed internally?
Even at a time when the job market is very encouraging for job seekers, finding and hiring the perfect candidate can be challenging. What are the benefits and drawbacks of making a quick hire albeit with an imperfect candidate versus waiting for the right candidate?
Try something new: Innovative strategies in recruitment
Ravi decided to think outside the box before approaching his client with any drastic measures. He began to do research on some innovative recruiting strategies that other companies have tried. Researching the women-only social media platform Mogul, he learned that the final step of a 3- or 4-part interview requires candidates to spend a day in the office working with the team they’re being considered for. This really helps to gauge a candidate’s cultural fit within a team and company instead of simply hoping things will work out after asking a few generic interview questions.
Ravi also found companies like Booking.com and cloud computing company DigitalOcean create attractive and fun virtual recruiting hubs that promote clarity in the hiring process and help to build trust between company and candidate. These platforms have functions like FAQs for candidates, blogs that describe “a day in the working life,” notifications about in-person job recruitment events and even the option to create job alerts for future openings. Ravi understood that these candidate-focused hubs help to attract top talent with their willingness to be transparent and innovative.
Diversity Recruiting Strategies
Another avenue Ravi wanted to explore for this hard-to-fill requisition was to improve diversity in the candidate pool. Many companies see increased diversity and equity as important factors to help acquire top talent. Candidates from underrepresented backgrounds may feel more comfortable applying to companies that publicly post the company’s ethnic and gender makeup, like Slack did in 2018. Reviewing how job ads are written and where they are posted are also simple ideas that can help improve diversity and inclusion in a company’s workforce.
In order to increase the number of women in their data science division, Airbnb decided to tweak its own hiring process. It implemented a binary scoring system for take-home skills assessments and started requiring that women made up half of the interview panel for female candidates to help them feel more at ease. Ravi also knew that new recruiting software implementing AI, like already helped to decrease bias with a blind scoring of applicants-