Effective Recruitment

Most employers dread recruiting; it takes a lot of time and expense and no one wants to make a bad hiring decision. Smart employers follow some basic rules to ease the process and make more effective hires. Generally, the more responsibility a position holds the more time and expense you invest in hiring. An entry-level position should take less time to recruit than an executive or sales position, but every position requires attracting the right candidates to your door. Here are some sources that might work for you:

This is a proven recruitment tool. Paying employees to find applicants works well for everyone. Remember that people tend to associate with those of their own ilk, so dependable employees will generally refer someone dependable. The employee will know something about the candidate and the work and can guess if it will be a good match. Few good employees will recommend their clumsiest friend for a job operating heavy machinery! Generally, companies pay a small bonus after the new hire has satisfied a probationary period - say 60 to 90 days. Your current employee will have a vested interest in the success of the candidate because of their recommendation and for their bonus. This recruitment tool saves time and advertising costs and gets employees involved in building their company. And you have an immediate reference for the candidate.

Local Schools/Community Groups

Primarily for entry-level positions, these groups may have an applicant pool waiting to be hired. Every high school, community college and trade school has a placement counselor on staff whose job is to develop relationships with employers to place graduates. Many community groups provide job-readiness training and also have placement counselors. Some programs are very basic, some offer training that may be translatable to your field and some will work with you to develop specific training programs. You may find a group that can provide on-the-job-training and in some cases, the cost of training may be subsidized or offset with grants or government funding. Look in your local yellow pages for Schools, Job Training and Community Groups and make a few calls, they are working to help employers just like you.

Federal and state welfare-to-work programs are a great resource to find entry-level and moderately skilled candidates. The government will often subsidize the cost of training and will work with the candidate to assure longevity. Virtually all unemployment offices have a Job's Program to place candidates. These programs can provide you with applicants with no recruitment costs at all. Candidates are frequently skilled, sometimes laid off by your competitors, and you can recruit them as soon as they are available. Contact your local government jobs or unemployment office regarding their recruitment programs; their counselors will do all the work for you!

Advertising can be expensive so spend your money wisely by doing a little homework first. No employer can afford to spend advertising dollars charting out new territory, so advertise where results are tried-and-true. Ask yourself where you would look for the job you need to fill. Ask your employees what newspapers they read, then read those papers yourself. If there are no ads in your category or anything closely related, consider another resource. If there are comparable ads, ask for demographic information, who buys the paper, what is their circulation, etc. These factors help determine where to spend your advertising dollars.

If you are advertising for something specific you may need to generalize to cast a wider net. Let's say you need to hire someone to operate machinery specific to your industry. While that might be difficult to find, anyone who has large machinery experience has the basics you need. To make sure they find your ad, title it with a general name rather than a specific one to attract a larger applicant pool.

The higher the skill, the more money you spend on advertising and the more specific you need to be to attract good candidates. Your goal here is to shrink the applicant pool to specific, appropriate candidates and spend your advertising dollar only where it will be effective. Larger market newspapers, trade associations, journals and publications are a must for recruiting these candidates. If candidates aren't involved with your industry associations or reading industry journals, you probably won't want to meet with them. Ask for demographic information and review the periodical to make sure your ad is appropriate. And remember to ask if your opening will be posted on their website along with your print ad.

The internet can be a costly and ineffective recruitment source for many employers. The easiest way to find out if the web is right for you - try it yourself. Look for job you need to fill; if you get no matches don't post your position - remember you don't want the expense of charting out new territory. The benefit of posting on the web is that it has national and global reach; the expense is worthwhile only if you need to search that widely.

These recruitment tips can help draw a large applicant pool and make it easier to choose the right candidate. But you will have to hire again, so always follow-up. Ask every candidate how they heard about your opening and note the number of candidates from each source. Then note how many really qualified candidates you got from each source. This little bit of work will make hiring the next employee so much easier because you can go straight to the source that worked best for you.

Written by, Riia O'Donnell, Associate Editor for The Plastics Distributor® & Fabricator Magazine. O'Donnell has over 20 years generalist experience in all aspects of Human Resource and Administrative Management.