Recruiting the right candidate for the role




The gap between skill and delivery requirement is probably one of the more pressing issues that keeps dodging the corporates. The issue arises from the inability of a company to deploy an HR dynamics that efficiently dovetails the needed skill with the overall current and future requirements from the same role.

More often than not, the divergence occurs at the level of communication and understanding. At the corporate level, while searching for the right candidate, the needs tend to be inadequately articulated. This generally leads to creation of a grossly inflated expectation in the minds of the candidates or an expectation that is grossly less than what the job offers in terms of engagement and prospects.

Let us take an example. A company needed an information technology lead. The company, however, was not in the business of technology. While creating the job description it was done in a manner that sent an impression in recruitment market as if the company was looking for a decision level lead that would be at par with the CEO of the business and would enjoy a similar degree of authority.

The applications came in. The HR was happy to see the CVs. They were happy because they felt that
a) Such high level CVs were an endorsement of the company’s reputation in the job market.
b) Such high skills were eager to be part of the company and deliver.

Nobody in the HR, however, retraced their steps to check what was there in the job profile that evinced the highly rated responses.

Post the interview the person who was selected had a huge experience and global market experience. Having had worked as lead in various multinational technology companies he was aware of the frontline developments in the industry that he had worked in. But he had no experience in working in a company that needed IT as a support vertical and didn’t have IT as a mainline business.

The salary offered was more than the candidate had expected as were the perks. So he joined. The honeymoon period was over soon. And the problem started. He had never worked with so few staff with such limited skills. He soon realised that he was actually expected go down to the floor and work with nuts and bolts so to say. The job actually needed junior level supervisory skill and not strategic intervention at the policy level that he had been used to.

Disenchantment followed and he put in his papers within three months of joining.

Here, like in all other cases, is a case as is encountered often of the inability of a company to understand its own requirement. That can result from various levels of messed up inter departmental skill requirement exchanges. But the end result is the same. In this case the company spent a lot of money on a resource that it didn’t actually need. On the other hand, it also created a possibility of damaging the brand of the company in the job market.

To wrap it up, inability to describe the job clearly while recruiting creates a number of problems that are absolutely avoidable. A botched job description not only leads to right guy in the wrong place, it also jeopardises the team spirit. The result is always detrimental to a company’s productivity.

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