First naukri

When I landed my first job, going to the office was more glamour than work. I had just graduated, and was waiting to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was half hoping I would get an important looking envelope saying I had been accepted at some top college abroad to pursue psychology. Instead, I sent my resume to a friend and got an offer from a major BPO company to join their recruitment team. While my peers were lining up at universities for admissions, I was chilling away in an air conditioned office which sprawled over acres of greenery and offered 'American' sounding snacks. This was enough to get me carried away and daydream about . Gradually, as I lost altitude, I realised what a job actually is.

[Solemn music]

So there I was, hitting ground reality and working my way up from the filing room to the interviewing rooms, poring over a hundred employee files, printing and punching photocopies of their documents. All this while wondering what a nutcase I was to pick up this job. 


Nonetheless, there were some highs that compensated for the other bad days. The ching-a-ling sound as my salary got credited at the end of a month, for one.

Gradually I picked up recruiting and moved up the ladder.

I never really understood the significance of our recruiting pressures until much recently. After 10 years’ since my first job.

Now, that I have experienced the working life a little more than as a fresh graduate, I feel the need to put my grasp of the recruiting function into perspective. A bit by bit about everything that I feel and know about recruitment.

In the the next few blogs that would follow, I will attempt to write about recruitment, taking inspiration from different aspects of hiring.

Kites

Fluttering eagerly in my hand

Waiting to soar high

Without a worry of the end

Waiting only to take off on the

Next wave of wind

Trusting the line of thread

to guide the way higher than

Up in the sky

I silently follow the trail

Of the the flight

Wishing i were as carefree as the kite

I close my eyes

And plant the thought within me

I open my eyes

And, I am the kite

-

Maithili

Recruiter Essentials

The Corporate World has few Superheroes, and Recruiters are one of them! It is the right person, in the right job that makes companies great. And, at the centre of this philosophy is a recruiter doing her/his job well.

I am listing out a few Recruiter Essentials which I feel are a must-have for a recruiter to keep their bosses happy!

Recruiter must-haves

Gift of the gab

As a recruiter, we have to juggle with multiple "customers" and keep them happy/engaged. Be it a hiring manager, candidate, agencies, or eager-beavers who want to know about every new position that opens up so that they can apply, stakeholders from the leadership who want to know which team is hiring for which skills;it is a heavy chip on the recruiter's shoulders to get the message across with as little friction as possible.

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MS Excel super power

Lets face it, there is no way you are going to maintain your candidate database, manage multiple skill sets, or prepare those (elusive) great reports for your stakeholders in your precious notebooks. So, get your fingers ready and eyes peeled to pore over spreadsheets and build data. 

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Presence of mind

We all know how managers have a knack for popping up at the wrong places/times to ask you for an update on a certain role in their team, the candidate pipeline, or some high priority email (which you obviously missed!). Presence of mind may be invoked to rescue you to safety till you can answer these questions to their satisfaction.

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Sourcing skills

Just relying on the Walk-in footfalls and newspaper ads is not enough. If you want to attract the right kind of talent, you need to know your job boards, SocMed platforms, and other pipeline building strategies. You are racing against time and the art lies in knowing which tool to use when and how so that you get the best of results. The recruitment agencies that you outsource some positions to, are competing with you to close the same role! How do you build your edge? 

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Nice to haves

Market intel

Not many are in the habit of building, slicing, and dicing the data. Once you are on top of your data, it can indicate you to crucial points that can help you with taking corrective measures to improve your processes. It can also show you how well you are actually doing. Gives you insights on the talent landscape, which companies to look for, what compensation you are competing with et cetera, et cetera.

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Recruitment Analytics

This is a tough one. There is lot of information that is available at click of a mouse, but how do we actually use it to our benefit? Hell, we are not even sure what information is of use to us and what is junk. Imagine the spreadsheet that you download from a job site; it has endless rows and columns with even more garbled information; rightly called a "raw dump". More often than not, at such times your MS Excel Superpower is quite handy to make this kind of information useful.

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All in all, it's still a fight for recruiters to convince the non-recruiters that we too have deadlines, targets, aggressive selling, and of course, long working hours. Don't let people doubt the magnanimity of your work! So, more power to you for doing what you do best!