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Alex Noudelman – The Pre-screening Progress of Recruitment
By Alex Noudelman. Alex Noudelman is a Digital Marketing Srategist in Toronto, Canada
Recruitment and selection can be a very hard process to complete. Having the right people at a company is one of, if not the most, important task an employer could ever come across. It costs a lot of money to hire an employee, but it costs even more to fire someone, and when you fire someone, an employer has to hire someone new and that of course that costs money too.
Recruitment is a long and sometimes dwelling process. It is not just about interviewing and then deciding who to hire. Decision making is what it is all about. The right decision has to be made on time. Again, one wrong decision could cost an employer a lot of money. Decisions have to be made from the first step of recruitment, which is screening. Screening is a broad term, so let’s take a look at it more closely. Screening comes in several steps. First comes advertising the job, deciding on how to approach the right people, looking through resumes and cover letters, and then making a decision on who to call for an interview.
First let us look at the advertising process. Where an employer puts the advertising is very crucial. That is what the article, “Make Recruitment and Hiring Your Strength” states. The article was written by Leah Simon and Carissa Tanzola, who are employment lawyers. Advertising is the first step in screening, and certainly is important. First rule is not to discriminate. We live in a world where there is no “normal” anymore. We have things like ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and marital status. We live in a world where political correctness exists and we have to be careful that there is equal value and opportunity is given to each and every person. It is also important for legal purposes.
Another important aspect of advertising is for employers to be honest in their advertising in regards to the job and what the potential applicants It is always great to make the advertisement more appealing to the applicants and get the right people at hand, but having the right people comes with a price. Employees like privileges too, and if an employer states that there is a good benefit program, great training, and flexible work hours, the company must have all of that. The authors stated that they came across a man who quit his job and lost his house because of a job that attracted him, but when he got hired, he did not get what he expected.
We discussed before that having to hire someone, firing someone, and hiring someone new can be very costly. It decreases innovation and productivity, as well as wastes training and decreases team morale. This is according Geof Begg’s article, “Recruiters Morphing into Matchmaker”. Of course having the right skills and the right abilities are important to apply to the screening process, but what about the personality? Employers must not forget to apply the organizational culture when screening someone’s resume and cover letter. An organizational culture is how the team of the organization works together. It is the atmosphere of the organization, the flow, the vibe, and the tradition. An employer must find the traits they are looking for in a potential employee that would fit the organizational culture. These traits would include team work, leadership, and communication skills (verbal and written).
But it is not just about the traits. It is about being happy and putting a smile on your face every single day, even when you have a bad day. It has been proven that companies get a lot more profit when everyone who works there are happy. Imagine seeing a celebrity starting to cry at an interview they are in because of a personal issue they came across, and then you see another celebrity in an interview that is smiling from ear to ear and telling jokes. Which interview would you rather watch? It is the same with any company. Customers love coming to services where the employees are happy. They want to keep getting their services, no matter what that is. In the screening process, employers should look for activities and hobbies that attract them to the potential employee.
As we discussed before, having the right location to post a job advertisement for applicants to see is very crucial. It is how the right applicants, and sometimes the bad ones too, look at the advertisement and make the decision to apply to it. Sometimes, employers have to look for those great employees, which is why we have job fairs nowadays. “Technology Streamlines Recruitment”, Susan Grant says that technology has been a great friend to the HR world, which is true. Email is very unpredictable. The system may say that email went through, but then it could have not gone through. This is why back then employers missed out on great potential employees and now with websites such as Workopolis, kijiji and Linked In; employers can now be sure that they will get all the resumes and cover letters sent to them. The career websites also make it easy on the applicants because they do not have to mail or fax or go directly to the company they are applying to too drop off resumes and cover letters.
In conclusion there are many factors to consider when it comes to the screening process. It is not necessarily about what employers must do but the effectiveness of how employers complete the screening tasks. The points mentioned above are just the beginning factors of how effective an employer is when screening someone’s resume and cover letter.
(c) Alex Noudelman
