Tag Archives: interview and selection
Deterministic Recruitment: getting recruitment right first time
Recruitment starts with the MD or manager of a firm stating what qualities they want in a new recruit. A recruitment consultant then perhaps instigates a search to find suitable candidates. There’s an issue though – how does one specify what’s needed?
How does that manager express the traits and abilities of candidates such that the search turns up truly viable candidates? If the search turns up less-than-ideal folk and the interview process selects the ‘best of a bad bunch’, that wastes everyone’s time and reduces the firm’s turnover and profits. How then does one avoid time wasting and get a viable pool of candidates right from the start? Continue reading →
Recruiting in a Skills Shortage
The UK has a skills shortage. That’s both official and borne out wherever an SME principal tries to recruit specific trades. In a recent survey by the CBI and the vocational qualifications body EDI who surveyed 694 organisations and reported in the Guardian, half of the respondents said that they were “struggling to find staff with skills in science, technology, engineering and maths”. The Government lists the sectors in which the skills shortage is most acute and these are set out in a list of professions available to immigrants on the Home Office web site. The list is extensive and covers most engineering and science-oriented jobs. Many would also argue that we are facing shortages of candidates with the right attitude and with service skills. Many service roles were filled by workers from the Baltic States following their accession into Europe but following UK’s recent economic problems, huge numbers went home leaving numerous vacancies.
How then should an SME principal go about recruiting when it’s a seller’s market? Continue reading →
On Job Descriptions
Job descriptions have three clear purposes in the firm: to guide recruitment (in concert with a Person Profile), give guidance to the principal on the relative value of that job against another, to guide the job holder should that ever be needed. Since there are such clear-cut purposes, it will come as no surprise that there is a very specific way of writing a Job Description such that these needs are satisfied.
Continue reading →
Ready, steady, go for job seekers
Whilst helping individual employees prepare themselves for the jobs market is not TimelessTime’s core business, it’s something we’ve done for three graduates over the summer. It showcases TimelessTime’s outplacement skills. The results have been very pleasing with jobs secured after a very small number of interviews. So what’s it all about? How does one prepare someone for the jobs market?
