When I started my career, I interviewed with a few companies. I was fresh out of college, and I had to go through multiple rounds of the interview process. They would conduct an aptitude test. The results of which were announced a few days later. Then, we were asked to take up a personality assessment test. Then a couple of rounds of personal interviews. After which, HR spoke to me. Assuming that you clear all of these rounds, you got an offer. This was the employer’s market, and hence this process was acceptable. Later on, when I grew in ranks and became a part of middle management, I interviewed candidates for my team. I liked many of the candidates, and I’d finalize them and send the list to HR. The HR would reject many of the candidates. When you ask them for a reason – it would be either met with silence, or they would say that the candidate is a cultural misfit.

How do you argue with silence and culture?

You don’t have a choice and start hunting for good candidates again. The silver lining was that this was also an employer’s market. Now, I have founded a company that offers recruitment and staffing services to organizations. We have faced multiple hiring challenges in the past decade. However, we have always been proactive in addressing them. We keep our eyes and ears open to every small change in the hiring space. Flip it to what is happening now. The market in which we are trying to recruit is the candidate’s market. We have seen several challenges this year as the market has been extremely aggressive in hiring technology talents. We have been addressing these challenges proactively and I’d like to discuss them here.

Candidate’s market

The typical hiring challenges associated with this market are:

  • Unemployment is low – it is in the sub-10 % range when you think of technology hiring
  • Good candidates aren’t looking to change – you must attract them. There is very little need for candidates to stand out. Instead, the onus is on the recruiting organization to stand out and be noticed.
  • No one is willing to go through a long winding hiring process – active candidates want a job now and here. Taking a long time to hire can result in candidates finding a placement elsewhere
  • You are not competing only with larger organizations but with new-age organizations that offer unimaginable benefits – unlimited vacation, dog-friendly workspace, kid-friendly workspace, flexible timing, hybrid/remote working, access to the dance floor, high professional development, the opportunity to moonlight, team happy hours, fully stocked kitchen, and cross-functional exposure
  • Unbelievable compensation structure – people get paid 2x by default, and if you are good, you can demand more than 2x
  • Often, you end up choosing a candidate from a pool of unqualified talent because your options are limited to attracting the right candidates
  • You don’t have a great employer brand at the moment – even with the effort it takes time to build one

 What do we do to address the challenges?

  1. Bring clarity to the application process. We ask specific questions like if they have developed an Android mobile application with a Yes or No option if that is what we are looking at
  2. Personalize our sourcing mail to describe what we can offer them and the life at our organization instead of what they can do for our company and what is expected of them. While the latter part is essential, our focus is on the former part
  3. Are all the hiring stages really required? We evaluate this periodically for every position that we are trying to fill
  4. Are we looking in the right places to fill our candidate pipelines? We look for a smaller pipeline of more qualified candidates
  5. Do we communicate quickly with candidates and with each other? We provide a great candidate experience – from our listing to the interview process to onboarding. We set expectations clearly in the hiring process and coordinate well with our candidates. We clearly communicate to the candidates what they can expect from the interview and what the next steps are
  6. We have defined timelines to hire for every open position
  7. Our hiring process generally gets over within a day and within three days for almost all the cases
  8. We always reply to reviews about our organization – good or bad. We look at our reviews as a means to learn and grow.
  9. We allow our people to tell stories about their work and what they like. Besides, we strive to be good, and it reflects in the way our people work
  10. We don’t mind paying 2x for a candidate who can offer 5x output. We pay well for the right candidates and don’t believe in inflating the cost of hiring talents
  11. To make things easier for the right candidates – we offer signing bonuses and relocation allowances. Besides, we move quickly with the process

All of these have helped us power up our hiring – helping our customers tremendously in the process.