Finding the right candidate is a challenge in a crowded market

Finding the right candidate is a challenge in a crowded market.

It’s no secret that there are a lot of candidates in the market at the moment.

So it should be easy to find the person you need, right?

Well – maybe.

Hiring at a senior technical level is a complex, nuanced process. It’s vital to boil down the requirement so that you have absolute clarity about what the role will entail and the type of person and skill set you’ll need. The multiple competencies required – business capability, technical understanding, regulatory experience – make it challenging to find one person with all the necessary skills.

And whether or not the candidate is currently working shouldn’t be the determining factor as to their suitability.

The passive process

The temptation in a recessionary market is to advertise the role and wait for the candidates to come flooding in. But that’s a purely passive approach, and there’s no guarantee that the right candidate will apply. Even if you find someone who fits, you haven’t tested the market – you’re just dealing with the best person who happened to land in your lap.

But even so, it’s an incredibly time consuming process. The sheer time involved in dealing with, say, 200 applications, interviewing 20 candidates, bringing 5 back is huge. Although it might feel like a cost effective and productive process, it’s actually hugely expensive in terms of time spent, and it brings no certainty of a successful conclusion. It can go on for months, and often does. And all the while the opportunity cost of the unfilled role increases and increases.

The active process

Working with a recruiter you trust allows you to define your requirements and step away from the process and the noise.

Because finding the right candidate is a challenge in a crowded market.

It may be that the recruiter advertises. But they will also tap into their networks, approach potential candidates in competitor companies, scope the market and present a balanced list of candidates for you to consider. That’s certainly how I set about it. The noise in the market and the number of channels are distractions that take you away from what you need to do – taking a brief, understanding the role and bringing a compelling shortlist from the entirety of the market is exactly what the recruiter’s there to do.

And once we’ve created the list, we’ll continue on; engaging with the candidates, selling the opportunity, highlighting the employer brand, working all the time to make sure that when you pick your candidate and make the offer, it’s accepted. It’s a full time role. It’s my full time role, in fact.

That’s why my customers work with me. Because I save them time and money. I provide them with an excellent route to hiring the right people at the right time.

Ultimately recruitment is like any other service. You pay an expert to do it well because learning on the fly how to do it yourself alongside your actual job is expensive, time consuming and wildly inefficient. It’s why I engage an accountant rather than doing the company accounts and VAT myself. I could google it and save myself the fee – but it would be a false economy.

Hiring technical people who can solve business problems isn’t easy. There aren’t a lot of good candidates around, they have lots of options and the process is high touch.

Get an expert in!

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