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Employers neglect maintenance and continuous improvement of the recruit process at their own peril!

The recruit process should be structured and robust, constantly refined and improved, with a view to making every appointment an outstanding success. It is absurd not to consider the penalties of a recruit process in neglect.

The trainee planner and the retiring accounts payable clerk constructed an outline vacancy advertisement for the local and national papers. They would run it on ‘job’ days which were traditionally Thursday and Friday for both papers. They felt it appropriate to share their choice of words with the both the HR manager and the department manager for which the vacancies existed. The HR manager was so pleased that his labor of conscripting effort to the task was met with some initiative from his conscripts that he scanned the draft advertisement over a cup of coffee and a mid morning cheese and onion roll, implements of self congratulatory stroking for a recruit process rescue that he felt was already largely complete. He sanctioned the ad placement subject to approval of the department manager with the vacancies.

The department manager with the vacancies was so stretched that every morning he found himself with sleeves rolled up helping technicians prepare machine set ups for handling the new days production schedule. He’d heard the phone ringing at least twice in the first hour that morning and been unable to get back to his office to answer it. About half an hour later he noticed a face pressed up against the clean room glass partition. Below the face was a piece of paper with some hand written words on it that he recognized as the draft text advertising vacancies in his department. He scanned the content applicable to the department positions available. There were a couple of spelling mistakes that he rectified by taking paper and pen, rewriting the miss-spelt words and holding his paper up to the glass. Of course the young person was only looking for content accuracy associated with the vacancies and other aspects of the content such as compensation and conditions would be handled by the HR group. There were some thumbs pushed into the air on both sides of the glass. The trainee planner started away down the corridor. As she walked away she heard a tap on the glass – the department manager was mouthing some words to her. She went back and pressed her ear to the glass. Ca-reer…ex-per-ience. Aaaaah career experience! Again the thumbs were raised, smiles exchanged and the trainee planner began to make her way back to the retiring accounts payable clerk in the HR office who had been tasked with looking up the Daily Reflectors ‘classifieds’ telephone no.

Ads WERE placed after a barrage of phone calls each one of which spurning a question that the new HR recruit team would have to go away and research the answer to.

The initial deadline for the Thursday and Friday of the following week was missed and the ads were to be placed in paper publications that were almost two weeks hence. The ads attracted so many letters and resumés that selecting a short list for contact by the new HR recruit team was going to be at least a weeks work. In a pensive moment between stacks of ‘processed resumé’s’ and ‘to be processed resumés’ the trainee planner suggested to the retiring accounts payable clerk (also peeping out between a stack of ‘processed resumés’ and ‘to be processed resumés’) that if that dumb assed department manager had been more specific with his work experience criteria then maybe the stacks would be less tall to start with.

It was a month to the day after their conscripted arrival in the HR department that the first telephone call was made to a shortlisted candidate which prompted a brief phone call with that dumb assed department manager. Only then was it discovered that career experience and Korea experience sound frustratingly similar..