Poor articulation of skills required by the hiring manager, recruiters’ poor understanding of the required skills, inefficiency in sourcing and poor screening contribute to poor results in recruitment.

Lets admit it – recruitment today’s is far more complex than it was many years back. One important reason is that the skills have become diverse and increased manifold. This is particularly true of knowledge driven businesses and also of functions that were pretty narrow some time back. Let me share my observations on why recruitment yields poor results:

1. Poor articulation of skills by the Hiring Manager
There are several (around 10 is my guess) skills that is there in the mind of the Hiring Manager i.e. the skills that the Hiring Manager thinks the candidate needs to have. Here is an example: Java, Server Side programming, Web Application, Banking domain, Agile development, Writing Algorithms, Object Oriented Development.
Maybe because the Hiring Manager is made to write text i.e. Job Description and writing text from words and phrases is not an easy task. Hiring Manager may miss out some key elements when they are putting it down as a JD. Why not allow Hiring Managers to clearly express the skills that are needed as it is in their mind? Possible? Yes. Here is an example of how it can be done –Job Skills Profiling.

2. Recruiters’ poor appreciation of the skills required
Lets accept it. No one can understand the requirement of the skills better than the hiring manager. But somehow we need the recruiter to help in sourcing and screening applications. The recruiter, in normal case, needs to read the textual Job Descriptions and cull out the few.