Understanding Recruitment

Recruitment involves attracting, evaluating, and selecting the best candidates for job openings. It focuses on aligning the right talent with organizational needs, ensuring both skill fit and cultural alignment to foster team success and drive company growth. Let's understand this concept in detail!

What is Recruitment?

Recruitment, a core function of human resource management (HRM), is a process that involves hiring the most qualified and employable candidate for any particular job profile. The entire process of recruitment begins from identifying the hiring requirement, screening the candidates, shortlisting the most suitable candidates, hiring the best candidate, and filling the vacant positions in any organization. The process of recruitment is typically includes both external & internal hiring (both vertical and horizontal movement of the existing employees).

Why is Recruitment Important?  

1. Recruitment speeds up the hiring process and brings the best talents for a role in any organisation. This increases efficiency and consistency in a business to improve profits. 
2. The recruitment process is a transparent one. Candidates are updated on whether they are selected for a relevant role. 
3. A good recruitment team is responsible for writing relevant job descriptions and dividing primary and secondary roles. This helps candidates decide whether they are a good fit for the role or not. 

List of Important Topics

Time to Fill (TTF) - This is the period dedicated to finding and hiring a new candidate. It calculates the time required for the recruiter and is a performance metric.

Source of Hire (SoH) - This metric calculates the percentage of hires from various recruiting channels. It determines which channel works best for recruitment. 

Application Tracking System (ATS) - This software is used for recruitment. With it, companies can organise information based on the candidate’s experience level. 

Candidate Management - This refers to approaching, shortlisting, and scheduling interviews with candidates through various channels. 

Onboarding Process - It involves integrating the employee to a company with its culture and environment. 

First Year Attrition - It is another recruitment metric. It calculates the number of employees who leave a company during their first year. 

Offer Acceptance Rate - This recruitment metric measures how many candidates accept the offer to join a company instead of those who are offered but do not join. 

How to Start a Career in Recruitment?

Starting a career in recruitment is not a tough job if you have the right skills and interest to pursue it as a full-time career. Most candidates who wish to start a career in recruitment pursue a bachelor’s degree and later go for a master’s degree in any specialization (commerce, HRM, management, etc.). Even engineers take up a master’s course in human resource management and apply for jobs in recruitment.

Mostly, recruiters prefer candidates with a background and experience in Human Resources or related fields. Some hiring managers also prefer those aspirants who take up professional recruitment training and certifications.

Recruitment professionals also fulfil the scope of talent management. Talent management refers to a business strategy that involves using human resource planning to help organizations develop an effective talent pool.

Talent management is an important part of human resource management and its strategies are often linked with business strategies for maximum benefits.

Professionals in talent management usually start their careers as fresh graduates, MBA graduates, or HR Executives. With the help of a certification in HRM or experience, one can move to a higher-level recruitment profile like HR Manager, HR Business Partner or HR Head.

When looking to take a job as a recruiter in tech, IT, and manufacturing companies, some of the employers give more weightage to candidates who belong from technical or related backgrounds or have prior working experience in related domain/s.

Top Courses to Excel in Recruitment

1. Recruitment and Retention Strategies on Universal Class
2. Human resources: recruitment and selection on OpenLearn
3. Recruiting: Talent Acquisition & Hiring (Version 2) on Udemy
4. Recruiting, Hiring, and Onboarding Employees on Coursera
5. Diploma in Human Resources (HR) on Alison

Conclusion

Recruiters from diverse backgrounds need experience in hiring the best talents for an organisation.