Planning Your Next Graduate Recruitment Program
Managing the Day-to-Day Activities
In addition to managing the project, there are ways that you can help yourself to look after the processes – ways that you can look after your day-to-day activities and those of your team. One of the biggest headaches for recruiters, but one of the most vital aspects, is the amount of communication needed to inform candidates of where they are in the process, to invite them to interview and so on. When you think that each candidate will probably be written to three or four times on average, there are a lot of letters that have to be sent out!
Even for a medium-size recruitment activity, it makes sense to use a computer database to manage this process. It is not cheap to purchase a system off-the-shelf, and you will probably want to make some alterations to suit your own recruitment process – for which you will have to pay – but beware of trying to devise a system for yourself. To produce a system in-house which meets your requirements, and in a way that gives positive messages to your applicants, is very time consuming and complex, and almost certainly not worth the effort in the long run.
If you already have a system, consider the potential benefits very carefully before buying a new one. If you decide to go ahead, contact a few manufacturers and let them show you what their system can do. Before you do, however, form a very clear idea of what facilities you need to have, what would be useful to have and what you really don't want at all. Then you can make a decision regarding the purchase according to your criteria, not the salesperson's.
Functions that are necessary include:
- ease of accurate and consistent data entry
- ease of producing standard letters
- ease of producing reports (particularly for monitoring purposes)
- robustness
- ease of finding a candidate's status from the system in response to a phone call
- a telephone help-line that is actually helpful
- multiple data entry activities
- ease of navigation.
In addition to your computerised records, there are many occasions where keeping paper records is appropriate and even essential, and it is also worthwhile to archive them. For example, you might be selecting applicants from first-round interview reports to invite them back for a second assessment. Keep a live record of numbers to be invited grouped by discipline, so that you can monitor your progress and ensure that you are not inviting too many or too few. While this can be computerised, indeed your system may facilitate this, maintaining an up-to-date record on paper is very visual and active.
In most recruitment activity you will be supported by a team of your colleagues, who spend varying amounts of time helping with the process. Some may be departmental or senior managers, or perhaps previous graduate recruits. Whoever they are, they will be busy, but their help is vital to the process. While they normally enjoy taking part, you can not usually do more than thank them for their input and time spent helping you. A more tangible reward is to give them feedback on the parts of the process in which they have been involved, so they can see the relevance of their contribution. This is particularly the case when they have spent time assessing candidates, and it is good to provide them with information about the applicants they have seen. It is rewarding when you become aware that a candidate you thought was well suited to the role is seen to be so by others too, and is actually appointed. With adequate records of which interviewer saw which candidates and where, it is easy to provide this feedback and it is usually very welcome. This will also increase the chances of their being available for the next recruitment process.
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