Category: Talent Development

Recruiters play a vital role in bridging the gap between job seekers and hiring managers. When collaborating with hiring managers to understand and fill a new vacancy, effective communication is key. Whether you’re a seasoned recruiter or just starting out, here are essential questions to ask your hiring manager to ensure a successful recruitment process.

1. Understanding the Need.

Inquiring about the need for the vacancy is a valuable step. Seasoned hiring managers appreciate this question, as it showcases your critical thinking and refusal to accept inputs passively. Vacancies can arise for various reasons, such as:

• Team members departing (resignation, promotions, extended leaves, assignments)
• Increased business demands.

If a predecessor occupied the role, understanding their contributions provides insights. This information makes it easier to comprehend the role’s significance. While it’s possible the previous employee might conduct a handover to the new hire, it’s also likely that team members will compare the new hire’s work with their predecessor’s. When it’s a new role, experienced managers can anticipate the newcomer’s value to the team and describe the ideal candidate. Since the demands and mentorship opportunities vary between newly opened positions due to increased business demands and positions that previously existed within the company, candidates often ask about this topic, so don’t hesitate to discuss it with your hiring manager.

2. Clarify the Selection Steps.

Gain clarity on the selection process. What steps await candidates after the initial recruiter interview? Are there one or more interviews, technical assessments, or tests planned? It is crucial to optimize the steps of the selection process according to the market and to communicate them clearly to the candidates. A fully optimized and transparent process will ensure the best candidate experience and enhance their motivation. Occasionally, hiring managers don’t fully grasp the scarcity of certain profiles in the market, assuming they have a pool of a hundred motivated candidates. It is on you to remind them of the scarcity of high-quality candidates and of the benefits of a clearly defined selection process.

3. Preferred Personality Type.

Building a rapport with your hiring manager is essential. Knowing their preferences can simplify the selection process. Ask about the personality traits they prefer in their team members. Do they seek extroverted individuals who openly discuss issues, or is it a role where such traits are less critical? Do they seek a candidate with great attention to detail or someone who looks at the big picture?  Keep in mind that certain hiring managers may hold prejudices based on race, gender, age or some other demographic characteristic that doesn’t have anything to do with how good someone is at what they do. Stay attentive and carefully assess these prejudices, so you can react to discrimination in a timely manner, according to the law and your company’s procedures.

4. Past Successes.

Ask if there have been successful candidates from similar industries or backgrounds in the past. This insight can help fine-tune your candidate search criteria, making your recruitment process more efficient. Understanding the qualities of previously successful candidates is like finding pieces of a puzzle that fit seamlessly and will help you narrow your LinkedIn search and Boolean search.

In addition to these questions, ensure you have a good grasp of fundamental details about the vacancy, such as salary levels, opportunities for growth, and how the role contributes to the team or company’s overall success. Familiarize yourself with the company’s core values, as this knowledge will help you explain the role to candidates and address their inquiries effectively.

In conclusion, don’t hesitate to challenge hiring managers and seek answers to these important questions. Your role as a recruiter is not just to follow instructions blindly but to be informed and provide valuable insights to ensure the perfect match between candidate and company. Effective communication with your hiring manager is the cornerstone of a successful recruitment process.

Frederick Irving Herzberg was an American psychologist who became famous with his clarification and invention of the term “job enrichment” in 1968. This is one of the first attempts to design employees’ job in a way to include interesting and challenging tasks whose performance should lead to improving employees’ skills, and consequentially to the increase of their status and/or salary level.

Although the controversy about this and similar topics could have been heard earlier, it seems that it took half a century for all professionals to start actively thinking about utilizing this idea. Psychologists, HR managers, couches, managers, and leaders, all now speak about the critically low engagement of employees. According to Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace” report, 85% of employees on the global level are not engaged in their workplace. That is why there have been some new ways created to make the workplace fun and relaxed in the hope that employees will motivate themselves to be more dedicated to their work and the company. So today, no modern company will allow itself to miss table football, a room for rest and games, fresh fruit on a daily level, free coffee, even free lunch at places, massages during workdays, paid fitness and sports programs, organization of team buildings and various events where employees’ family members are invited. Of course, before that, it is necessary to offer private health and life insurance to the whole family, provide education and development budgets, and ideally allow for an opportunity for occasional work from home. When you think of a company that offers all of this, it is really a good question how in such an environment some employees can come reluctant to work, forcing themselves to endure one more day before the weekend and vacation. At first glance, it seems that anyone who passes the selection in a company that is earning enough to provide all of these benefits to all of their employees must have an incredible capacity, ambition and motivation to achieve business results coming to work fresh and motivated.

Herzberg ‘s two-factor theory, from which the term “job enrichment” was created, says it is possible to be unmotivated even in environments that provide maximum benefits! You are probably wondering how it is possible. Herzberg says that there are:

• Factors that affect the mitigation of dissatisfaction, the so-called hygiene factors, such as job safety, salary, timely annual vacations, and all that we have specified in the preceding paragraph.

and

• Factors affecting the increase of satisfaction, the so-called Motivators –challenging work, recognition and rewards for employees’ efforts and performance, responsibility for their job, an opportunity to do something important in the workplace, make a decision and feel like we are contributing to something important.

According to Herzberg, if there is no fulfilment of hygiene factors, employees will be definitely dissatisfied. Still, if they are fulfilled, it is not necessary that employees will become satisfied with their work. To become satisfied, it is necessary that, in addition to the existence of hygiene factors, there are motivators in the workplace – all those opportunities to feel that we are worthy, that we are valued, appreciated, that our contribution really has some weight and meaning.

Without it, we can bathe in the swimming pool every day, have massage, parties, meet-ups (in pre-pandemic times), and still not be satisfied with the work because our boss is a micromanager not giving us the freedom to offer an idea, create something; we do not see the meaning of repetitive work that seems completely aimless; we have to comply with bureaucratic and meaningless papers just to meet procedures which were set 10 years ago; our boss is a bully presenting our results as their credit while never having a word of praise for us.

Therefore, high-performing companies direct their focus to the real welfare of their employees, not only concerning physical and technical benefits but indeed in terms of creating a productive working environment based on employees’ personal talents where everyone can contribute according to their unique set of individual strengths and in their own specific way.

For organizations seeking to improve employees’ engagement and consequently their performance, strengths-based development is a proven solution. To boost their business, leaders need to start developing people based on what is right for them. Yes, we are talking about taping into unique individual talents that we all have, and the first step is to understand ours.

We, at Jaka Lounge, truly believe that when people use their personal strengths, they achieve the best results, and we created a special program based on the Gallup’s Strength Based Development.

In one of his speeches, organizational consultant Simon Sinek points out that the generation of millennials is characterized by a need to “making an impact”. In a few years, members of this generation, composed of people born between 1980 and 1995, will make 50% of the global workforce and it is important to consider how characteristics of the millennials affect their professional habits.

The great desire of this generation to significantly contribute to the companies where they work can be a great advantage for employers. For several decades, one of the main challenges of HR professionals is how to motivate employees. The influx of young, ambitious and educated professionals at first glance seems like an ideal solution. Still, Simon Sinek points to the other side of the coin. The millennials, although ambitious, can hardly be described as patient. If the experience of “making an impact” is missing shortly after the arrival in the new company, it can often be followed by the decline of motivation and frustration with professional stagnation. In extreme cases, the consequence of the lack of impact can be a transfer to another company. In this way, paradoxically, highly motivated workers become a challenge for the HR sector.

On the one hand, HR experts are trying to cope with this problem through a design of continuous education and advancement programs. This is how you try to focus and seize the potential of that motivated generation. Still, it seems that these efforts seem not to have given much effect so far. A 2018 Deloitte survey shows that even 48% of the millennials do not plan to work for the current employer within two years, while 28% of them plan not to stay longer than 5 years. Apart from the opportunity to advance, one of the main reasons why millennials move to other companies is a better balance of private and business life and greater flexibility.

It seems that, for now, millennials accept a career path that implies frequent changes. Some estimates suggest that if the trend continues, the average millennial will change up to 20 positions for the rest of their career. Still, as Simon Sinek himself says, making impact is a process. The actual contribution of the company does not come with the position, it is built through long-term advocacy. It seems that if the impact of the influence remains the ultimate goal, the changes will have to be also made by millennials, not just companies.