The candidate you want to hire

If you are hiring, the best fit for you would be someone who can fit right-in without any kind of training. There are a lot of guys like that out in the market, but the challenge is that you need to find them, that explains why monster.com and naukri.com is such a big hit. So, I’ve been doing some interviewing for quite a long time now, and I believe that some of the good ways for you to find a candidate is to:

• Target potential companies and not candidates – if you find a company that works exactly like you do, then you get candidates from there who fit right in.
• Target communities – Be a part of the community, contribute to the community, and hire people from the community. Coz a candidate in a community shows that he is passionate about his line of work and is working more to get things done besides his office work.
• Address pain points – Yes! It is a business strategy and not some hiring strategy (I think, I got that from my MD’s talk in a leadership meet). It is very general, nothing specific to my company. The point I am trying to make is that, there is immense talent out there that did not get a chance to work in an office environment that you provide, for instance, there are a lot of people who want to switch from a Services to a Products company, BINGO! If you are a products company, how about you address this pain point, hire these guys who are really happy to come abode and are sure to demonstrate the best they can.
• Join your existing employee network – Everyone loves referrals, but again we need to find them, they are there somewhere in our online networks. How about the HR in my company joins my LinkedIn network and connects with potential hires. I believe there are lot of them in my network who are looking out for a job, but don’t know that my company is hiring… If the HR could search my network and get in touch with them, it’s more like I referred someone in my company (About the referral money, the employee should get some portion not all of it coz the HR had to find the candidate from his network ;)).

Apart from the conventional practices that HR uses for hiring, there are a lot of such small things which can make a big difference. Also, before I didn't find HR roles to be that challenging, but now I think that an HR role has immense scope for breakthrough and creativity.

PS: Hey, by the way, are you looking for a job in the IT industry in Hyderabad, India; get in touch: girish.mahadevan at progress dot com, we are hiring.