Signs of a bad recruiter or classic mistakes in recruiting

Recently, the topic of staff recruitment is often discussed at Habré. In particular, a good topic is here (especially I advise you to read the comments) and click here .

A lot is said about the competence of recruiters, and in this part of the problem there really is. Moreover, I am sure that in approximately 70% of cases the work of recruiters is ineffective. And why this happens - let's try to figure out further.


What begins recruitment? It begins with a professiogram . A professiogram is a list of qualities that a selected specialist must comply with. These qualities are critical for work, their list is finite. Well, the qualities themselves are naturally measurable. In ancient times, when computers were large, the professiogram was also called the “job description”. The link indicates that the concept of a professiogram is applicable only to engineering specialties, but this is not true. Any description of the specialty - this is the professiogram.
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“The blonde secretary, from 170, breasts from 3 sizes” - and this is also a professiogram. The bad, really, because the skills are not defined and the ways of measuring them are incomprehensible :)

In the jargon of recruiters, a professiogram is also called a comb. For two reasons. 1. It allows you to “comb out” unsuitable candidates. 2. If you draw it - it looks exactly like that.

1. Incorrect professiogram

Accordingly, the first problem with staff recruitment is a poorly compiled professiogram. In life, it looks like this: "6-bit turner, 25 years." Or this: “a lawyer with peaceful methods of resolving international conflicts”. I note that these examples are not bash.org.ru, but quite real orders for recruitment agencies. Accepted by agencies. It is clear that the manager who worked with the customer simply did not bother to define a set of input requirements for his work. And, naturally, with the vacancy so formulated, the probability of closing it tends to zero.

A professiogram should be formulated in such a way that it is extremely clear from it how the senior programmer differs from the younger layout designer and vice versa. However, in the professiogram there should not be anything superfluous - this will allow you to get the widest possible range of candidates and explore all the possibilities. Roughly speaking, if your programmer (I really liked this comment) does not communicate with customers in principle, but should code, code and code - it makes sense to not care about the requirements of the jacket and tie. It should work. So what it looks like doesn’t matter.

A professiogram is an accurate, complete and detailed answer to the question “who are we looking for?”. All qualities that are critical for work, it is. Well, or at least should be.

2. Let's define your IQ?

And let's not waste the time and money of the customer, dear recruiter? No, well, really?

IQ is the ratio of mental and chronological age ( wiki ). That is, roughly speaking, the IQ measurement gives an answer only to the question of whether your candidate is not mentally retarded. At the same time, such a measurement is useless if there are documents on education and even more useless if the candidate has an impressive professional experience.

Measuring IQ only makes sense if you take a person to the project team, where he will have to work with an unknown material. In this situation, the IQ parameter is, in fact, the only thing that at least somehow indicates the ability of the psyche of the potential employee to adapt to changing conditions. Even so: to unknown changing conditions.

I’m not saying that many recruiters use the Eysenck test or even more funny methods from books like “180 popular psychological tests”. And, of course, the results they have come out very funny.

3. What personal qualities do you have?

Continue with psychologism. Personal qualities must be such that a person can work successfully in this place. And no others. For example, if an employee has access to some economic documents, then it makes sense to test loyalty to an employer (is it necessary to say that the level of this loyalty should be firmly stated in the professiogram?).

But, in any case, this does not negate the fact that employee loyalty is the task of the manager, not the recruiter.

The second argument against the assessment of personal qualities sounds very simple: today there are not so many working tools in psychology that allow these qualities to be reliably assessed. Among the questionnaires, recruiters with perseverance worthy of better use, continue to apply 16PF and other publicly available techniques. And any publicly available method is rapidly losing validity. At the same time, to the question “Did you try to use CPI, for example?” HR managers make such eyes as if you were offering something indecent to them.

The same, by the way, concerns the notorious “leadership assessment”, which is often understood to mean social competence only, and not at all the ability to motivate people and lead.

4. And let's draw?

If you are asked to draw a "House-Tree-Man", then you can immediately ask the recruiter for something indecent. All drawing techniques are only suitable for the situation of individual counseling, they are irrelevant in situations of on-line testing of candidates.

Moreover, psychoanalytic and projective methods begin to work only when you can become attached to a person’s personal history. Remember Western films about psychoanalysts - they very long communicate with the client, before moving on to therapy itself. The purpose of this communication is to understand what these or those symbols mean for a person. If there is no such understanding, then it is easier to wrinkle the brow, the psychological effect will be greater.

5. When recruiting a narrow specialist, the recruiter does not use the services of an expert.

“Feel free to hire an expert to assess your professional skills, YOU DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING!” Is the phrase of one of the people who taught me how to manage personnel. Often, one simple experiment saves a lot of time and money. Declared in the resume at the place of the secretary print speed of 1500 characters per minute - take the computer and check, it's easy!

More specialized knowledge is declared - hire an expert. Yes, of course, you will not miss all applicants through an expert - but for this purpose, the recruitment system is built as a series of consecutive filters. Not everybody gets to the expert, and this is normal.

6. Interview as a way to drop out a large number of candidates.

If you come for an interview with a manager, and there, say, 8 candidates are sitting - then turn around and leave. This means that the manager either does not understand himself who he needs, or could not explain it. In any case, working with him is not worth it.

Interview with the head - the final stage in the selection of personnel. It is implied that the candidates at the interview have equal professional competences (otherwise, why was the garden planted?). And, if all their skills and abilities were evaluated with due attention and accuracy, then we will not see any queue there. 2-3 people, and even then not at the same time. It takes time to compile a personal opinion, this is not the case.

I tried to list the most common mistakes, the list will be updated.

Read on the technique of interviewing and measuring advise this book here. Psychological education is desirable, but the book will be interesting even to non-professionals, and it ventilates the head too much :)