Recruitment Process

Monday, September 28th, 2009 - Job Advertisement, Recruitment Process, career change, career management, employment, job application, job hunting, job search

Recruitment Process

One of the questions I often ask job seekers when advising them, is do you understand the recruitment process? Often, they look at me quizzically, and think I must have gone mad. Why would they need to understand the recruitment process, it is the same at every company and anyway, the job advert or online job application will guide them through it if the internal recruitment process is different.

To me, as a recruiter and CV Writer, its shows two things:

• They have not undertaken any research on that company. They hence can not tailor their job application
• They do not understand the basic recruitment process, and the criticality of each step. They therefore stand a great chance of rejection

Researching companies before applying is critical to your job application, and I will expand further on this key subject area in later posts. But this weeks posts are all about the recruitment process steps, and how understanding them can vastly improve your job application statistics.

New Jobs

In background, when an operational team needs a new person to fulfil a new job, it will arise for one of two basic reasons:

• Replacement
• Expansion

But the next step which few understand, is how those positions are then fulfilled. Understanding that could double the number of jobs available to you, and quadruple your rates of job application success. But what does quadruple your chances of employment really mean – you want one job, not four? Simply it means you could get a job four times quicker.

Once the positions have been agreed at a business level of being needed, the final job description is agreed, and the job advert signed off: yes, every job has both a job description and a job advert, which may simply be a copy of the job description.

It is at this point, that understanding the recruitment process becomes critical to your job application success. Of all the jobs created in the UK:

• 1/3 are fulfilled internally – they are never advertised on a jobs board, and are fulfilled by internal candidates, mostly via promotion
• 1/3 are fulfilled by people they know – again, most often these jobs are never advertised. They are fulfilled by a combination of internal candidates (whom the employer may not have thought interested in that position), existing contractors, suppliers, customers, employee recommendations, external experts or previous job applicants
• Leaving 1/3 to be fulfilled by job adverts on job boards, newspapers or via recruiters

What should this tell you? Immediately, it should tell you that you can double the number of jobs available to you if you know about the middle third. The first third are nominally unavailable – companies want existing people to be able to know by demonstrate able evidence that advancement is possible.

So, how do you access the middle third of jobs? We will come to some more specific tactics and discussion later in the week, but simply by deploying three tactics:

• Networking
• Targeting companies
• Pull marketing of your expertise

But, the key reasons you should be interested in how the recruitment process works are the end numbers. Simply, apply just for jobs you see via job boards or in newspapers, and your average chance of success is 1 in 20. Where as, find jobs in the middle third, and with a combination of less competition and the employer seeing you as more of a skilled talent, that ratio improves to 1 in 3.

But, lets us think that perhaps you don’t believe that you can access that middle third. How about learning how you could improve your job application success ratio to the same chances of success, through the whole process, just by applying using a defined technique?

I hope this week of information and technique guidance proves successful to your job search. What have you got to lose, except a pile of rejection letters?

Good Luck!

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One Response to “Recruitment Process”

1. Tweets that mention Recruitment Process | Professional CV Writing - CV4.biz -- Topsy.com Says:
   September 28th, 2009 at 11:43 am

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