Studies in hiring the right person the first time around (Web sight)

A look at some Web sites offering information on recruitment and staffing

Done right, recruitment and selection can be an invaluable strategic advantage. Finding and landing the best people quickly and efficiently before your competitor does can be the difference between winners and losers. Based on the number of horror stories out there about disastrous hires, getting it right is easier said than done. These sites provide some insight and guidance, or should at least get you thinking about the challenges recruitment and selection entail.

Building partnerships
http://www.peoplemanage ment.co.uk/RECRUIT_menu.asp

This article from the online magazine of the British Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development explains the relationship between the Royal Bank of Scotland and recruiting firm Consult. A member from each group explains why they think the relationship has been so successful. “You have to be aware of the politics of the organization, but you can’t play them. It is crucial to be loyal to the person who has given you the assignment — and not play one against the other,” explains the consultant. The article concludes with a list of important dos and don’ts for a successful recruiting partnership.

Recruiting online
http://www.ilogos.com/en/

Internet recruitment consulting firm Recruitsoft offers a good selection of research, reports, tools and articles on recruitment. Not surprisingly, much of the content here extols the virtues of online recruiting, though there are a number of useful freebies and some of the numbers are interesting.

There is, for instance, a white paper on how to select a staffing management system vendor. It covers the spectrum from running the request for proposal process through to structuring a service level agreement.

Government assistance
http://hrmanagement.gc.ca/

Your organization may qualify for some help from the federal government in filling your recruitment needs. From the homepage, click on “hiring” from the navigation bar on the left. The feds offer a number of useful resources, documents and links here covering everything from subsidy programs and guidelines to how to write a job description, post a job and search for resumes.

Why do we do it?
http://www.scientificselection.com/lucky.htm

This article asks why so many organizations are still using traditional methods to select knowledge workers. “Managers who normally demand detailed cost justifications for purchasing office equipment pride themselves on hiring people based on almost no objective data,” points out the author.

Though this is coming from a vendor of ultra-modern recruitment and selection tools there is some provocative insight offered here. From this page readers can use the navigation bar on the left for other readings.

The best interview question of all time
http://www.erexchange.com

This site of the Electronic Recruiting Exchange offers thousands of pages of content for recruiters and HR professionals. The exchange was initially conceived as a forum for recruiters to get feedback about online recruiting from their peers but soon expanded into much more, including a free newsletter, forums and articles.

There is also a database of seminars on recruiting. From the homepage, click on “articles” and then “popular articles” for a number of good readings, including one on the best interview question you can ever ask. So what is it? “Please think about your most significant accomplishment. Now, could you tell me all about it?”

To outsource or not
www.gantthead.com/Gantthead/default

From this homepage enter “outsourcing talent acquisition” in the search field. This article explores the popular trend of outsourcing. “So does it work for recruiting?” asks the author. “My answer is that it can work for certain types of recruiting, but to treat all of recruiting as transactional and, therefore, non-value added, is a huge mistake. I predict that any organization that has fully outsourced its recruiting efforts will begin to pull some of it back inside within the year.” This site is for IT project managers, but has a wealth of free reading on recruitment and selection and other HR issues — you could spend hours exploring.

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