Recruitment Insights From Recruiters for Job Seekers
Project Human Resource’s outplacement team recently completed a short survey aimed at understanding whether recruitment processes have changed and, indeed, how recruiters go about managing the process for their organisation.
The results provided some interesting insights for both job seekers and recruiters and these are summarised below.
What do the results mean for job seekers:
- If you’ve applied to a company before, don’t wait for them to make contact with you, take the front foot and let them know you are still on the market. 97% of recruiters said they never or almost never filled roles from their database.
- Not everyone reads the resume from front to back and most people try to process the information in less than 2 minutes. Make sure you consider this when designing your resume and ask yourself, “can it pass the skim read test and still get the message across”?
- Do you need a covering letter? If this is delaying your application don’t bother, not a single recruiter believed it was essential
- Recruiters are poor at making candidates aware the role they applied for has been closed. As a job seeker, expect acknowledgement of your application but not notification the role has been filled elsewhere.
- It is common for recruiters to telephone screen first. Expect a call if you are on their broad shortlist.
- Prepare for some formality in the interview and learn how to answer behavioural interview questions. It appears the majority of recruiters like some formality in their interview technique and the more experienced recruiters still use behavioural interviewing.
Summary of Results
Let me preface any conclusions from this survey with a couple of facts. Firstly, the sample size was modest, less than sixty. Secondly, it was skewed toward managers. Having said all that, there were certainly some interesting results and if investigated further should be done using a more rigorous sampling procedure and method of data collection.
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Project Human Resources
The consultants at Project Human Resources have been delivering Career Transition, Outplacement, Psychometric Testing and Recruitment Services for over 20 years. We regularly conduct surveys to ensure our information is up to date, relevant and of benefit to our target audience.