Why the right recruitment is an investment for your company?

We have all walked past a “Help Wanted”-sign in a display window in our local shopping mall, so if recruitment can be that simple, why hire someone else to do it? Of course, finding your next top Executive or highly skilled Specialist is not as easy as taping up a piece of paper to your window, but still… Why hire someone else to do it? Because with that type of job, you are playing at making a huge investment in your company’s future. The candidate cannot just be suited for the position: It has to be exactly the right match for you both. And how can you really know whether you are making the right choice?

The difference between a suitable candidate and the right candidate

When making the right match, you must look for talented candidates. A person’s talent includes knowledge, skills, drive, personality and potential for growth. While finding someone with the adequate knowledge and skills for a certain position, and while a drive may be easy to identify in a candidate, it can be harder to map a person’s personality and potential for growth. This is what a skilled recruitment company excels at. When the right candidate is identified and hired for the position, the organisation is likely to grow: According to Professor of Business Administration Boris Groysberg at Harvard University, a top performer has productivity 6 times better compared to a mediocre performer. This number alone explains why hiring can be an investment.

Mapping personalities

A candidate is more than their skills, knowledge and experiences: Each person has their own personality, and a personality is key when it comes to approaching work tasks. While all candidates can claim to be result-oriented with an eye for group dynamics and a drive for abstract problem-solving, there are things they may not tell you at a job interview. Our personalities can be our greatest strengths in a given position, or it can be our blind spots.

Mapping a candidate’s strengths and developing areas to an extensive degree – though a crucial part of a recruitment process – can be nearly impossible within one interview without the necessary equipment. This is because most of a person’s personality is not revealed to us over an hour of conversation but more so over an hour of observing them approaching challenges. This is why Hudson Nordic put all our candidates through scientifically proven tests that map both the way a person thinks and chooses to prioritise tasks under pressure. For an even more detailed evaluation of personalities and personal strengths and developing areas, we are also able to do more extensive testing through our Assessment Centres.

When testing a person, our scientifically proven test tools map personalities and social abilities as well as professional competencies. This offers a broader perspective of “the whole candidate” upon which a company can base its choice of candidate in order to find the best possible match. This is one of the many reasons why we at Hudson Nordic describe ourselves as a People-to-People company: In order to find the perfect match, we look at the whole candidate as well as the whole context behind the position and the team which the candidate will be a part.

The search process

When you are looking for the right Specialist or your next Executive, you have to know where to look. A skilled recruitment company have a number of researchers and big networks they can mobilise within only a moment’s notice. Researchers are dedicated and trained in finding a pool of promising candidates under time pressure. They act as bloodhounds, dusting up several candidates where there appeared to be none available. All this could never have been done based on a “We are hiring” note on a window! In other words, Hudson Nordic’s dedicated researchers act as metal detectors when finding that one needle in the haystack.

Digging out the potential

Once the skills, experiences and personalities are all in place, you also need to ensure that the candidate you are going with has the right sort of potential. This can be one of the hardest things to identify, as the definition of “potential” often varies from company to company. While some companies see potential as the ability to grow to the next level within a couple of years, others see potential as successful risk-takers or as someone who is able to create a high level of engagement within employees to move in the direction of change.

Before you start digging for potential, you must know what you are digging for. These types of considerations are what a recruitment company is hired to make. Though it can be hard to figure out what sort of potential lies within a candidate, this part is crucial to identify since High potential are what will ensure your company’s success in the future. Studies show that over the upcoming years, fewer candidates will be available as we enter a new war for talent where true talent is scarce in the job market. This means that what will define an organisation’s level of success is whether or not they succeed in mobilising their employees’ potential fully and in the right direction. This spotting of potential requires not only knowing where the potential is but also what it consists of.

Having an Executive with the right sort of potential can prove crucial to a company’s success rate over the next number of years. Through testing, and if necessary, through assessment centres, it is possible to make sure that the candidate holds just the kind of potential, you are aiming for in your company and thereby aligning it with your company’s visions and missions so the entire organisation can reach the next level.

Recruiting is an investment.

Recruiting can be easy – like when you are hiring a person to cash the tills in the malls. Smart recruiting for top or specialised positions is not so simple, though, and it can prove a very fruitful investment to have someone who excels at recruiting do the job for you. It is an investment because the people you hire for these positions will be defining your company’s future. It is not enough to look for knowledge and skills when you look for true talent: You must also look for drive, personality and potential. This is a very complex process as personality and potential must align with your company’s values, your vision and mission and the rest of the team that this position will be a part of. In other words, it is not just enough to map talent, you must also match it.

Studies show that the right matching of talent with the organisation is crucial for the future of an organisation in a world where talent is becoming scarce, and flexibility and adaptability to change are key for success. A recruitment process which results in a talented top performer can increase productivity by up to 600%! In conclusion, a recruitment process is an investment in your company’s future and should, therefore, not be taken lightly. Handing over the recruitment process to a company with the necessary skills, experience and testing tools to make the perfect match may be the best decision for your company’s future if the match is to be made for top positions or very specialised roles since these define your company the most.