In this video, Caissa's founder Konstanty Sliwowski agrees with many people when he says "I don’t like recruiting." The transcript of his video is as follows.
Don’t get me wrong. I am deeply passionate about recruitment, finding and engaging the right people, effectively running recruitment processes, walking hiring managers through job briefings resulting in fantastic CV to offer conversion rates and working with incredibly inspiring clients to help them grow. What I don’t like though is recruiting.
At this point you are probably scratching your head and saying recruiting/recruitment, potato/potato. Isn’t it the same thing. Well no. It is not.
Recruitment is a strategy, a process, a contingency and retention plan and a business essential practice. How you execute recruitment is probably the most impactful thing you as a manager can do. You may say that actually I am wrong and that it is sales or engineering or product development. Well, here is the thing. Unless you are able to attract and hire the right people who can execute on those critical jobs in engineering or product or whatever else. Without the right people you will have no business to talk of. This is why, as a business leader recruitment stands at the centre of everything you do. Get it right and you get the people that will help you win. Get it wrong and you are stuffed.
So what is this about disliking recruiting I am saying. Well, recruiting itself is focused on executing the act of hiring staff. It is by far in most cases reactive. And here is why. Most companies go to market to recruit in 2 instances. Firstly, when they are growing and their team is stretched or has an experience gap or; secondly, when someone leaves and they need to make a replacement hire. In both cases hiring is a reaction to your circumstances. You are playing catch up to the needs of your business. This also means that when you start recruiting you get sucked into it. As you need to make the hire soon your focus shifts to the immediate needs of the business rather than the strategic that you as a business leader need to focus on. Recruiting is cumbersome, frustrating, and sucks up a lot of time that as a business founder and leader I would much rather invest into working with clients and mid and long term business objectives.
Recruiting is too often a knee jerk reaction to circumstances. Instead of recruiting, as business leaders and HR professionals we need to focus more on strategic recruitment initiatives. Your team will develop skill gaps. People will leave your business. It is a fact of life. But what you do to plan your growth and retain your people for longer as well as how do you go about a backup contingency plan for their succession is something that we can already talk about today.
Let me show you how you can protect your business from losing key staff and avoid knee jerk recruiting by taking better control of your recruitment strategy external contingency planning.
