A well designed recruitment strategy will provide you with all the tools you will need to ensure that you hire the best fit candidate for your business. It should also provide you with a framework that will ensure that at each stage of the process you are not only on track but your implementation of the strategy is best practice. This will include how you identify and assess candidates screening out those who are unsuitable and dealing with those you want in your business.
Best practice recruitment
Best practice recruitment includes the recognition that those undertaking the recruitment process are aware of the potential pitfalls of discrimination not only in terms of the risk of breaching the anti-discrimination laws but by engaging in discriminatory practices you may exclude the best candidate for the role that you are seeking to fill.
Large institutional businesses have invested considerable resources in framing anti-discrimination policies, adding counselling services and designing training programs that arm managers with the requisite tools to ensure that they are aware of discriminatory behaviour in recruiting new employees. However, even with all the educational programs, training and support from human resources professionals’ discrimination may still occur either intentionally or unintentionally due to the beliefs of the individual managers.
Small to mid-sized businesses (SME’s) that don’t have these resources can struggle to ensure best practice particularly when they are dealing with a multitude of client related issues while also having to manage the business. Additionally SME’s often have limited or no resources to support them when recruiting new employees and find the prospect of initiating a search for a new employee a daunting task. The challenge only increases when they have to move through the assessment phase and candidate interviews can quickly stray in to areas where discriminatory behaviour may not be intended but are included in the questioning.
Ensuring anti-discrimination measures are included in the recruitment process
Whether you are undertaking the recruitment process in-house or you draw on the resources of an external recruiter you should be clear as to what you need to do to ensure you reduce the possibility of discrimination occurring.
DIY – In-house recruitment
Unless you have considerable recruitment experience then you may be best served by engaging the services of a professional recruiter, however if you proceed to manage the process yourself you should invest the time in mapping out a thorough recruitment strategy.
The recruitment strategy will act as your guide through the process and will help you maintain your focus. It will also help you steer away from discriminatory thinking and behaviour by clearly defining the position requirements in terms of capabilities and experience and make you more mindful in terms of excluding discriminatory biases relating to gender, age, ethnicity and disability.
Mindful and methodical
The candidate identification phase of the recruitment process can prove challenging however this is compounded at the assessment stage and to effectively address these challenges it is necessary to have a structured interview questionnaire when interviewing. Apart from ensuring that you cover all the requirements of the position in a methodical manner it is also a risk management tool that helps keep you away from discriminatory questions.
The ad hoc approach to interviewing lacks rigour and facilitates a meandering approach that may stray in to discriminatory waters. The introduction to any interview commences often with seemingly innocuous conversation which may include family, interests or shared acquaintances. However, what may initially be innocuous can move to questions eliciting personal information about managing competing demands of work and family. Many women would find this familiar and unwelcome territory.
Post interviews you may be well served by adding all the candidates’ capabilities, experience and responses to your questions on a spreadsheet so that you can make an objective assessment of each candidate. At the very least you should have comprehensive notes of each interview to refer to. Resorting to memory is the Achilles heel of recruitment as it opens the door to errors and may lead to discrimination.
Being mindful of discriminatory practices is the first step in ensuring that you are undertaking a best practice recruitment process and adopting a methodological approach will keep you on track to delivering the best fit candidate for your business.
Example of gender and age discrimination
The CEO of an SME advice business needed to replace a member of the financial planning team who had taken up a role in another firm. The CEO saw this as an opportunity to hire a financial planner who had a focus on the SMSF market and added this in terms of capabilities and experience to the position description. The existing financial planning team was all male with the youngest being forty five years of age. The CEO decided that he would look for another male financial planner in his forties as he thought he be a good would fit in with the existing team.
The CEO lodged an advertisement on an industry job board and it attracted fifteen responses, six of which fitted the position brief. Of this six two were women in their thirties and the CEO immediately excluded them from contention. A personal issue arose which would take the CEO out of the office for a week and he handed the recruitment file to the office manager who was instructed to inform the successful and unsuccessful candidates and set up interviews. She took the time to read each CV and noted that the two women candidates had been relegated to the unsuccessful category and immediately called the CEO to clarify why they had been excluded. When he explained his reasons the office manager drew his attention to the women’s superior experience and qualifications and that had both been very successful in building client relationships.
The office manager was unrelenting and the CEO agreed to meet with both candidates if only to pacify her. On his return to the office he interviewed all five candidates and the short list of three included both women and after the third interview one was offered the role.
When the office manager asked CEO about his decision to hire one of the women he said that both women were very impressive in terms of their professionalism and their experience. He also admitted that he enjoyed the meetings with them and on reflection he should have put his preconceptions to one side as he believed either of them would work well with the team.
On meeting the other financial planners the new team member was given a warm reception with one of them saying ‘It’s about time we had a woman on the team after all this is the twenty first century’.
Engaging a recruitment firm
Most professional recruitment firms have significant experience in dealing with discrimination and have in place training programs for new consultants. However, small recruitment practices with minimal resources and large firms with high consultant turnover may struggle to ensure they provide a best practice recruitment service which actively addresses discrimination.
If you decide that you need help in recruiting a new employee it is important that engage a firm that is not only able to demonstrate a track record of success in placing like roles but that they have a robust recruitment process that addresses discrimination.
Discrimination is demeaning to potential employees and can deprive business of high performance candidates. Mindfulness is the key to avoiding the discrimination minefield, that and a robust structured recruitment process.
Peter Dawson, Principal, The Dawson Partnership
www.dawsonpartnership.com.au
Read Part one of Addressing the D word here
