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2015-05-05 05:59:14
Diomidis Spinellis
Running an open recruitment process one where the position is openly
advertised can be overwhelming, especially if you don t have at your disposal
an HR department that s organized to handle the process. This is often the case
in small businesses, volunteer organizations, and some government branches. I
ve often seen recruitment calls receiving too little interest, or, worse, paper
CVs piling up on a desk, with no clear plan on how to deal with them.
No wonder so many managers choose to avoid advertizing openings. An extensively
cited 2010 study found that 42% of hires happened at companies that didn t
report a vacancy. But hiring like this, by word of mouth, is a mistake.
Recruiting with an open call, rather than through your and your associates
personal networks, dramatically expands the talent pool you can fish from. It
can also increase the diversity of the people you hire, which has been shown to
increase a firm s competitive advantage.
Fortunately, time-strapped managers can use freely available tools to publicize
your call, gather applications, and collaborate with your team for evaluating
the candidates.
Utilize multiple channels to advertize your call. Online social networks, such
as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, can work wonders. Consider paying to
promote your call promoted posts are often cheaper than traditional
advertising channels. Put the word out through your newsletters, mailing lists,
and internal channels as well. By creating a specific link for each channel
through a URL shortener, such as Google s, you can compare their effectiveness
and geographic reach.
Don t even think about inviting paper CVs. These are certain to bog you down if
you receive more than a handful of applications. Instead, create a Google form
where job seekers can enter their details. Once an applicant submits a form,
the details get automatically entered into a spreadsheet, which makes comparing
the entries much easier.
Add ample fields to the application form, allowing the applicants to express
all details that might indicate they re particularly suitable for your opening.
If, for instance, you re hiring chefs, create a field for each cuisine they can
cook, one for each formal qualification (such as diplomas and certificates in
professional cookery, food safety, hospitality supervision, patisserie,
leadership), as well as fields for attendance at industry events, awards, and
types of experience. Don t fret about the exact relevance of these fields to
your particular opening. During evaluation you ll use them mainly as proxies to
highlight the most promising candidates.
Here s an example. In 2009, I was hiring aides for a senior IT management job.
The application form I created had countless fields for indicating proficiency
in tens of programming languages and IT systems. Few were relevant to the
position. However, those who scored high demonstrated both their interest for
IT and their self-improvement drive. Both were qualities that made them
suitable for the job.
Make the form s fields easy for you to process. You can quickly tally in a
spreadsheet answers to multiple choice, checkbox, and number fields, so prefer
these types. In contrast, evaluating free text fields requires a human eye; use
such fields sparingly. Even when you can t avoid free text, try to restrict it
with suitable guidance. For instance, instead of asking candidates to tell you
where they went to school, ask them for the school s website this will give
you one consistent answer, such as www.berkeley.edu, instead of a variety of
names used to refer to the University of California, Berkeley.
If you re hiring as a team (which you should be doing), once the application
deadline expires share the Google spreadsheet with the rest of the team,
allowing each member to vote on the applicants. One method I ve used, is to
give team members a fixed number of votes (say 20), and ask them to allocate
these among the applicants. I also allowed for negative votes to let members
identify particularly risky applicants. Create a separate spreadsheet column
for each of your colleagues votes. To avoid the groupthink trap, set the vote
cell font color to white, thus obscuring the votes from other team members. For
higher confidentiality you can create a separate voting form, where applicants
are identified by a unique identifier, such as their email. You can then merge
the results of the two forms with a simple spreadsheet lookup formula.
With completed fields and votes in one giant spreadsheet it s then time to
grade the applications. Here you ll use spreadsheet formulas to convert
completed form fields into weighted values, (say 10 for our chef s food safety
qualification and 150 for a James Beard Foundation Award). If it s difficult to
write a formula to grade a particular field, create a new column and enter the
grades by hand. If you re into this, you can even write some Google Apps code
to automate the task. When evaluating new editorial board members for the IEEE
Software magazine, I wrote a small program that would complete each applicant s
number of publications and co-authors based on a supplied link to their online
library publications list.
Finally, add the calculated field values to obtain the total grade for each
applicant. With an (admittedly crude) grade assigned to each applicant, you can
sort the spreadsheet by the corresponding column to obtain a ranked applicant
list. Given that many of the measures you ve used for grading are rough proxies
for the qualities you re actually looking for, some more work lies in front of
you. Go through the top ranked entries and carefully evaluate the applicants to
create the shortlist of the ones you ll invite for an interview. Be generous in
the shortlist s size to compensate for the lack of your grading s
sophistication. As an example, in 2009 case, from a list of 750 applications I
shortlisted about 20 people to interview for five positions.
Having read this far, you may have come to the conclusion that open recruitment
and messing with forms and spreadsheets is too much for you. But make no
mistake: this process allows you to hire the best. Bringing such people into
your organization is the single most important thing you can do for it.
Diomidis Spinellis is a Professor in the Department of Management Science and
Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business. He is the author
of two award-winning books Code Reading and Code Quality. Follow him on Twitter
at @CoolSWEng.