Challenges and Growth of Recruitment Consultancy in India

Few HR skills which make a good placement consultant would be someone with good communication and interpersonal skills. The other required qualities would be that s/he can gauge the potential of a candidate with respect to the suitability for the job as well as sustainability. The recruitment consultant has the responsibility to put forth the requirements and responsibilities of the job along with terms and conditions at the first stage of employing the candidate.

Recruitment in India has become a challenging job after the boom of technology and a drastic increase in market size. With numerous companies all over the country, there is a huge requirement for skilled professionals. More than a million job seekers enter the job market every year. So it becomes a daunting task for the recruitment consultant to find the right candidate for their organization.

The changing trends of the recruitment industry and methods of recruitment have brought about many recruitment challenges for the recruitment consultants in India. We will look into some of them here and what approaches a smart recruiter needs to take to combat these issues:

1. A large pool of CVs to choose from – Nowadays it is so easy to apply for a job, all it takes is to upload your CV on the company portal. This online method makes many professionals apply to several companies at once. The recruitment consultant has the extremely difficult task of figuring out which applicant is seriously interested and who is not.

2. To skim out genuine candidates from the not-so-committed ones, one can make the application process interactive. For example; a recruiter can make the applicant provide a cover letter along with a case study to complete. This will make sure that the candidate is invested in the job posting and it will also help them to find out if s/he is the right fit or not. Many top organizations are using this technique on social media platforms to identify and engage suitable hires.

3. No standard format of CV – Everyone wants their CV to show up and have a high probability of getting screened. This makes people stuff their CV with all the keywords and jargon making it lengthy. Where some make a one page CV, filled with their achievements (much like Western-style), many fill it up with all the projects they did along with their college achievements. Then there are some who make use of professionals to write a CV for them. All this has made it difficult to discern the real personality of the person or find out any trait which differentiates one candidate from another.

4. The recruitment consultant has to find another way to assess the candidate rather than rely on the CV. They could make their own standardized process of applying which can make them figure out the required qualification and core competencies of the applicant.

5. To figure out whether or not a candidate can do the job – There is always a tussle between experience-based hiring and competency-based hiring. Though how a person did a job in the past is an indicator of how good he is, many times it could be misleading and untrue. A 30-minute unstructured chat is not enough to gauge if a candidate is a good fit or not.

6. Companies are now seeking work samples from candidates to make sure they are good at what they claim to be. For example; a PR manager should be able to write a good press release or a category manager must know how to create a demand forecast.

7. Insufficient HR skills – It has become important to learn new HR tools which make the recruitment process much more efficient. But many of them have all these HR analytical software at their disposal yet do not know how to use them effectively for searching, screening and hiring professionals.

8. The only way to deal with this is to develop these skills and learn the tools. The more equipped you get with these tools, the better decisions you can make while filling a vacancy.

So if you want to get solid candidates for any position in your company, low-cost techniques might not always be the best ones. Making a sub-optimal decision might require you to run the whole process again. So the recruitment consultants need to work on these challenges and turn them into opportunities to learn. They will soon find out that adapting themselves would give them much better employee retention rates and amazing team culture.