You are conducting placement drives, taking interviews, but not getting enough participation/ joinings.
You might be thinking that there is a huge talent pool waiting to get jobs. So offering high salary packages, or a cool office, or Diwali incentives will get you all the good candidates you need. This is not what our experience has been.
We have seen people complaining about only two coffee machines being there, or working on weekends (even if it’s a one off instance in a month).
Do you also feel that
- You cannot offer higher packages in the initial days of your company – so are facing challenges in attracting good candidates?
- There ain’t “good candidates” out there?
- Students are not much aware about our industry.
If it helps to know – we were in the same boat. Let us list down a few ways how we tried to approach these challenges related to hiring:
- Introducing stipends: We rolled out a perk – giving out stipends during the training period. This prompted candidates to join the company at least for the training period. While we got candidates, the trainees got a benefit. This increased our hiring rate – as the trainees started learning about the work, the exposure, the culture, the growth; they started to stick to the team.
- Improvement in interview process: We were experimenting a lot but still were not very happy with the success of the hiring program. Rather than blaming the candidate pool, we started to look within to see if there’s something we can improve on.
- We figured: We had a high rejection ratio in interviews. When we calculated it, it came out to be 19/20 on average.
- We accepted this ratio and started planning more interviews in order to ensure that we take a sufficient number of people.
- We streamlined our interview process. We re-evaluated the basic parameters we ought to look for, in the candidates and finalized five parameters – two of them being Creativity and Curiosity
- …