5 steps guide to construct your recruitment career

1. Equip yourself with essential skills: A degree or diploma in Human Resource is ideal to start your career in recruitment. It gives you required understanding about the functioning of human resource department in an organization. The next target should be to acquire right knowledge on technical/functional terminologies used in the industry you aim to build your recruitment career in. IT recruitment professionals can get some help from my presentation Tips for recruiters published on this blog.

2. Train yourself on using recruitment tools: There are quite a few online recruitment tools are available today to help recruitment professionals. We can divide them into two categories (1) Sourcing tools (2) Processing tools.

Sourcing tools are online job portals like Monster.com, Naukri.com, Dice.com, Jobstreet.com etc. These portal provide online job posting and resume database search. While it's not difficult to use these portals, it can be quite tricky to get the best results depending upon your understanding of various options available. So it's always advisable to attend the formal training offered by these portals, which mostly comes at no cost but improves your efficiency in using these portals effectively.



Processing tools are inhouse HR packages which are used by organizations to process the job applicants received. These are customized packages which store, analyze and process job applications received against various job positions available and help speed-up the screening, interviewing and offer/rejection handing process. A formal training is always helpful to improve efficiency and reduce errors on using these packages.

3. Build your social presence: Social media has positively affected not only our personal life but also our professional life. Social network like LinkedIn is probably the largest professional network and the biggest free resume database that you can ever have. In order to utilize this database you should build comprehensive presence on LinkedIn and create a web around it. The ideal web would be to:

1. Setup a blog for posting your job on regular basis, include logo of your present employer in each post to avoid confusion when your change employment.
2. Then post the link of new blog job post on your LinkedIn profile. Join the relevant LinkedIn groups and post your new blog job post link in appropriate groups.
3. Setup a twitter account. LinkedIn provides you option to automatically tweet your new post to twitter. The growing followers of your twitter account will help you increase your reach to thousands of job seekers and build your personal network.
4. Setup a Facebook page for your job posts and link it with your twitter account for automatic posting. Invite job seekers to like your Facebook page to build a large community of active/inactive job seekers. You might change employment, but your fan following stays and grows.

4. Keep yourself updated with changing times: Be a part of various online human resource / recruitment communities and spend some time on discussion threads replying / participating. Attend webinars /seminars to keep yourself updated with changing time, policy and procedures in the industry.

5. Communicate effectively: Communication is the key to success in any career and when you are a career professional, it becomes rather more important, so communicate effectively. Often we have heard the complaints from applicants for not receiving the feedback on their job applications, which results in loss of respect for organization and for the recruitment executive. So make it a habit to provide prompt feedback to all selected/rejected applicants. It doesn't take time to drop one liner informing the candidate on their job application status. You need to anyway update your internal system on the status, so just make it a habit to draft maybe a one line email informing rejected applicants. You will anyways pursue selected applicants for the next steps, but also be considerate about those applicants who couldn't make it to next round due to some reason.