…So you have a vacancy to fill. The knee-jerk reaction is to dig out the previous incumbent’s job description, send it to HR or direct to the recruitment agency, and wait for some resumes to arrive of people who are just like your last staff member.
Is this the right reaction? In a few cases it may by – where the organisation, your department and the services you provide have changed little or not at all since that job description was written. How often do all these things apply, however? In this changing world of technology enabled work; very rarely and therefore the job role is likely to have changed.
This course of action would also mean you would be letting a golden opportunity pass you by. A vacancy in your team gives you a chance to step back and think – to reappraise your whole department – both the services you provide and how these are divided up between your team members.
Have you been carrying out user needs analysis and customer satisfaction surveys, and if so have you acted on the results and implemented new services to meet those needs? Is your service offering aligned to the overall organisational objectives or to external customer drivers? Since a period of change, which the rest of the team will need to acclimatize to, has been forced upon you by your team member’s resignation, this is a good chance to evaluate all these factors and make other changes at the same time.
At the very least you should take the opportunity to review the job description and person specification in light of changes to your department since these documents were originally written, and to reflect the duties the previous incumbent was actually carrying out before they left. More likely you will need to amend or rewrite the job description to encompass the changing environment and demands upon your team.
Once you have a revised job description, you then need to think about the skills someone will need to have to carry it out effectively – a person specification. Instead of routinely writing down ‘xx qualification, xx years experience in (similar organisation to your own), good communication skills’, stop and think about the actual skills that the person will need to have.
Just because someone has worked for three years in another similar organization, or another comparable department, doesn't mean they carried out the same duties as specified in your role, or that they were any good at them. Specifying a need for ‘x years experience’ is simply a sort of short-hand, only useful when there really isn't time to analyse the job properly or to consider what skills the new post-holder will need to carry out each of the duties.
It may be that a good theoretical knowledge of your functional area is important, in order to set policy for example, in which case a masters degree &/or several years' experience in that area would be appropriate. It could be that the person will be interacting with other business unit staff/managers, facilitating and promoting information sharing initiatives for example, in which case a confident personality, good influencing and negotiation skills, fluent oral communication, determination, lateral thinking and a friendly and approachable manner will all be more important. The role could involve a range of technical duties, perhaps using an ERP or other intranet based system, in which case knowledge of that technical area coupled with strong ICT skills may be important.
If your vacancy is for a varied role, calling for a wide range of skills, then it is worth considering how these requirements will narrow the available candidate pool – the higher number of skills you are asking for in one person the fewer potential applicants there are likely to be. Some skill sets are largely incompatible and the chances of finding both in one person are very small; salaries for such roles are therefore likely to need to be higher.
Once you have completed your job description and drawn up a person specification, and HR or your agency have sourced some resumes, it is time to review your applicants and decide who to shortlist for interview. It is tempting to have a quick look through, just scanning each person's details, and put aside those that ‘look interesting’. However this method risks missing a good candidate just because they haven’t laid out their resume in the most convenient way or in the manner you were expecting to see the information.
Instead it is better to draw up a table, with the skills you are looking for listed down the left hand side and the applicants’ names across the top. These skills could include spelling/grammar and format/layout of the resume, if written presentation and communication skills are important in your job. They could also include ‘interesting hobbies’ or some other indicator of personality such as ‘entertaining writing style’ where the role requires a high energy, engaging personality.
You should then work through each resume systematically; looking for evidence that they have used each of the skills listed, and tick each one off in your table. You will therefore be able to compare all the applicants and see at a glance which ones ‘tick the most boxes’. If you want to get very technical, you can weight the various skills so the most important ones are weighted x 2, for example. The candidates with the highest scores are those that you then call in for interviews.
You are now at the next stage of the process, of interviewing your prospective applicants… but that is a whole other story!
