Objective recruitment: Part 1 – What & why

Since we founded Sekando almost a year ago we’ve tried a couple of different tag lines.

“Recruit smarter”, “Increase # of qualified candidates”, “A new channel for recruitment”

How to reach out with your message in a quick and easy way is still something yet to be

figured out for us, but for now we have decided to go with “the recruitment marketplace” – even if I considered “Sekando – 100% objective recruitment” for quite a while.

First of all, it’s not obvious what it means. To be objective means (according to me) to be data driven and constantly criticize your own decisions and processes in order to motivate them – and to be fine with these motivations, from a value driven business point of view. Here’s a quick guide on how to get closer to 100% objective recruitment.

Sounds reasonable – right? At least it does to me – but it’s harder to comply with them.

For example – how do you find your candidates nowadays? Linkedin & CV applications. What’s the first thing you see at Linkedin and CV-applications? And just like that, we just failed point “i”.

There are actually too many reasons to be objective in your recruitment processes to cover in this article, so I’ll stick with 2:

1. Increase your diversity.
2. Become more data driven.

Important why? (apart from the fact that these are buzz words at most employers).

1. Increase diversity

This article from McKinsey is getting kind of old, but as (or even more) important today.

a) ”Gender & ethnically diverse teams perform better financially”.

b) ”Low gender and ethnic diversity correlates with poorer financial performance”.

So if you weren’t convinced before, you might be now.

2. Become more data driven.

By becoming data driven you’ll need to make less decisions. I’ve been a part of a couple of recruitment processes and have made myself guilty of trying to motivate my favourite candidate through gut many times. The problem with this is not only that it increases your chances of recruiting the wrong people – it actually takes more time – than if you already had decided on what parameters to base your decisions on, regardless if these parameters included results through personality tests, years of experience, salary or anything else.

So back to my two questions:

1st question: what does it really mean to reach for 100% objective recruitment?

It means to increase diversity and improve efficiency, by

i) Anonymizing candidates.

ii) Deciding on measureable qualifications before (and hold on to them).

iii) Basing your decisions on these measurable qualifications.

Interested in how to do that? Stick around for part 2.

2nd question: why did you choose not to go with that one?

Because I am not sure (yet) what a 100% means and how to get there. I know how to reach for it, but not sure on how to actually get there. I assume some hyped AI company will have to teach me. And – the democratic nature of a marketplace does have the potential of actually getting there – and that’s what we are building at Sekando.

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Not sure what recruitment strategy to use for 2021? Check out this framework.

Want to minimize cost in recruitment? This read is for you.

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