email
To All Consultants Mar.
17, 2004
Project PREPARE
(Our Competitive Advantage)
It is quite possible that when
you send a candidate for interview with your client, candidates recommended by
other placement agencies (our competitors) are also waiting to be interviewed
for the same position.
So, how do we ensure that, our
candidate gets selected, & even if he is no better than the candidates
referred to by our competitors?
Of course, there is no way to
ensure - but there is a way to increase the "probability"
considerably.
It is quite simple.
Ask our candidate to thoroughly
"research" our client-company before appearing for the interview.
Even for that one hour, if he can
muster/display an amazing "knowledge/Info" about the client-company,
then he cannot fail to impress the interviewers.
He must know more about the
client-company than the interviewing executives themselves!
In my 45 years, I have
come across thousands of candidates, who cannot proceed beyond 4/5 sentences,
when I ask them, "What do you know about our Company?"
One can forgive such stark
ignorance at junior levels, but, what message is a Senior executive conveying
to the
interviewer, with such a
response?
I suppose, he is trying to tell
the interviewer,
"Look, I am a very busy man
and I am not all that interested, either in your Company or in your job."
Now contrast this with a
candidate who can tell you all about your Company's
Products/Services
Plant locations
Joint Ventures/Technical
Collaborations
Names of Senior Executives
Sales Turnover & Compound
growth
Financial Ratios
Share-price movement
etc etc.
If I was an interviewer and
discover that the Candidate knows more about my Company than I do so myself,
that would have a devastating
effect on me!
I suppose, all Senior Executive
candidates realize the importance of being "knowledgeable"
about their prospective employer. There problem is, where & how to get hold
of such client-company data.
This is where you come into the
picture.
You can use "HARVESTER"
to dig up info/data about the company - then email it to your candidates.
All you have to do, is to enter "website
www.Companyname.com"
(Company URL) +
"About Us"
or
"Products/Services"
or
"Company History"
Then hit "EXTRACT"
button.
Then email the extracted
links/pages to your candidate with following message: -
Dear Sir/Madam:
We have organised your interview.
Enclosed find info/data links
about the client-company.
It would be in your interest to
study this material thoroughly before going to the interview. Such a
preparedness would dramatically increase your competitive advantage vis-a-vis
other candidates. With this knowledge you would be in a position to impress the
interviewers and be in a much better negotiating position in respect of
salary/designation etc.
Wishing you good luck with
regards
To facilitate your job of
searching client-company info/data, within 2/3 weeks, Deepa will add to the HARVESTER,
URLs of 1000 large Corporate
websites
URLs of 40/50
magazines/newspapers where news-items keep appearing regarding these 1000
Companies.
In the meantime, I am evaluating
the possibility of subscribing to CMIE's products, PROWESS and CAPEX,
which provide structured data/reports for some 2000/3000 large companies. This
subscription may cost about Rs. 1 lakh/year, but I think, we can recover it
many times over, if, as a result, we are able to place 10 more candidates
during 2004/05.
HCP
cc: Abhi
cc: Vikram
cc: Deepa for doing the needful.
cc: Ashutosh
Kartavya
Abhi
Inder
Vicky
28/06/03
Project PREPARE.
We are in the business of solving
(providing solutions -) recruitment-related problems, whether such problems are
faced by recruiters or by jobseekers.
One such problem - and a quite CRITICAL
too - faced by jobseekers is to prepare themselves well for an interview.
Everything hinges around their "preparedness". If they are
well-prepared, they will be able to impress the recruiters - and their
probability of landing the job goes up.
Jobseekers need to prepare
(before the interview) in following areas:
A deep/current knowledge about
the Company (where they are appearing for interview)
A reasonable knowledge of the
"Industry" in which that Company is operating (- this
knowledge/preparedness is crucial for Senior positions)
Knowledge/Skills of "how
to behave" during the interview, how to
speak/sit/listen/ask/dress/answer etc. in front of recruitment-panel.
"Subject/Topic/Function"
Knowledge
How much do you know of the "function"
in which you claim to be a specialist/expert?
This last one is very vast and
most difficult to impart to a candidate and we will keep out of this for next
$2/3$ years. Of course, we can always tie-up with a number of
websites/webservices, which offer ONLINE, coaching/learning/testing to
jobseekers. We do not need to re-invent the wheel! Nothing that we may try to
develop inhouse, can come anywhere close to what experts - in - the -
respective fields, have already developed.
Similarly, there are dozens of
(HR related) websites, offering all kinds of "tips/advice" on
how candidates should conduct themselves during an interview. Once again, in
this area too, we should stop at providing "Links" to
appropriate websites/webservices.
But it is item #1
(Company-related info/data), where jobseekers have none/hardly any, web-based
resources, to refer to.
Organisations like
CMIE/Indiainfoline/Matrix etc do have very valuable info on large no. of
companies, but this is only available to registered (Corporate?) subscribers,
who have to shell-out, Rs. 50K - 100K per year to "access"
this data - and of course, download, if desired.
No individual jobseeker can
afford this price.
But Recruit-Gum can!
We can subscribe to these "services"
& download "DATA-SHEETS" for thousands of Companies on our
local server. We can do this (downloading) on a continuous basis, so that no "Company
Datasheet" is more than 6 months old.
Now, how to "leverage"
this investment/this subscription, to our advantage - and to jobseekers'
advantage?
As follows:
Everytime, a recruiter uses "Interactive
Response Page" to communicate to a jobseeker, we get to know
WHO (which jobseeker), is going
to be interviewed,
by WHOM (which Company), and
WHEN (Date/time), and for
WHAT (position/vacancy)
Now all we need to do, is to
pick-up from our CORPORATE DATABASE, the "DATA-SHEET"
of that Company and email it to the concerned candidate, along with a covering
letter, wishing him/her "Good luck" in the interview! This
process MUST BE AUTOMATED (no human intervention at all).
If a recruiter calls 10
candidates (using our Interactive Response Page) for same vacancy/position
(even on different dates), we should confine ourselves to sending "COMPANY
DATA-SHEET" to only the top/best 3 candidates (as per their
percentile Score). We want to coach/prepare top 3 candidates only - much
like coaching-classes, not admitting students who have scored less than 60% in
SSC/$12^{\text{th}}$ std!! Because such "admission-rule"
improves the chances of students of that coaching-class, scoring $90\% - 95\%$
and thereby increasing the "Reputation" of that
coaching-class!
It is no different with us!
We want to ensure that, at least
one/two (out of the three) of OUR candidates are able to impress the
recruitment-panel, so much with their "deep/current" knowledge
of the Company that they are bound to get "shortlisted".
Eventually, one of these 3, will get appointed.
When this happens, the candidate
who gets appointed (
(or even get shortlisted) becomes
our greatest Salesman! From that point onwards, he would "market"
RecruitGum/ImageBuilder to his friends/colleagues. Remember Tom Peters advice
on "Word-of-Mouth marketing"? Not only, it is the cheapest but
it is most "trusted/credible" (because the praise comes from a
friend/colleague) and, therefore most "Lasting".
Every shortlisted/appointed
candidate would credit our "Company Datasheet" with his
success and become our BRAND AMBASSADOR! And when we get thousands of
Brand Ambassadors, we don't need to advertise RecruitGum/ImageBuilder.
From my 44 years of experience,
I can tell you that nothing impresses a recruiter more than the dazzling
display of his own Company's knowledge by a Candidate!
Imagine a Candidate, telling you
all about your Company's
Products/Services/Market share
Factories/Branches
Sales Turnover/Financial
Ratios/EPS/Mkt Cap/Dividends/$D:\text{E}q.$
Technical Collaborations/Joint
Ventures
Names of Directors
Cost of Production/Inventory
Turnover ratios/Royalty-payments
Exports/Imports
Manpower Costs & their $5$
year trends/Interest costs
of L&T
CMIE's datasheet (downloadable
under PROWESS for Rs. $50\text{k}/\text{yr}$) runs into $30$ pages! Can you
think of any other marketing initiative that is so cheap - and so CERTAIN TO
SUCCEED?
[Signature]
28/06/03
