A Checklist for (corporate) Recruiters in Vietnam

As a recruiting professional playing an in-house role currently, I’d like to start the conversation with the idea of a checklist for a recruiter to review even before applying for a corporate recruiter role, in the context of Vietnam. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean some or all of the areas below are not changeable, but unless you are applying for the head of recruiting role (at country level) where you’re expected to build up (or rebuild) the entire staffing function, you will likely have to adapt and perform within the current situation of your prospective employer rather than to attempt to make a fundamental change. On the other hand, this is not a full checklist on a company’s recruiting strategy. What I’m going to point out here is the key areas you should look into for your move on decision, to ensure you can recognize if there’s a show stopper on your way to success.

1—Recruiting Culture: what this means here is that recruiting responsibility is not only owned by recruiting department, but the entire organization, from the very top management leaders down to the entry-level employees. In this case recruiting department plays the leadership role while every individual (employees as well as managers) and department in the organization is assigned a prominent role in recruiting. They are expected to work as a talent scout for the organization on a 24/7 basis.

2—Mode of Operation between Recruiter and Hiring Manager: one of the good examples where you can check whether an organization having its recruiting culture is through how Recruiter and Hiring Manager work together on a hiring demand. I know for a fact that it’s not uncommon here where the hiring managers simply rely on the resources provided by recruiting department. And at the same time, recruiters will react only on the open requisition from its business groups. It’s a one-way transaction where recruiter is the Giver and hiring manager is the Receiver. I doubt if one can always give enough.

3—Recruiting Tools: based on my observation and experience, there’re two key areas to check up:

• Company Career Website: it’s simply a career portion in the company website and should be considered as a critical component of a company’s sourcing program. However, it’s important to note that candidates normally explore a company’s website not only to find jobs, but also to learn about its products, financial performance, benefits and ‘what it likes to work here’. Therefore, besides finding a quick access to jobs for interested candidates, make you can get that information from there as well.

• Applicant Tracking System: this is basically a system to manage the data involved in the hiring process, from opening a requisition to posting ads and tracking all the resumes received. The system itself cannot assure you to hire better people, but it can reduce a lot of your time and effort to manage your requisitions (and applicants) one by one, in an automated way.

4—Employee Referral: companies are normally doing the same with other sourcing channels including job board, resume database, print ad and so forth. Interestingly, not that many companies pay enough attention to employee referral program (ERP). I recently talked to a counterpart from a heavily branded fast moving consumer goods company. It was a big surprise for me of being shared that they don’t have such program in place, nor an intention to implement one. I guess you can easy recognize the relation between this and recruiting culture I mentioned above. This program is a best way to involve every employee in the recruiting process.

Final Thought

I’m not asking you to do a search for excellent as we all know that nothing is perfect. What I’m trying to advise here is to make sure you will join an environment where you can really perform and contribute, in some more creative ways, rather than being struggling with the same old issues in recruiting. I would expect you to have the research on business environment to find out the industries and companies you prefer. When you learnt about a job opening for recruiters from one of your ‘preferred’ companies, do your homework to make sure you have a deeper understanding about the organization on each of the items above. As a recruiting professional, you have plenty of ways to complete your research. Talk to the people who is working for the organization that you know, get information from internet and even listen to what other job candidates is talking about the company. Those would be the concrete information for you to make your final call if you’re ready to apply. Best luck to you!