What is the first thing people do or ask when needing to do a hire? Bingo! We start with a job description (JD).
I’m sure most of us as HRs/ Recruiters have been through the process many times - You reach out to the hiring manager, understand their needs, write up the JD, then proceed with the job posting.
In my past 20 years of recruiting experience, I have attended countless training, workshops, and sharing on how to hire Best-Fit-Candidates. But one thing I noticed is that people seldom talk about Technical Fit. Why? Because it’s supposed to be straight forward, it’s what’s black and white written on the JD. That should be the easiest part!
Out of all 4 fits, we decide to start with Technical Fit, because this is the foundation of all. Each talent hired is an investment from the company to gain productivity, efficiency, and value, and the technical fit is the first requirement to meet for more predictable business results. Hence today, I want to share with my community on the deeper meaning of technical fit.
HRBP has been an increasingly popular term in the HR world. To be a Go-to-HR business partner, hiring should be beyond just referencing the JD jargon and seeing whether the keywords on a candidate’s CV match those on our JD. As a credible HRBP, we should strive to go beyond that, by taking a step back to first understand the actual needs of the job and the team.
Let me give you an example. Assuming you are an in-house HR for an IT Service Provider that is hiring a new Business Development Manager, you sit down with the hiring manager and s/he mentions to you that s/he needs a “hunter”, we don’t need a “farmer” alone anymore. What will you do or say next?
Make a note? Update that in the JD? Or will you actually take the proactive step to ask the question - why? In more extreme cases, do you actually know what a hunter and a farmer mean from a Sales Conversion cycle/operational standpoint?
As an HR professional, do you consider it part of your role to understand what true technical fit looks like for the role you are hiring?
If you work in retail, how often do you visit the shops and actually observe and engage with the staff?
If you work in a manufacturing company, how frequently do you visit the factories?
In order to increase and maximize the accuracy of our hiring decision, we must first increase our knowledge of the business. And that cannot be done by reading and writing more JDs alone, but by increasing our exposure, experience, confidence, and credibility in the company and industry we are in.
The key here is to hire based on real business settings and needs instead of by the JD, and that is the true definition of technical fit.