When deep-profiling a jobseeker becomes necessary

If you are poaching a talent from a rival company, there is the temptation to limit your research of the candidate to themes of productivity and the immediate value the newcomer may generate to your business.

Even though deep-digging the background of this candidate may not be an ideal thing to do because time may unnecessarily be wasted, it is always prudent to profile the candidate beyond the immediate achievements and miracles the being poached has been credited with either in their previous or current employment. Neglecting this may generate surprises, some of which may not be pleasant to the business. 

There are numerous unpleasant tales about newcomers that are sometimes capable of occasioning even a cardiac arrest that prospects can hide from their new employers. Much as those being poached may be second to none in the profession they profess and capable of generating the positive hat-tricks that bring the business a lot of fortunes, profiling their private lives may bring to the knowledge of the recruiting company lifestyles that may be totally at war with the values of the company.

Prospect may awe your business from the standpoint of the fruitfulness of the deals they attract to your business but when scandals the same persons may have authored at their family and local community levels erupt, you can be sure of the extent of injury this can unleash on the brand of your business.

When hiring a jobseeker with some history of work, profile them sincerely and deeply, because even though in response to your prying on why they are leaving they may claim to be seeking greater inspirations and more challenging opportunities that have become nonexistent in their current job stations, they actually may be running away from challenges that have overwhelmed them and turned them into square pegs operating in round holes.

By researching these prospects and going a few more miles beyond where it is traditional to stop, you may stumble into information that will enrich your research and furnish you with knowledge that perfect your labour decision. 

Supervisors are the best persons from whom you can obtain very important and precisely relevant information on a job prospect but be mindful that some supervisors and managers may not be willing to travel the entire haul with you in your deep-digging of their subordinate, but it is possible to find some who really do not care about what society may think of them. This category of managers will provide you with every bit of information as long as the quest does not cross the redline. 

But beyond the set of information obtainable from the supervisor, a smart HR should have a shrewd way of knowing the prospect they wish to hire. Old schools may be communities from where you can procure information about the qualities of the prospect in their teen and early adult life so you are able to define the kind of person the jobseeker is likely to become. When a company is prospecting graduate trainees that it hopes will lead its company in future, the latter’s schools are the sure places to hunt information on the kind of students these prospects were and are likely to be in future. Leadership traits tend to manifest quite early in young people’s development and stirs them up into action in the form of leading their schools, class, clubs and any social groups that they may belong to. 

In the same way, bad habits that may compromise quality adult life and possibly stand in the way of a successful career may have started in school.

In the second cycle schools, for instance, students may start abusing hard drugs and consuming locally prohibited herbs. Some may even lead their schools to stage violent, unapproved demonstrations that go as far as burning down properties belonging to their school. In the tertiary schools, offences that range from socially unacceptable practices such as sexual harassments to very serious ones like local club fund embezzlements may have attracted the attention of authorities and so have been documented and preserved on the files of the perpetrators.                 

For small and medium sized communities that are closed knit together, seeking background information about prospects may be a lot less stressful compared with large metropolis. If your subject comes from a small community, there is that good chance that by the time you speak with the tenth person, you can collect as much as may be necessary for some general character audit. Even for city dwellers, when your prospects are notorious for one thing or another, collecting information about them may not be akin to going to hell and back.

These days, the most useful predictor of the character of a prospective employee is Facebook and possibly Twitter. The employer who can hack into the social networking site account of a prospect has a vast amount of information about the jobseeker. From the messages they post to those they tweet to the groups they belong on both social media, you can practically gather as much information as to know your future employee even before they take their seat in front of you in the vetting room. 

Candidates who are affiliated to online interest groups whose activities are often questionable have a tendency to transport such vices to the workplace. On the other hand, jobseekers with online associations with professional bodies or interest groups whose activities do not pose any risks even if such groups are nonprofessional in nature may give the job-giver interesting cues and assist in the final decision making process. 

In the end, when you decide to hire a prospect even as an excavator operator without the due diligence of deep-digging the background of the prospect, as much the entire loss may be a community-wide problem, the immediate loser is the company that employed without profiling the candidate. When the operator of this costly heavy duty machine recklessly topples it into a pit, the tens of thousands of cedis of capital losses will certainly cost more than the few that were required to professionally profile the prospect. GB