Years and years of recruitment experience has taught us here at AgRecruit that certain elements of effective recruitment are universal, whether in the AgTech sector or other domains. One of these elements would be the ability to vet candidates at initial contact in a way that saves a lot of pain further down the line!
For some searches, the ability to headhunt and identify niche skillsets is critical. However, we continually speak to hiring businesses who are hiring for roles where qualified candidates are, in theory, plentiful – and yet they’re still coming up empty and banging their head against a brick wall. Normally in these cases, we can identify that errors in the initial vetting process might be the cause…
It should be easy to tell within a few minutes whether or not somebody roughly has the skills for the job (and a deeper delve into specifics can be carried out later in your interview process).
However, there could still be a million and one reasons for a person and job to not be a fit…
Are they genuinely looking (as opposed to window shopping) and why? Is your job realistically going to remove the issues that they might have in their current role? Does the salary / location / culture / remote vs site-based policy (just to name a few topics) align with their expectations and needs? Are you coming in behind multiple other ongoing interview processes?
If just one of these doesn’t line up then that alone can be a justified reason for ruling somebody out at the start – saving the future headache of offers being rejected, people withdrawing from interviews, etc.
This is why we might engage with 40-50 candidates on a search that look great on paper… but only actually send 4-5 CVs to the hiring company.
This isn’t always easy – for the experienced consultants here at AgRecruit, it took years of working in recruitment to get good at this! A lot of it revolves around a ‘sixth sense’ that you develop over time. If you’re recruiting and struggling for some of these reasons, then get in touch – we can help!
