Recruitment, Recruitment, Recruitment

Eight test engineers is our target. Exactly 4 months from the off, we’ve hired 2. My eyes have been opened to the magnitude of the recruitment task for a high-tech business trying to crew up (even) 200 of the right people from scratch.

4 months, 2 hires, sounds calamitous. But when you break down the numbers, we’re not doing that badly at converting CVs into bums on seats. Here’s the score.

Our recruitment agency has put up 12 CVs. We wanted to interview 10 of those candidates. 2 of them took other offers before we got the chance. 4 we turned down after interview. We made offers to 4. One of the 4 turned us down on salary.  One has still to give us an answer.  2 accepted.

Put like that, the story looks like pretty mainstream experience. It’s to the agency’s credit that we’ve liked the look of nearly all the CVs they put up, and we’ve made offers to half of those we’ve interviewed. We are not being too choosey for our own good. In a couple of cases calendar conjestion meant  we weren’t quick enough to get to interview.  That always happens and you always kick yourself.

It’s the trickle of promising CVs that explains the paltry bottom line.  Could be the agency isn’t looking hard enough, but those folks have been successful specialist recruiters in the IT industry for over 20 years. They’d hardly still be here if they weren’t good at.

You might think that the soaring unemployment rate in recession struck UK – recession struck Europe and world – would have created a queue for every vacancy. And it is unhappily true that I’ve  several times seen redundancy as a reason for a candidate’s availability in this recruitment drive. But the supply of credible Symbian OS test engineers was always niche and has not been vastly augmented by the general shedding of labour. And of course the high calibre people are the most securely employed, disproportionately rare among the inflated ranks of job-seekers.

I’ve had a hand in the recruitment of the teams I’ve worked in since the early 90s, but always for enterprises very much larger than Symbian is.  I regard myself as a careful recruiter, but I know that stage of fatigue in a  recruitment slog where it is conceded that the standard has to be dropped: good enough will have to be good enough. Not feeling near to that concession yet.  But I do have a novel appreciation of how much more repugnant it would feel in a small enterprise than it does in a big  one.  If I am recruiting for an enterprise of a 100 people and you are recruiting for an enterprise of 10,000, then on average, the calibre of each person we respectively hire is going to matter 100 times as much to success of my enterprise as it does for yours. Whoppingly crude arithmetic that, but there’s something in it.

An unwelcome corollary of that is the degree of inhibition you feel, in the small organisation, about hiring green talent.  The smaller you are, the heavier weighs the cost of developing that talent up to break-even value to the business; the more urgent it appears that the new hire will be able to hit the ground running.

So is Symbian going to have a graduate intake? Recruiting graduates is a social responsibility for employers like us; and yes we are.  Just within the Delivery team, of which Test is a part, we have three graduate traineeships in the works for this year – better than 10% of headcount – and one of them’s coming to me in the test team. They will be heartily welcome, but I need them to be good!