The Romanian IT&C industry, an industry which is continuing its upward trend, currently has around 80.000 specialists. The biggest players are clustered around Bucharest, Cluj and Iasi and they are continuing to recruit local talent. However all of these companies have the same challenges.

• The attrition rate among recruiters and recruitment researchers is very high, due to the upward trend in this industry which needs an additional 80.000 people. Moreover companies have to rely on the same limited resources. For the moment start-ups and larger companies in Romania focus on the same market, with its limited opportunities and resources.
• The need for new skills. The current market context requires new strategies. Recruiters are doing more head-hunting and need complex abilities. The power of active listening and sending a message with a high impact must be reinforced with new competencies.

The same industry challenges can also be found in different companies. So below are the abilities that need to be aligned:

1. Profiling
2. Creating rapport
3. Communicating with difficult profiles
4. Identifying general skills and needs – motivating factors
5. Persuasion abilities
6. Handling objections
7. Managing manipulators and conflicts
8. Working in a multicultural environment

Let’s take a look at all 8 of them:

1. Recruiters need profiling abilities in order to quickly understand (based on first glance and remarks) what type of personality the candidates in front of them have so as to select the right communication strategy and words. Having a candidate and losing him during the recruiting process has a negative impact based on the effort it took to find him, the time spent and the resources which were used.
2. A candidate that is aware of how valuable he is in a certain market also becomes aware of how much power he has during a conversation. Based on their profile some will politely refuse while others will just say no, thus breaking the rapport. Other candidates will totally ignore or become less communicative in front of a female recruiter but will be more open towards a male recruiter – or the person responsible for the technical interview. A recruiter’s objective is to create a comfortable environment for the candidate that encourages authentic behavior so that the information which he offers can then be assessed (measured) at a later time. On the other hand there is also the need to manage the candidate so that he doesn’t turn into a difficult one.
3. The personnel crisis in the IT&C market doesn’t allow recruiters and future managers to make the most rigorous of selections. A strong filter will mean negatively impacting work processes due to lack of employees. In HR departments the focus is moving from selection to training (through Induction, process training, systems, team work, project management or Agile – so that the future candidate will be aligned to the values, team behaviors or performance standards of the company). In no way will he be turned down because he doesn’t have certain general competencies or a varied professional experience. In this case the recruiter must be able to manage different personality types including very difficult ones – talkative or silent, more or less emotional, dreamers or pragmatists, more or less competitive – who most of the times avoid being involved in discussions!
4. Identifying general skills and needs. Sometimes, due to a difficult profile you risk losing the candidate or the interest of the candidate when he is involved in a longer recruiting process. This is the time when you can switch from a classic but invasive approach, based on previous behaviors – such as the Star method – to a more diplomatic and softer one using Projective Interview for more accurate data about general skills and needs.
5. For any rational profiles, like most of the IT people are, a strategy which involves a lot of talking will not work. So keep it simple and beautiful! It would be useful to find out what needs they have (motivating factors) and connect them with your proposal (project, tasks, systems, travel opportunities, a good manager or a high performing team).
6. Efficiently handling objections can be done by assessing objections either behaviorally or based on the situation and then choosing the right approach for each. This means being in tune with the previous assessment and making sure you take various particularities, sensitivities and reactions into account when communicating. It is important that you resolve these objections as efficiently as possible. Three or more objections usually mean no.
7. For some recruiters it will be hard to understand and change the behavior of certain managers – the sort of behavior which manifests itself through dissimulation, blaming others, manipulating or throwing blame around for every replacement and new position which is still in pending. Even the best sales people make the same mistakes. There is a remedy and it has to do with how you can prevent or manage possible conflicts, as long as any conflict is based on a problem.
8. A corporate environment is naturally a multicultural one. People from different backgrounds with different values and exotic customs can develop a powerful partnership as long as they recognize the various nuances of each other’s culture. The degree of development in a recruiter will be shown by his ability to understand, for example, how enthusiasm and the need for multiple follow-ups work in the Indian culture, the conservatism of the Polish culture and the need for coherence between what you say and what you do, the way Romanian creativity works and the potential surprises that might arise from this during the recruitment process. Or what might be considered rude by someone from Italy, Turkey or the Middle east.

Aligning your skills, practicing new ones you will be able to deal with all challenges of the IT Industry. For this we recommend our Recruitment training!