Inside the Recruitment and Hiring Process

Personnel recruitment is one of the most essential processes in the life of any company. The important objective is to optimize it by making it as efficient as possible. Today, at Janus, special attention is paid to attracting competent specialists with the full range of necessary professional skills, who would fit harmoniously into the psychological climate of the established multinational team.

In the practice of some of my colleagues, recruiting managers, the following situations sometimes occur: at first glance, a candidate seems good, but there is something unsatisfactory in their motivation or personal qualities. The question then arises: “How do you change this?” We try to avoid such problematic situations as a whole, and from the very beginning we invite candidates precisely suitable for the job who will fit into the corporate culture of the company. I know from experience that it can be difficult to find such candidates, because they must have both the competence declared in their profiles, as well as the skills of team interaction and being suitable for us in spirit.

We pay attention to a candidate’s developed soft skills, which include the abilities to clearly express thoughts, work in a team and effectively resolve conflict situations, adapt to changes, multitask, search for and analyze information, find non-standard solutions to problems, and much more. It is important to have developed emotional intelligence, and the ability to understand other people’s feelings and control their own.

Of course, hard skills — those that can be quantified or clearly demonstrated — are still very important, and a successful candidate must have them to a sufficient level. Ideally, the best candidate we offer a job to should have both types of skills in a harmonious relationship. It should be noted that the development of soft skills takes a lot of time, while hard skills directly related to a particular profession can be learned much faster.

In addition, a feature of our company, which is international and has offices around the world, is the multicultural team, so it is important for us that a potential member can effectively interact with people of different nationalities and cultures and find an individual approach to each. This is also a soft skill. Working in a multicultural team enriches each member with new knowledge: communication with colleagues from different countries expands horizons and inspires new ideas. Colleagues note that the company’s multiculturalism is its undeniable advantage.

Another aspect that we pay close attention to when selecting new employees is the alignment of the candidate’s values and principles with those of the corporation. The values of our company are enshrined in its code of ethics; these include clarity and transparency, reliability, respect, cooperation and responsibility. We are professionals, always striving for dialog, taking responsibility before society, thinking about the ethical consequences of our actions, and constantly developing and striving for perfection, so we are looking for candidates who fully share these and other principles of our company.

We understand that it is unlikely that we will be able to find a candidate who meets every single requirement, and the employee will still have to adapt to new realities. We have developed an effective adaptation system for new employees to achieve this.

If we see that a candidate not only has the necessary qualifications, experience, skills and knowledge for us, but is also ready to share our views and approaches to work, we are happy to offer them a job. After all, we are interested in employees working for us long-term. Ideally, we strive to ensure that employees do not leave us for other employers, but retire. And we succeed in this: many of our employees have worked for us for 5–10 years, and there are even those who have worked with us for 15 years or more, and having retired, continue to work with us on a remote basis.

In conclusion, I would like to say that we are aware that the time and effort invested in selecting the right people will then save resources that could have been spent on correcting the situation. “In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two,” writes Lee Iacocca, an American entrepreneur and one of the world’s most successful executives, in his book Iacocca: An Autobiography, and this statement is impossible to disagree with.