Desperately seeking specialists

Classified ads, industry portals, recruitment agencies – the range of recruitment tools available is wide.Which of them are worth choosing?

Zuzanna Wiak

According to Krajowy Związek Pracodawców Budowlanych (the National Construction Employers’ Association), Poland has a shortage of 120-150,000 employees in the construction sector. It is also difficult to find an expert with significant experience of the real estate sector. So how can this be done as quickly and efficiently as possible? The most popular means of finding employees are still the classified ads, first of all in daily newspapers, but it is often worthwhile to use several recruitment tools. “Placing classified ads in newspapers is still a very effective tool for finding employees. However, the most efficient way, which is used by my company, is the mixed method, combining, among others, ads in the media, analysis of the database of applicants, and a direct search of the market,” claims Monika Kulikowska-Flis, a consultant with the HR consulting agency HILL International.

But it is not only professional ‘headhunters’ who use several methods at the same time. “We always use several recruitment methods simultaneously, as it makes the search period significantly shorter, and is thus more efficient. Publishing recruitment ads is an invaluable method of market exploration and finding people, who are interested. We also regularly monitor our internal database of applicants. And we quite often use community portals, which allow us to quickly access the right target group, whom we will wish to contact,” says Magdalena Kowalska, HR specialist for the construction company Hochtief Polska.

Expert needed now

The selection of a recruitment tool is best determined by the position that the company wants to fill. Companies may decide not to search for top-level specialists by placing ads in daily newspapers, but instead to use the personal contacts of other employees or headhunters, who have their own databases. The search is often not limited to the territory of one country. More and more real estate specialists are willing to come to Poland, as they compare the development prospects of our country to the situation on the real estate markets in the US, Spain or the UK, which are now lagging behind. Movement in the opposite direction is also noticeable. Local specialists, who have finished their education in recent years, can benefit from their experience in Eastern Europe – for example in Russia, where a lot of new projects are under construction, and the salaries are often quite high. “Thanks to the fact that our company is active in a number of European countries, we can also use networking, or the database of our European contacts, in our recruitment projects. We often search for top level managers in large companies in such a way,” says Monika Kulikowska-Flis from HILL International.

Efficient nepotism

Real estate sector players who wish to find the best employees often use the oldest method in the book – they talk to friends, friends of their employees, colleagues or family members. Sounds familiar? Some call it nepotism, which carries a degree of negative connotation, but this is a method that guarantees a high level of efficiency. Real estate players are reluctant to openly admit to using such practices, but it is different when we talk off the record.

Internal promotions

“First of all, we invest in our own human resources capital – we recruit internally. We are a company, which has been active in the sector for quite some time, so we possess our own contacts, which are useful when recruiting needed specialists outside the company. Of course, in some instances we rely on the assistance of professionals, but we have not selected a single agency. Neither do we have an especially dedicated recruitment department. In order to increase the efficiency of the recruitment process, the evaluation of competences and job interviews with candidates are conducted directly by those managers with whom the applicants will cooperate in the future,” says Renata Chmielewska from the development company Mayland Real Estate.

Employee from the Internet

We are still very much in the era of the internet, and this has become a more commonly used means of finding employees. Recruitment portals provide an easy and efficient way to find job offers. Recently, a new portal has entered the market, which is directly targeted at the real estate sector – EuroJobs CEE, part of the Eurobuild family. “Before we brought the idea to life, we had conducted research on a representative sample of individuals employed in the sector. The results of the study show that our product is needed and that people will be interested in it, which has now been confirmed by the number of visitors on our website. It is visited daily not only by those people who are looking for interesting job offers, but also by those who search information about real estate and personal changes on the market,” according to Konrad Jarowski, sales manager of EuroJobs CEE.

More and more people are coming to the conclusion that portals featuring job offers are an efficient source for the search for real estate specialists, who are so hard to find nowadays. “Different types of industry portals are valuable media, which enables us not only to directly reach the group of applicants who we are interested in, but we also attempt to participate in the ‘life’ of the community of internet users, who are often specialists in their sectors,” believes Magdalena Kowalska of Hochtief Polska.

As the interest in internet portals for recruitment is growing, their number is also increasing. The most popular websites are visited by lots of people every day, but the visitors are not always highly qualified specialists. In order to avoid receiving a pile of irrelevant CVs, it is important for the future employer to reflect thoroughly before choosing a portal. “Efficiency is highly dependent on the portal that we choose, as well as on the reputation of the company on the job market and on what it offers its employees. Choosing the right portal results in a large number of incoming applications, where by ‘right’ we understand, in this case, the most frequently visited portal, which is also interesting from the point of view of substantial content,” adds Aneta Sierakowska, HR director at Budimex Nieruchomości. ν