General directors and shareholders began to take part more often in the selection of employees

A new trend has emerged in the Russian labor market – general directors and major shareholders of companies have begun to more often participate in interviews with candidates for line positions and middle management positions. This, according to experts, may indicate that top managers and owners, in the context of increasingly complex hiring in a scarce labor market, are not entirely confident in the effectiveness of their HR services.

A number of representatives of recruitment companies interviewed by Kommersant reported that general directors and shareholders of companies began to take part more often in the interview process with candidates. This trend toward “manual control” can be explained by a lack of qualified personnel. According to Superjob, the number of vacancies on the labor market in Russia has increased by 44% over the past year, while the number of applicants per vacancy has decreased.

According to Alexander Ponomarev, senior partner at the company for the selection of middle and senior managers First (Ward Howell group), most often such changes in hiring procedures occur in enterprises with a staff of 120 to 1 thousand people with a turnover of 5 billion to 20 billion rubles. in year. “We see that companies are introducing a stage of getting to know the CEO even for candidates who are not applying for positions of top managers. Some add the stage of approval of a candidate with a salary above a certain threshold by the board of directors or other corporate governance body,” says the expert. Some businesses are creating new structures to evaluate candidates, such as hiring committees, so management can review candidates’ profiles immediately before hiring, he said. At the same time, there is a demand for more “technological” ways of selecting candidates in order to move away from emotional decisions in hiring matters in favor of an analytical approach.

Vladislav Bykhanov, partner at the recruiting company Cornerstone, assesses the situation in a similar way. He also notes that owners have begun to take part in hiring interviews for employees at various levels more often. “Most likely, this is an attempt to manually solve the problems with personnel that most companies now have,” he believes.

Alexey Mironov, vice president for operational management of the ANKOR holding, explains the growing interest of managers in hiring new employees for other reasons. “Firstly, an increasing number of companies are faced with the fact that the hired employee ultimately does not fit into the corporate culture in terms of his temperament or values ​​- many have become more demanding about this. Secondly, this may indicate a certain democratization of management – managers want to get away from hierarchy and build direct contact with key employees in order to receive objective information about the company or market from them,” he says.

At the same time, notes Yuri Gorkovenko, HR Director at RT-Invest Transport Systems, additional interviews lengthen the hiring process – and this in itself may allow other companies to “intercept” promising candidates who would like to get a job as quickly as possible. “In addition, “blind hiring” is now gaining popularity in companies – when companies are ready to take a candidate who meets basic criteria and then further train him to meet the needs of the business on the job,” he notes.

Anastasia Manuilova