On Becoming a Highly Effective Recruiter or Hiring Manager

…when the demand for talent exceeds the supply, you can't operate under the assumption that it isn't! This is why most companies can't find enough good people ...

Last month there was an interesting story making the rounds by the co-founder of Meebo who publically and gloriously pronounced that most recruiters are pretty bad. Of course, she didn’t know that she contacted my firm a few years ago and felt that her company was so cool, their managers didn’t need to learn how to interview or recruit top people.

Aside, from this cynical comment, many of her points about recruiters are true, but not for the reasons she states. Her big ones: recruiters are afraid to pick up the phone and call, they don’t know the job so they sell smoke and mirrors, and most just post boring jobs or search through LinkedIn. If you read my posts last week about the differences between the hidden and the public job market, you’ll know the root cause: you can’t use a surplus of talent approach when a surplus of talent doesn’t exist.

In a scarcity of talent market, hiring the best person available for a position, rather than the best person who applies, requires a different type of recruiter and hiring manager relationship, and a different type of recruiting process. In 1980 when Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was published, I had just begun struggling with this same issue, and the book offered a good framework for bridging this gap. Here’s my take on what recruiters and hiring managers need to do in partnership to find and attract great people:

Begin with the End in Mind. There is too much focus on skills and experience when opening up a new job. By describing the job in terms of outcomes and the long term career opportunity, the skills become a subset of performance. The idea is that if a person can do the work, the person has the right skills and experience. This allows a company to upgrade the talent pool to include more high potential, diverse and passive candidates without compromising quality of hire. When talking with strong candidates, recruiters and hiring managers need to be able to describe real job needs as a series of clear performance objectives (design new rapid response mobile interface) rather than emphasizing skills (must have 3 years+ HTML5 and a BSCs).

Think Win-Win. This is recruiting from beginning to end. Passive candidates need to see the career opportunity in another job before they'll consider it seriously. This typically is a slower process taking days to fully absorb, not minutes to explain. So don’t rush, sell the next step, not the job. Engage in a series of preliminary career discussions and interviews, including exploratory conversations with the hiring manager.

Be Proactive. If you want to hire the best person available, rather than the best one who applies, pick up the phone and start getting referrals. Strong networking skills are a critical part of this. The direct way: use LinkedIn to find prospects connected to your first degree connections and ask them about specific people. Then call these people, mention the person who referred them, and recruit the person Thinking Win-Win and Begin With the End in Mind.

Put First Things First. Prioritize your work, and work on work that matters. This is the difference from filling the position with the best person who applies to seeking out and recruiting the best person available. Focus on urgent and important, not just urgent, and especially not urgent and unimportant. Too much effort is spent on weeding out the weak, rather than attracting the best.

Seek First to Understand and Then Be Understood. Too many hiring managers over emphasize skills and experience when opening a new requisition. They then either over emphasize technical brilliance or the impact of first impressions when deciding to hire the person or not. If a good candidate is rejected for a bad reason, recruiters need to intervene by first understanding the real job, why the person wasn’t considered, and as a rebuttal, presenting detailed evidence the candidate has performed similar work at peak levels.

Synergize. This is team skills on steroids: working with, influencing, coaching and developing people. Recruiters and hiring managers need to become trusted partners in the entire hiring process if a company wants to see and hire the best people available. Seek our candidates who possess these same skills, since they’ll become your future leaders, if they’re not already.

Sharpen the Saw. Constant self-improvement is not only a core characteristic of all top performers, but essential for recruiters who want to stay competitive, and hiring managers who want to build remarkable teams. Surprisingly, too many recruiters and hiring managers are stuck in their old ways and old habits, even when they don't work.

Recognize that you can’t use a surplus of talent approach when a surplus of talent doesn’t exist! With this in mind, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People offers a great foundation for rethinking the entire talent acquisition process whether you’re a recruiter, hiring manager or current job-seeker. Or, for that matter, anyone who wants to become better at whatever they do.

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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the Amazon best-selling author of Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007) and the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, is now available as an Amazon Kindle eBook. You might want to join Lou's new LinkedIn group to discuss hiring related issues.