Great Vision Without Great People is Irrelevant

They say the devil is in the details, but so too is the key to becoming a truly exceptional recruiter and talent acquisition practitioner. If you’re looking to step up your game, here are some often overlooked, but absolutely imperative details that separate the best from the rest of the recruiting pack.

Competition, economic uncertainty, and high costs mean that you’ve got to make sure you recruit the right people for overall business success. The modern work force is persuaded by a misconstrued economic stability and by competition creating a complicated recruiting landscape. The checklist of ‘Must Haves’ that candidates are requiring from their future employer is getting longer making it harder to recruit quality candidates that fit the needs of the client.

•  According to a survey done by indeed.com 61% of employers will be hiring more employees in 2020 than they did in 2019. Companies planning to hire more employees are spread throughout the U.S., so whether your staffing company is located in Boston, Seattle or somewhere in between, the numbers of new hires will be expected to rise.

According to the same Indeed survey, employers are finding it to be more difficult to fill entry-level positions compared to executive level. Many of the candidates that will fill these positions are recent graduates or in their early career, and the importance of a smooth interview and on-boarding process is crucial to this specific group of individuals. Making it your job to assure the process is easy, direct and flexible to the needs of the applicant and the client alike.

Relationship building

•  Build a good report with the management team; know their personality, their background, their goals, their budget and their time management skills.
• Communicate on a daily basis.

The more you connect with the manager and build trust the better chance you have at creating the needed synergy for success.

Once I have my goals and plan of attack set for recruiting, I make a point to know exactly what type of candidate my manager would work best with.

Tune into current employees; good talent knows good talent – a simple and underrated recruiting technique is the employee referral program. Offer cash incentives or bonuses for helping to refer possible candidates.

This achieves a few important goals, it demonstrates the faith in current employees, gives current employees a chance to make extra cash and allows the manager to hire candidates that have the ultimate reference – their own employees.

Read between the lines

Companies often put too much emphasis on finding the perfect employee that checks every skill set box; They want a unicorn. However, this can lead to dismissing the individuals that show potential for growth within the company and role even if their background is lacking in certain areas. Experience and specific skill sets are important, of course, but not any more so than potential found within a top performer, that may be missing a few predetermined factors.

Top performers will end up being smart, resourceful and innovative – three elements that have nothing to do with prior experience. Bringing in people based off of character and mentality helps avoid hiring people with a preconceived notion about the category, it gives a candidate that has good ideas, student mentality, and wit a fair chance at success even if they don’t check all of the skill set boxes on day one.

This is philosophy is easily compared to the athletic arena. Great athletes can shift from position to position and make an impact using their skills and problem solving logic. Your team members should be able to use whatever experience they have to rise to a new occasion – not recycle what they have done before. Think outside the box.

Keep high standards: Even when the pressure is on

Fast growth creates its own set of “happy problems”. I call them growing pains. The biggest of which is staffing a company experiencing fast growth. This is a huge pitfall for startups, as they let the pressure of the moment outweigh the need for long term stability. Use your growth to attract good talent, but don’t let the need for speed influence your decision on a hire. A top performer produces dramatically stronger results than those around them.

Why? There is less overhead involved in hiring two outstanding employees who are a perfect match than five good employees who aren’t. Less money is spent on on-boarding, training and engagement. Quality always beats quantity. One bad apple in the environment will rot the whole team. I found that creating clear and realistic expectations with the hiring team during these times reminds them of the importance of such.

Know your brand

The importance of the brand during the recruiting process is essential. Creating, enhancing, and protecting a company’s voice has become paramount for financial success. Companies deploy a dynamic presence across media platforms, including conventional communications and public relations, consumer friendly mobile applications and e-commerce interactions, not to mention strategic social media management. As a market professional, you must successfully blend traditional communications and advertising with ever evolving internet and digital marketing strategies as well as with effective, intelligent social media management. The industry’s top talent appreciates and seeks out how essential dynamic and creative leadership is to productive brand strategy and execution.

In addition to using the right social media platform to create a better online presence for your brand, creating top-notch content is a trend in recruiting that you should implement into your recruiting process. This doesn’t mean recruiters need to be spending hours every day creating blogs and info-graphics, but they should be posting to social media pages more than just job postings. It’s important for recruiters to be human while still being a database of job openings. This places an emphasis on candidate experience throughout the whole process of filling a job opening, tying back into the importance of building relationships.

Think like a business owner

As business evolves, so does recruiting. Technology has made it easier to reach people and for people to learn a great deal about a company or organization with a few simple searches.

The Forrester research claims that 70-90 % of the buyer’s journey is complete before first contact. If you don’t think that this relates to recruiting, you’re missing the boat.

Just like potential customers, potential employees are spending ample amounts of time researching organizations before even applying.

This can be a beacon for talent, or an embarrassment. That much is up to you. Know and utilize your online narrative.

 Recruiting is sales

It’s easy to feel like you hold all the cards in the recruiting process, especially in a down economy. If they’re good enough to impress you, though, they could likely nail down an opportunity elsewhere. That’s especially important at a startup or marketing firm because of the amount of competition for an aspiring professional. Respect their power as a strong talent, sell them on the benefits, personality and development opportunity within your company in the most organic way possible. Being transparent and realistic about what the company can offer the candidate will help create excitement but also avoid any misinterpretations and or unrealistic expectations.

Writing a better job description

If you’re not accurately describing the position you are hiring for, you’re at a disadvantage from the beginning. It is crucial to be honest about the job to make sure that you are attracting and retaining the right candidates.

Maybe the job you are trying to recruit for isn’t glamorous, or doesn’t pay at the top of the scale. If that is the case, don’t try to dress it up that way. At best, you will have wasted everyone’s time when the truth comes out. At worst, you’ll end up actually hiring a talented employee who learns later on that the job didn’t fit their aptitudes, their interests, financial expectations or their personality. This employee is likely to be less engaged, and more likely to leave with a bad taste in their mouth as soon as they find a better match.

Ask the right questions

When your goal is to bring in the most qualified candidates, it behooves you to ask them the right questions. This can be different for each organization, and that is why it’s such an important area to focus on. A list of interview questions or pitch might be completely different for one market compared to another. It is a huge factor in talent acquisition. Study the role before picking up the phone.

• Your goal here is to help identify candidates who stand out as great additions for your culture and the task at hand. Know what the team is looking for characteristically, what level of expertise they need and what experience is required. Asking the candidate prompting questions to uncover their truths.

Seek and embrace diversity

A diverse team is a major competitive advantage and building one starts with the recruiting process. In addition to dramatically increasing the depth of its talent pool, a diversity-focused recruitment program provides an organization with the opportunity to experience the myriad benefits of a diverse and inclusive team. Essentially you are looking for a cultural addition rather than a cultural fit.

• Diversity can take many forms, which is important to consider as you endeavor to attract a more diverse group of prospective employees. A successful program seeks applicants from the widest possible range of backgrounds and life experiences.

Cultural fit = Stability

Cultural addition = Growth

Get clear and realistic timelines

Do your best to let the candidates know two important things early on in the relationship:

• When you plan to make a hiring decision (Fear of loss = create a sense of urgency).
• How much of the candidate’s time you will likely require?

By communicating your expectations about time and timing from the start, candidates can plan and organize their job search accordingly.

Use an interview rubric or rating process

Hiring and recruitment decisions can often be based on gut reactions about a candidate if not thought out properly. The problem with those gut reactions is that they’re not always accurate. Although it can be difficult to remain completely objective during the selection and interview process, leveraging an interview rubric or rating process makes it a bit easier to avoid bias and impulsive decisions. Using practices like these to temper gut reactions with quantitative data can help make your recruitment efforts more inclusive while decreasing the number of “misses” in your hiring process.

• Know the answers to the toughest candidate questions.

You are the expert in your market. If you are not studying and boosting your knowledge base on the client, the procedures, and the details of your market, then you are not doing yourself or the client justice.

•  Good recruiters can find the answers to the manifold questions that inevitably arise during the talent attraction and offer process, but great recruiters anticipate these potential hiring hurdles and continually remain proactive in alerting and overcoming any red flags before they are actually raised.
• They accomplish this by asking themselves a simple, single question: What could prevent this candidate from accepting a position if offered?
• Whether this comes down to relocation, salary, work-life balance, bad reviews or a negative online presence of the company, every recruiter needs to ask this question – and know the answer for every candidate under consideration for every open requisition they work on.
• One of the simplest fixes for finding red flags is to be as realistic and transparent about the opportunity as possible.
• Never oversell the position or undersell the requirements; acknowledge and directly address and candidate concern honestly, and you’ll not only build trust, but also alleviate any potential roadblock for achieving your ultimate goal of placing the right candidate in the right position – and doing it the right way.
• In doing so, you create a pipeline of warm candidates that might not be perfect for the job you are looking to fill now, but could be the perfect candidate for future roles.

Practice makes perfect

• Role playing is a daunting exercise because you are putting yourself into a position of being judged by your peers but it is essential in the recruiting training and development process. Role playing, eventually, after time, will make you more confident in the both the exercises and the overall skill of recruiting. There are always new approaches to experiment with, new things to try, and improving your professional skill set requires relentless pursuit of these possibilities – and relentless practice.

No great recruiter is ever satisfied with doing what works – they’re committed to doing what it takes to make that work even better.

• Furthermore, make sure to keep in touch with your candidates as much as possible. Talk to them daily and make sure to address any concerns and questions your candidate might have as they work their way through the interview process. Lack of communication is one of the most common complaints that candidates express when working with recruiters. Avoid this by staying organized, building a relationship and keeping an open door for communications. In other words, be courteous and respectful of other people's time.

In the end, you are only as good of a recruiter as you are prepared. Your success is in your hands. Think like a business owner and don’t just show up for work; own your craft, build your network, and attack your goals.

I’ve created a quick check list or ‘cheat sheet’ for you to help familiarize yourself with the role and company needs prior to starting your talent search. Good luck and happy recruiting!

1. Market size
2. Population demographics
3. Average pay for similar positions
4. Average education level of unemployed demographic in market
5. Competition; Who they are, how they recruit, what they pay, what benefits the company offers to the candidate, online presence, connections to the community, and who the top managers and recruiting specialist are.
6. Colleges in the area
7. The position qualifications
8. The management for the client
9. Company hiring trends
10. The duties of positions being filled
11. The growth opportunity within the company for candidate
12. The company background, mission statement and goals for future
13. How many positions need to be filled for client
14. How many interviews they expect to have daily/weekly/monthly
15. Timeline on hiring process
16. Hiring process
17. Budget for recruiting