My best tip to get to the best applicant first

Dear Recruiters and hiring managers with dozens of other priorities outside of hiring for your open job,

We can agree - timing is key. Without going off on a very justified tangent, timing is key because your best candidates have A) Free will and B) Other job offers. Yes, even if they tell you that they have “nothing pressing” if they are good, there will be other offers. 

How do you secure the best while juggling all the rest?

Notice I said “best applicant” we can also all likely agree that applicants are not always the best candidates. Briefly why - it’s late in the game and the strongest workers are likely not also actively seeking jobs (and updating their resume at work). However, in transitioning from the agency world to internal talent acquisition I’ve learned that low quality applicants are not always the case. I’ve had some really great applicants! Very hard to find candidates who actually applied themselves. If you are a good company (good public reviews, great customer reviews, profitable, strong retention, all the things) then there is a high chance that you will get several good applicants. Candidates who are not posted, excel at what they do and who applied to maybe 1 or 2 jobs this year. They will come to you at a high volume! You will be excited and yet simultaneously flooded.

There are diamonds in the rough, but how do you find them? I’m not going to say that you need to go faster and squeeze more resume review time into your day because I’m a huge believer of practicing what you preach and I’m not doing that. I’m squeezing in more proactive strategy and long term wins, not more resume reading. While juggling 20+ active reqs single-handed with the responsibilities of all phone screening, testing, ATS administration, offer letters and HR background checks and yet making 107 hires in the past calendar year I can absolutely tell you that I have not reviewed every resume that has come to me. Yet, I’m still hitting hiring targets while driving vendor costs way down and taking ownership of our own talent acquisition process.

 Here’s my tip:

First - At the end of your well written job description (that’s a whole tangent for another time) give your candidates very clear directions on how they should stand out. This is reverse engineering a basic leadership principle – give your employees very clear directions on how to succeed and the ones who are smart enough to navigate your tip along with caring enough to try will succeed. It’s clear, direct and leaves plenty of room for wins.

Next – monitor that instruction for the candidates who followed directions and screen them first. This means, the candidates who

1) Care enough to read the whole description

2) Care even more to make the effort to stand out

will be the first candidates in your radar. 

Can we all agree that those 2 principles are universal concepts in what we want in a good employee? This also means that your #1 time slots are secured with likely to be the #1 candidates and living your “timing is key” motto. You are getting to the best candidates (best potential employees from cultural match not just keywords) first. This tip also contributes to helping drive down your number of offer declines by getting to the candidates who are the most interested first – before they join your competitor. 

Sure, not all of the applicants who follow your instructions will have the desired skills and experience. Not all of the candidates you raw source will actually fit or will even respond. Recruiting is a heavily prioritized juggle of all three. This tip is a shortcut on who to spend your time screening first. You will also find success expanding to regular applicants who didn’t see the instruction as well as raw sourcing, but those first time slots are the most precious – the candidates who both fit and took the time to try to stand out are the ones who should be contacted first and are highly likely of accepting an offer should you give it.  

 There are many other tips to quickly navigate your raw applicant pool and most of the applicant tracking solutions out there will sell you on them. Tips like keyword filtering, asking questions, having candidates send in a video, sorting by degree and years of experience etc. Sure, I use some of those strategies too and many others but there is not one other standard tip that comes close to emulating the results that I’ve received with this clear instruction in the job description tip. 

Why? In this method you know that you are starting with employees who likely care because they did something to show you they care. Start there, and continuing screening and selecting – whatever process is working for you. From an internal talent acquisition perspective, you are starting with “good employees” (good cultural fit) first and filtering down keywords and specific experience second. I’d much rather do that than find all of the programming languages in one resume and from that narrow pool start to find good employees. A good employee can learn things not listed on a resume. A good employee might need to update a cert but it’s like a grand and a few hours of time. Worth it. A bad employee doesn’t follow directions or make an effort to stand out from the beginning and will cost you SO MUCH more. Bad employees are sometimes good at interviewing and can get through your normal filters. Not worth it.

 Here is exactly what I put at the end of my job descriptions:

 "Looking for a way to make your application stand out?

1. Apply online through normal procedures.
2. Send a follow up email to Talent Acquisition: <EMAIL ADDRESS> with your name and position of interest in the subject, in the email please include: Your resume attachment, brief introduction and/or cover letter."

 I like this so much because the second step is fairly discretionary, from here I keep screening the candidate’s core skills without investing 30 minutes of time on a phone conversation. 

Some send me an email with “Here’s my resume” in the body and a resume attachment. Subject: Resume. No intro, no context as to what job they are looking for and no additional effort than just barely following direction.  

??

Others follow the second direction very perfectly well and I’m starting to feel like we are “on the same page” already – HINT, this is starting to filter cultural match. 

??

Your instruction is automatically filtering for you while you are sleeping or doing other things. All the other tips that tools build in do not even start to touch culture match filtering at least not without requiring you to read every written answer and watch every video.  So, we are left with the same problem – limited time and having to click on everyone. Time spent reviewing and not engaging with the best candidates.  Other kinds of automation filtering (ex "years of experience" questions taking candidates out of the pipeline) relies on keywords and basic questions which do not help gauge culture match.

Sure, candidates can and should reach out to you on their own without you putting the instruction in the job description yet it rarely happens because they do not know it works and there is limited public education on this topic (more to come). Hint to job seekers: candidate should do this method anyway! Reverse engineer this tip and do it for all of your job applications even if the recruiter hasn’t found this tip yet. It makes you stand out!

Yes, a good hire can be made in someone who did not take initiative to reach out first but that good hire will be hiding in a very wide pool of files and links.  So be direct and tell them what you need them to do! I promise you not every candidate will do this, in general I see anywhere from 5-15% of my applicants actually following this direction (typically skewed based on skillset) and that is a blessing! It saves so much time!!  

 My results using this tip:

 107 hires in a calendar year, 60% reduced vendor fees and 97% retention of those new hires in their first 90 days period. I attribute a lot of my “Hire better, faster” drive toward this tip and I hope you find it equally as useful!

Brainstorm your candidate instructions to stand out and please let me know if you try it and what your results are!