Ten Tips to Find Atypical Talent in 2022
Are you a Talent Acquisition (TA) manager, hiring manager, or agency recruiter struggling to fill niche roles? If so, you are not alone, as I found out last quarter when I reached out to thirty-three TA colleagues to find out their biggest challenges, and to brainstorm the best solutions for hiring success in 2022.?
Effective recruiters need to be savvy about the industries they work in, the roles they are trying to fill, and the people they are working with. However, even the most gifted recruiting teams may fail if they do not have the right tools in their belts to help them manage all of the information that is flowing in the hiring process. Below we have identified the top 3 problems, and the top 10 tips to ensure successful hires:
Problem #1: Not enough qualified candidates for niche roles
Posting ads, in-house sourcing, and internal referring are probably the most commonly used methods in an organization to fill standard roles, and they work well. But niche roles require niche strategies, and applying a talent-surplus strategy to a talent-shortage role will not end in success. It won't be as easy as culling out the weak candidates in a herd. Chances are there aren't even enough active candidates to make a herd for these niche roles, and passive mover candidates are likely hidden deep in the woods.? So how do we find these active movers, and how do we coax the passive movers out of hiding???
Tip #1 Customize and Optimize your Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?
A commercial ATS could be a big box of solutions to your hiring challenges, or it could be a big box of chaos. Only when you customize it to your specific needs will it actually become a useful tool. Dig in to the ATS capabilities and don’t be afraid to get the developer and your higher-level managers involved to make customized, systematic changes, as they just may be the answer to your talent search prayers. As an example, a commercial ATS does not automatically know how you source your candidates, and you may have some very particular methods or channels, but the ATS software will automatically set a generic workflow for you. This is wasteful of your time and is the opposite of helpful. Furthermore, an ATS does not know how to re-qualify and re-activate candidates who are passed over for previous roles. It’s worth putting the time and the effort in ahead of time to make sure good talent is not lost in the abyss. With a few software tweaks to your ATS (which may or may not already be options already encoded in the software), you’ll be cruising along the hiring highway!
Tip #2 Leverage advanced candidate search techniques?
Tools such as Google Xray, Boolean, as well as searching within specific communities (Github, industry associations, etc…) can work miracles! Targeted use of AND, OR, NOT and other search strings will allow you to find needles in haystacks. Most importantly, don’t forget to record all the search strings you use in an Excel spreadsheet so that you can keep finding those needles over and over again for each new open role.
Tip #3 Implement A/B Testing
Search strings aren’t the only things you should record in a spreadsheet when sourcing candidates, you should also record the results of your searches, so that you can continually refine your strings to find out which ones work the best. How many candidates did each search string return? Of those, how many candidates followed up on your messages? Which messaging style gets the most results? Don’t let the title “A/B Testing” fool you, you could have options A, B, C, D, E…Test, Record, Assess, Amend, and Repeat!
Tip #4 Partner with your Marketers?
Your company’s marketing team has enormous potential to lighten your sourcing load by creating and publishing content that portrays your company as an industry leader. Linking open roles to these posts will allow that hard-to-find talent who consumes this content to find you first. A little upfront marketing work can pay for itself many fold in passive inbound leads.?
Tip #5 Gather Reinforcements
Sometimes your internal hiring team will be overwhelmed with hiring needs, and you might want to reinforce your ranks by partnering with an external recruiting agency. Choose wisely, however, because they operate with two different business models, contingency and retained, and you will have a very different style of communication, expectations, and expenses from both. I’ll dive into this aspect more below, but just understand that a contingency search is not the best fit for sourcing hard-to-find niche candidates. If you are an agency recruiter, you can help ensure that the type of role the company is trying to fill suits your style and capabilities.?
While we are on the subject of using external recruiting agencies to fortify search efforts, let’s discuss another problem often arises between TA managers and agency recruiters:
Problem #2 –Miscommunication between TA managers and Agency Recruiters
While they hope to increase and diversify their talent pool by working with an agency, TA managers can end up feeling disappointed with the relationship, and so can agency recruiters, if certain precautions are not taken. In addition to the lack of volume of candidates as mentioned above, the top issues that TA managers report while working with agency recruiters to fill niche roles are:
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These communication issues can waste precious time and resources of everyone involved, but they are surmountable with a tactical and methodical approach.??
Tip #6 Pre-scribe Pre-screening
TA managers, hiring managers and agency recruiters are often aligned in wanting to properly pre-screen candidates, but there are other times when they are on different pages completely. That difference is often seen in the two types of agency work–contingency and retained. Since there is financial disincentive for contingency recruiters to pre-screen, don’t expect them to do so. If you want tight pre-screening, it’s best to partner with a recruiter working on retainer, and preferably one that is focused specifically on your particular industry as they will understand the nuances of the open positions much better. Lastly, if you want to go the extra mile, TA and hiring managers can develop pre-screening criteria for the agency recruiter to follow. A list of Must-Haves, Nice-to-Haves, and Deal Breakers would be a good start, but you can make it as detailed as you want.?
Tip #7 Avoid repetition, and avoid repetition!
Nobody likes to repeat themselves, especially when there is barely enough time to communicate everything necessary the first time around. TA managers frequently find themselves having to communicate the same information repeatedly to multiple recruiters within an external agency, whether that is because of agent turnover or because the file is being passed around to different recruiters within an agency. This is a waste of time and financial resources, of course. Though TA managers have no control over agency personnel turnover, nor over the team members chosen to work on a particular client, they do have control over their system for communicating during the recruiting process. Whatever system is implemented needs to be able to track, share, and update information seamlessly, and it is your right as a TA manager to ask an agency recruiter to ensure that the information you share with them is recorded properly. Best practice is to put this in the contract before work begins so that everyone is clear on expectations.?
Tip #8 Sink those Floaters!
Floaters--you know, those resumes that agency recruiters forward to you that don’t match any open role, cuz the agent thinks they might be a fit some time down the road? Occasionally Floaters are a godsend to an internal hiring team, but more often than not they create more work that was not budgeted for. So how to manage an agency recruiter that has talented candidates who don’t quite fit a JD? You know they are coming, so specify your tolerance for Floaters ahead of time. Perhaps you have no tolerance for them, or perhaps you can accept a few per open req. Whatever works for you!
Tip #9 Manage Internal Team-External Agency Expectations
In order for expectations of results and timing to be clear in the recruitment process when internal hiring teams partner with external agencies, internal teams must first understand the business model of an agency. As mentioned above, contingency and retainer agencies have different ways of earning revenue, different incentives, and different ways of working. Contingency agencies are great for filling standard positions when there is not a high level of expertise/training required, when there is a candidate surplus, and/or when there is no time pressure to fill the position. Retained agencies are best suited for filling niche or senior roles, when there is a candidate shortage, and/or when there is time pressure to fill the position. Contingency agents are usually trying to fill 20-30 open roles at one time, so their attention is quite divided. Retained agents work on a single open role at a time, so the hiring organization has their full attention and effort. As a TA or hiring manager, you have the best chances of having a successful partnership with an external agency if you align your needs with an agency’s business model, motivations, and capabilities.?
A third common challenge for hiring for niche roles happens internally within a company:
Problem #3: Miscommunication between TA managers and Hiring Managers
Many of the TA managers I spoke with echoed the same thought that there is often an information gap between hiring managers and TA managers about some of the nuances of a position that cannot be found in the JD, such as the role’s key performance indicators (KPIs), opportunities to collaborate with other teams, and the career ladder. Without these details, it may be nearly impossible for a TA manager to sell a candidate on a role, or even to sell them on considering it beyond the initial cold call, especially in today’s candidate’s market. For these niche roles, TA managers have to function like high level headhunters who are armed with the best information and technology to help them fill roles, and they need the hiring managers to take a more active role in either educating them in advance, or in interfacing with prospective hires earlier on in the process. Which brings us to our next tip:
Tip #10 Bring on the funnel!
Did you realize that the TA Manager - Hiring Manager recruitment funnel looks an awful lot like a Sales-Marketing funnel, where the TA manager is the “Marketing” teammate, the hiring manager is “Sales”, and the vacancy is the “Product”? The TA manager works to identify and qualify leads for the hiring manager to vet and finally sell the product. As such, the best results will come when you tailor the funnel to the specific needs of the role. There should be specific tasks with ownership responsibility outlined for each team member along the entire funnel; there should be transparency about what previous steps have been accomplished, and what the next steps are; and there should be full information shared about the open position and any communication with the prospective hires. This information and the divvying up of responsibilities within the funnel could change with each new open req, so it’s important for the TA manager and the hiring manager to communicate specifically and clearly on the details in advance using a prescribed template, if at all possible. Only then can the funnel work smoothly without any blockages along the way.?
I want to thank my TA colleagues who shared their experiences with me to generate this article, and I hope these tips are helpful for finding top Talent, with a capital “T”! But “T” doesn’t just stand for “Talent”, it also stands for the two things that I think unify all of the above tips–Technology and Teamwork.?
Technology + Teamwork → Talent
Recruiting community, let’s use our human and our superhuman resources to get it done in 2022.
2022 is going to be an exciting challenge for employers to see how they can adapt to this changing market, and Flyhigh Talent is here to help optimize your recruiting efforts to make your business thrive! Contact: [email protected]