For Those of You in the Way, Way Back: Finding Great Talent is Never Easy

A Moment of Reflection

In 1999 everyone, including Prince, was partying.?I was diving head-first into the world of talent acquisition trying to find programmers who could circumvent the Y2K crisis.?Trial by fire to say the least.?20 plus years into this rollercoaster of a market and one fact remains.?Finding great talent is never easy.?Any market.?Any time.?In April 2001, I found myself standing in the middle of a job fair for our struggling start-up.?Despite the market, we had managed to land a round of funding and had a few open roles at in our Sunnyvale, CA headquarters.?I am certain there were 200+ employers registered originally for this career fair being held at the convention center. The devastation of the market crash was very human.?Candidates grappling with life situations that had changed on a dime.?Sponsorships needed.?Double income families down to zero.?The desperation I had never witnessed in my young career.?We were one of the only employers that showed up.?No Microsoft, HP, Sun Systems, Yahoo, as they had all abandoned ship.?I don’t blame them; they were all in massive rounds of layoffs.?Something struck me that day.?Finding great talent was not any easier than it was 8 months before standing in a booth next to these behemoths offering sign-on packages and new cars (not an exaggeration).?I spoke to each candidate that lined up that day.?We filled our roles quickly, however, we also took inventory of future needs and collected resumes.?We were planning for our future and it took all 10 hours and 100’s of conversations.?No system or applicant tracking, we put resumes into categories and sent individual e-mails as follow-ups to keep candidates warm and interested.

Flash forward to 2003.?Standing at a Pharmacist convention in my 10 x 10 booth representing Caremark at one of the largest conventions I had ever attended.?We were giving away stress balls and lanyards.?Right next to me Pfizer had a smoothie bar, hand engraved pens, and a fire dancer.?Again, I can’t make this up.?The big retail giants were eating us alive.?Offering 5-year contracts and 6-figure sign-on bonuses.?How could we compete??At that moment, it occurred to me, we were never going to win head-to-head with these giants (even though we ourselves were a huge company).?Talent was tight and the market was driving up compensation rapidly.?Sound familiar?

Lessons Applied and Universal Truths of Finding the Right Talent, Right Now (and a bit of advice for those looking for those opportunities and getting discouraged by the sea of auto-generated rejection letters).

A sidenote on “benchmarks” for 2022.?They are all out the window.?Do we benchmark what worked in 2019??That was a completely different labor market??Do we throw out 2020 from the benchmark data??Yes.?Do we use 2021 as a benchmark norm??Probably not.?Taking suggestions here?

Focus on Value Proposition

This is true on both the candidate and employer sides.?Focus on YOUR unique value proposition. For candidates, highlight, target, and hone your superpower.?Convey it in your resume, LinkedIn profile, during networking meetings.?At the same time, be targeted and specific.?

“In my career, I have found natural skills in creating the vision/strategy and driving a team to execute.?I have delivered on that skill set in multiple high-growth environments leading teams while continuing to be hands-on.?I am looking for a role and opportunity in operations with a team to be hands-on while leading the overall strategy”

On the employer side, it is much the same.?Taking you back to the example at Caremark.?We should not be competing with the retail chains for Pharmacist talent.?This strategy costs us more in the short and long term.?We started to cultivate a clear value proposition of choice and flexibility they could not offer.?No ringing up toilet paper over here.?We have over 40 different roles for Pharmacists, many have high levels of flexibility and leverage your clinical skill set.?Flash-forward to the present day.?We compete with the industry for the best talent in welding, auto/diesel, and other skilled trades.?We can attempt to compete with industry and market with dollars, but we are always going to lose.?We are starting our journey to clearly refine our value proposition.

It IS a numbers game

If you are looking for a new opportunity, no new information here.?Activity is key.?Networking zoom calls or meetups, if possible.?Work your circles and be specific about your targets.?For each and every role you apply, attempt to find someone who is 1-2nd connected and targeting the role.?I have heard several friends who have been seeking roles that this feels overwhelming, exhausting and the dread that overcomes them is like a tidal wave each morning.?My only recommendation is to shift your mindset.?Gratitude.?How can you be grateful under financial and emotional stress??Grateful you are not faced with faxing, tracking, and monitoring your snail mail for an answer??Grateful for expedited interviewing through virtual tools??Grateful for this time to evaluate what you want next, your greatest strengths, and to take the time to evaluate the culture and leadership of where you want to target.?So much information exists on companies today just by a quick google search.

For companies, recruiters face an impossible task.?Resumes that run the spectrum and the desire to dig deep and find the best candidate.?In this market top talent is in even higher demand than any other time in my career, rivaling the late 90’s market wars for tech talent.?Great passive candidates are getting called while being perfectly happy in current roles.?While raw talent is lost in a sea of resumes making it difficult for recruiters to take the time to discern the best way to evaluate a diverse candidate pool.?Any magical advice here would be false outside of calling in the fire dancers and breaking bumping budgets by 7 figures.?Facing high requisition loads, less time to source and less time to diligently sort through applied candidates the challenge is real.?

My advice to my own team:?Time block and focus on one role at a time to dive as deep as possible.?Use your technology to set screening questions that go beyond the simple minimum requirements to drive to behaviors and other key factors for consideration.?Look at the screening answers to understand subtle elements such as attention to detail, written communication, thought organization, and mindset.?Short behavioral-based interviews that provide for an abbreviated window to understand HOW someone describes their work history (not as much the dates and what but the flow and thought process).?Find your go-to questions for this role that ask for recent examples of how someone navigated change to uncover clear strengths.?Coach leaders on how to leverage their networks to drive interest.

Value the diversity and strive for inclusion

For individuals seeking new opportunities, consider top growth industries that may have parallels to your past.?Looking how data science, healthcare, mental health, marketing, renewable resources, and education may provide an avenue to a career 2.0 by highlighting skills in your past projects that would be relevant but not necessarily notable on your “regular resume”.?We have all had “tours of duty” in work that took us down interesting and diverse paths to solve business challenges.?What might be relevant to a career pivot? ?If you love your space and industry, how can you underscore your innovation in your space in the same way??Should you look at pivoting to new roles or areas of operations you never considered based on deep knowledge of the industry and past projects??For example, if you have been working most recently in small start-up environments, your sharpened skills in change management, growth, strategy deployment, and project management could be highly valued for a more established company experiencing great change in today’s market.

For employers, many of us are focused on driving greater diversity in our workforce.?If you are in an organization where “back to the office” is optional, taking this opportunity to reach outside of your market to diversify your team.?Be intentional about targeting a broader market and open about the short- and long-term plans of how you will keep people connected.?This creates a larger candidate pool, and additional volume to search through.?Understand the key drivers for success in the role and use your technology to outreach and qualify leads.

Be inclusive with your hiring process.?Up, down, sideways and leapfrog into other teams to give candidates a good sense of the culture while gaining powerful insights across the organization.?Set the stage for the interviewing team who might be less seasoned in asking behavioral questions or typical interview cadence.?Keep it simple, which allows for greater overall inclusion in the process.

Take a Deep Breath

For all of us, we are in uncharted territory.?For those of us doing this for a while, nothing is new about a rapidly evolving talent market.?Many of us can count 4-5 cycles in the last 20 years of peaks and valleys of varying heights.?What is a constant??Cultivate pipelines of talents starting today and never stop.?Your applicant tracking system happens to be one of your greatest business assets.?Rich in data on candidates who are already interested in your story, purpose, and product.?Even with all of this planning, we cannot plan for what we don’t know.?Take a deep breath and focus on repeatable processes, building pipelines over time, and what areas have the most impact on revenue and the business for talent.?

And remember, we are all in this together to educate our leaders on the complexity of these challenges.??Please share what is working for your organization.?We are all learning as we go!