With employees changing jobs at a greater clip than ever before, setting yourself up for successful candidate ATTRACTION is essential. As we discussed in our last Employee Experience Lifecycle blog, while it’s tempting to jump in and fill an open position as quickly as possible, it is critical to do your workforce planning first to ensure you’re filling the right jobs the right way with the right people.
Once you’ve done your workforce planning, the process of sourcing and recruiting flows naturally out of that exercise. Here are six tips for getting the right flow of candidates coming your way.
1.Know the difference between sourcing and recruiting strategies and tactics. Plan first.
For your sourcing and recruiting efforts to be as streamlined and successful as possible, you need to have a plan in place. You should have your goals spelled out clearly from your workforce planning process. Now you need to build your sourcing and recruiting plan with well-thought-out strategies – not just tactics.
At the most basic level, strategies define the ways you are going to go about your sourcing and recruiting efforts, whereas tactics are the specific actions you will take to get there. Strategy must come first. Understanding this is essential, because too often organizations skip the crucial strategy step and find themselves doing “shotgun” recruiting instead of smart sourcing. Then they wonder why they have so many unqualified candidates to sift through or so few candidates to consider.
Sourcing and recruiting strategy lays out your approach. Let’s clarify the difference between sourcing and recruiting. Recruiting is the broader term used to encapsulate finding, prequalifying, prescreening, presenting, interview coordinating, negotiating, closing and filling an open job. Whereas sourcing specifically means finding talent and, possibly prequalifying and prescreening.
A sourcing strategy integrates with the recruiting process but can operate independently to help delegate duties to create efficiencies. Some recruiters handle all the steps while some recruiting teams have a sourcing team segmented from the other recruiting duties. With that said, no matter who’s handling the duties a sourcing strategy AND recruiting strategy need to be outlined and aligned before the tactical work begins.
Smart strategic planning for sourcing and recruiting unearths the deeper wells of potential candidates you might otherwise miss. While following a tight process to move the best candidates quickly to hire will be a competitive advantage. Not all HR departments have this strategic expertise, and that’s when it can be beneficial to bring in a contract sourcing and recruiting specialist to augment your team.
2.Sourcing is a lot like channel marketing.Use that to your advantage.
To dive a step deeper into sourcing, it’s necessary to develop a channel strategy. Once it’s been determined no one is available to fill the role internally, there are only 6 ways to find talent externally: advertising, database sourcing, referrals, colleges, conferences/job fairs, and agencies. Depending on the depth of experience and skills needed, these channels can be prioritized and worked in a sequence to find the best talent.
For example, if you are searching for entry level or less experienced workforce then start with general job postings and college or job fairs. However, if you’re seeking an experienced skill set requiring a technical degree, then database sourcing and referrals could be the priority. In these two examples I am offering two different ways to begin sourcing, assuming you have a corporate recruiting team working on behalf of hiring managers. If you do not have a recruiting team supporting you, then you might start by partnering with an agency.
What’s most important is that you build and work the plan. Most business leaders have a general understanding of the importance of marketing in driving sales and growth. Framing the sourcing and recruiting process as being similar to channel marketing can be a great way to help people on the business side understand what’s at stake and help them make the connection. In channel marketing strategy, you clearly define the target audiences you’re going after, which channels are best to reach them and how you’re going to shape the message for each one. Engaging your business leaders in helping you do this for sourcing will help ensure you are recruiting from the best pools of potential talent and creating compelling messages that will attract them to your company.
Candidate sourcing and recruiting is most successful when it’s a coordinated effort between HR and business leaders. Unfortunately, once business leaders have given you their open positions to fill, they too often check out and leave the rest to HR. It’s important to keep them engaged.
3.Craft the right message to put your company’s values – not just the job – in front of potential candidates.
Again, like channel marketing, once you’ve developed your strategies for sourcing talent, you need to craft the right messages that will draw the best talent to you. There are lots of resources out there for how to write a compelling job description or job ad, so I won’t go into that here. However, it’s important to know the difference between a job description and a job ad. A job description is an internal document with more details to be used to properly classify the type of job. Whereas a job advertisement is what it implies, it captures the essence of the job and company culture to attract the right talent. I offer some advice based on many years of recruiting experience:
Be realistic. Candidates today are bombarded with hype and selling every day. They have developed a keen eye for spotting “too good to be true.” Think of the times you’ve seen a real estate ad for a home that says “cozy” when it really means small and cramped. By all means, put your best foot forward, but keep your descriptions in the realm of truth and avoid hype language. Simply put, don’t pretend to be Apple when you’re not; represent your culture accurately. If you don’t know how to describe your culture, ask a consultant to help articulate your employment brand which is developed from your employment value proposition.
Create an invitation to learn more. The job description doesn’t need to cover every detail of the job responsibilities – indeed, if it’s too detailed, some of your best potential candidates will TLDR before they get to the point of applying. You want to give people just enough to make the job sound compelling, but also realistic and doable – without creating overwhelm. Leave them wanting a little more. You might consider using video to allow the hiring manager to describe the opportunity, which enables candidates to hear directly from the manager.
Be clear and specific about the qualifications, skills and experience required for the role – and make sure you’re differentiating between what is “required” and what is “preferred.” If you have a long list of requirements for a job that barely pays the average comp range, you may end up either not attracting people at all or attracting people who know you’ve inflated the expectations and they’ve inflated their resume to match. There’s no such thing as the perfect candidate, they do not exist. For hiring managers, the goal should be to find the best fit for the role today, based upon market yield (available talent). To continually source for a job opening for more than 60 days becomes a zero-sum game. The longer a job remains open, the company learns how to operate without that role and will not be seen as necessary. OR the requirements are unrealistic and need to be adjusted to meet the market.
Put your values forward. Today’s job seekers care about your company’s values. They aren’t just looking for work, they’re looking for a job they can feel good about, with a company that shares the values they hold dear in life. Here’s where we often see window dressing…make sure your values are real – you want to attract people who will excel in your culture. And if your company doesn’t have a set of well-considered values beyond the template on your website, that’s your cue for a future project that will pay off in recruiting talent who will excel in your organization. Often times it’s a good idea to partner with a consultant that can remain objective while helping you craft a realistic employment value proposition and employment brand.
4.Use the most targeted tools for recruiting, not just the most accessible ones.
Here’s where all of the above planning and team engagement will help you immensely. Picking an online, AI-driven recruiting tool to do all the work for you is tempting, especially when HR departments are under-staffed and over-worked as it is. But that’s exactly what your competition is doing too. And quickly slapping a job posting onto a job board may end up pulling in a lot of applications from people who aren’t even close to being right for the job.
When you follow the plan, you will have a much better – and more targeted – sense of where your best potential hires are most likely to be found. Revisiting the channel recruiting method, this is where the rubber meets the road. Depending on your priorities, you will quickly learn whether or not the channels initially engaged are offering a return. After a few days or weeks, if you do not have a solid pipeline of candidates to consider, it’s time to work the next channels.
I never recommend using a shotgun approach and launching all channels at the same time (unless you have the resources to truly leverage all channels at once) as it could overwhelm your process or be a waste of money. Oftentimes using fewer tools and more targeted searches can net you higher quality candidates (and waste less of your time weeding through applications from clearly unqualified people). It’s best to take a calculated approach in trying different channels to help you test which works best. If you aren’t sure, this is another area where outside expertise can be a worthwhile investment, ultimately saving you time, energy and money. Such as helping to decipher the many new AI tools available to help source and qualify talent.
5.Have a clear interviewing process and methodology in place.
Once you start bringing in potential candidates, you need to be prepared with a clearly defined interviewing methodology to assess the competency level of potential talent and the compensation (or total rewards) package needed to hire the right talent. Again, there are lots of resources on how to interview candidates – and that’s another area we can help with – but here are a few of our top tips:
Model – and communicate – the behavior you want from candidates. Every company and hiring process is different, so don’t leave potential hires guessing at what you need and want from them during the interview process. Be on time and be prepared. I’ve seen numerous top candidates lost during the interview process because interviewers canceled last minute or showed up late to the interview shortening the time with the candidate. Top talent has options and if the job opening is not a priority to you or the interview team, then it won’t be to the candidate either.
Make your hiring process and timeline clear from the outset. Let applicants know what you expect from them, what they should expect from you, and the steps in the hiring process (and stick to it). Candidates should know where they stand at any time during the process. Unless it’s a C-suite-level executive role, 3 - 4 rounds of interviews should be more than sufficient to make a hiring decision. Asking a candidate to go through more than 3 - 4 rounds of interviews decreases the chance of hiring the candidate. It demonstrates indecisiveness and an inability to assess talent in a timely manner.
Go old school with your best candidates – talk. Inevitably, you will have to turn down a qualified candidate, as you can’t hire everyone. But there’s a difference between outright dismissal and keeping the door open. You never know what might come open down the line, so keeping potential hires hooked in is critical to building your brand reputation. As such, when telling a qualified candidate “no,” be sure to call them and explain why the job didn’t work out. Be encouraging and let them know you’ll keep them in mind for other positions that become available. And if you aren’t quite sure how to do this, there is training available to learn how to say “no” with dignity.
6.Treat everyone with a personal touch.
This may sound like a lot of work, but it actually doesn’t take all that much time and it will create a far more positive view of your company for any candidates who might want to apply for something else in the future. When I say “treat everyone with a personal touch as you look for potential,” I mean everyone. Even candidates who are definitely not qualified for the position.
This doesn’t mean a personal phone call to each and every person to tell them they aren’t being considered for the job. But creating a thoughtful, encouraging, and positive automated response doesn’t take much time and can make a meaningful difference in how folks perceive you.
If you see an inkling of potential in a candidate who isn’t quite right for this job, and they’re not at the level of phone-call follow up, when you reach out to them, consider including a link to other job postings at your company that they’d be a better fit for. Or simply let them know that you will keep their resume on hand in case a more fitting position opens up down the line.
The best hiring managers keep their own private network of future talent they can reference later.
Need some help? At Bright Talent we know it takes great resources to find bright talent. We offer experienced contract recruiters for full or part-time, full-cycle projects or sourcing support – onsite or remote – to augment your recruiting efforts.
Take a look at our Recruiting Services and, if you’d like more info, contact us and we’ll be happy to start a conversation.