Sourcing and recruiting effective talent is only a small part of the Talent Capture equation.  In today's feverishly competitive market we simply do not have enough skilled professionals for a host of Cyber, Cloud and Developer roles, particularly in the Federal IT space.

In your organization how long does it take when you send a successfully screened candidate to a hiring manager before they interview?  In addition, how long after that do you extend an offer to a qualified candidate?

Years ago when I managed a small team we had a situation where candidates were sitting for an average of a week before a hiring manager would engage back.  More than 80% of the passive talent decided to either accept another offer or stay where they are.

To remedy this situation, I created what I refer to as Project 24/24/24.  The methodology is simple.  When a successfully screened candidate was presented to a hiring manager they had 24 business hours to review and if the candidate was an 80% solution (they had 80% of the required skills), the hiring manager would respond back to the recruiter that they would be interested in an interview.  The second stage of the framework requires an interview to be set up within 24 business hours of the successful hiring manager review based on the candidate's availability.  The recruiter would have a firm series of timeslots to which once they re-engage the candidate they would attempt to set up such an interview within the 24 business hours.  The final stage of the framework requires a successful interview to move to offer within 24 business hours of the interview.

This strategy took an average of 2-3 starts per recruiter to 7-8 starts per recruiter within 6 months.  The pushback from the respective programs was severe until they saw the results.  

Change is never easy and implementing such takes a true collaboration and diversity of thought. Taking time to sell the vision to the programs and the executive team took time but was well worth it.

Have you engaged your leadership with such a strategy? Every situation and culture is different however it first takes a conversation to build an effective empire.