Every job seeker understands how challenging it is to find a job that will fit their skills, their talents and of course, a job that will take them closer to the career that they have been dreaming of all their lives. Job-seeking becomes trial and error, often at the expense of the job seeker. On the other hand, finding the right candidate for the job is a difficult thing as well for a client and this often leads to wasting time, money and resources in the long run.

A company’s HR Department is the bedrock and birthplace of that company’s ultimate success. Growth can be qualitative or quantitative but when it needs to be both, issues often come to pass.  When a company is forced to hire many and hire quickly, too often quality suffers. This certainly doesn’t need to happen. The following is a guideline for businesses to follow as they look to on-board and diversify their talent pool within a crowded, and somewhat confusing, search landscape.

TALENT RECRUITMENT WITH INTENTION

Whether you’re working internally to source talent, or, as more often is the case, working with an outside agency, the key to successful talent recruitment begins with establishing your plan to hire and staying true to the plan throughout the process.

Talent recruitment with intention includes:

1)    (If outsourcing) Interview and decide upon the correct search firm. (Find a link to an article detailing this process HERE.) The most important part of this process includes finding a firm who will partner with you/ not just work for you.

2)    Establish a realistic timeline to hire.

3)    Discover and engage high quality passive candidates.

4)    Streamline your company’s brand throughout the process.

5)    Get the culture fit correct.

6)    Review extensive metric and reporting for the process; from start to finish to evaluate not only the recent hires, but the outside search firm you’re working with.

7)    Aligning the true intention of what the company needs for the position to the true intention of what the candidate wants for their career.  Not just resume matching but intention setting. This alone can attest for a strong culture fit and successful candidate retention. 

ESTABLISH A REALISTIC TIME TO HIRE.

These days, there are more and more corporate hurdles to leap when onboarding new candidates. Not only are there more steps to the discovery process but there are more decision makers that need to be heard on the other side of the process (such as stakeholders, a growing HR department, etc.) All of this slows down the hiring process, oftentimes frustrating potential candidates and ultimately slowing the growth of the company itself.  A realistic time to hire needs to be set in place from the get-go and then adhered to throughout the process.  This means staying on sourcing and interview deadlines, and more importantly (but oftentimes more challenging) staying on C-level schedules to obtain confirmations of hires quickly and effectively.

CANDIDATE ENGAGEMENT

Engaging and attracting the right candidates begins with streamlined, attractive brand messaging across all the many different options of candidate sourcing. Put your brand’s best foot forward, show potential candidates the benefits of working for your company. Not just the actual benefits but the intangible things as well. Show testimonials of other employees at your company or upload glossy videos of some of your workspaces, cities and/or work culture. You don’t have to have a start-up ping pong table and keg to make your place of business stand out. Oftentimes potential candidates simply want to see an organized, sophisticated work space free from distraction. Videos can go a long way for this and give the potential candidate a taste of what they can expect working there.  (Think about it, you’re asking someone to spend the majority of their work days here; it only makes sense to show them that space and culture.  It’s akin to the traveler wanting to see video of their hotel, or vacation rental before they book; why not provide the same sort of education to the potential employee who will be forced with a much larger decision than choosing a simple vacation?)

Also remember that the quality of your potential candidates will be severely impacted by both the firm you choose (specialty or quantity?) and the avenues by which you chose to search. Sifting through generic job boards may not land you that specialized computer programmer.

GET THE CULTURE FIT RIGHT

Getting the correct culture fit is key to completing the search process. A candidate could look great on paper, be willing to relocate, but then never actually connect with those they are going to interact with on a day to day basis and thus retention suffers.  The search process has to include interviews that survey personality traits as much as competitive talents.

Be sure to set up the interview process to not only include HR managers but those direct managers that the candidate will work most closely with.  And, when possible, have If and when possible, have colleagues or peers for that job actually do the interview or have a meet and greet meeting.  This is a great way to empower the people of your company while making sure the new hires will adhere to the current culture you have moving forward.

METRICS AND REPORTING

Obtaining detailed metrics and reporting throughout the entire process makes for not only stronger candidate sourcing but proper reflection of the hiring process from end to end.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure and it’s important to understand where bottlenecks can happen. Too often detailed reporting falls by the way side and intention is not met.

ACCOUNTABILITY

At the end of the day, it’s all about client accountability for the true intention to succeed.  The client must stay true to the process through things like coordinating exec’s schedules in order to quickly be able to interview a passive candidate, to following and recording all the thousands of minute metrics, to putting the time in to peer to peer interviewing to perfect the culture fit.  Onboarding new talent and expanding your company is a huge signal of success: remember to recruit with intention throughout the process to ensure that success blossoms.