If you are assuming filling an open position would be easy because the job market is tight, think once again. Employers should hire for where they want to see their business tomorrow.

Hiring a candidate smartly could benefit the productivity of an organization, and a wrong hire could lead to a waste of time and money. That’s why the impact of well-planned recruitment should not be underestimated. Let’s take a closer look at several practices that will help you hire smartly:

1. Priorities

Before you start an interview, meet the key managers in your organization, talk to them, and get the insights like:

• what do they look for in candidates?
• what skills the candidates must have?

From this conversation, you will understand the priorities. Every employer must think about priorities; it could be experience, resume, or candidate’s culture fit. These qualifications should be considered first when you hire an employee.

2. Mindset: Entrepreneur vs Employee

The second attribute every recruiter should consider is the mindset of the candidate. There are two fundamental mindsets: an entrepreneur mindset and an employee mindset. For example, when you are talking to entrepreneur-minded candidates to explain current situations and pain points of the company, they will immediately step in with their insights and provide solutions for the problems. Candidates with entrepreneurial mindset are problem solvers who think outside the box and consider problem an opportunity to innovate. Whereas, candidates with employee mindset will ask you to assign tasks for them. They are followers who need a guidance and don’t think outside the box. Both entrepreneur-minded candidates and employee-minded candidates have pros and cons. Choosing one or the other depends on what employee mindset company needs for the job position.

3. Online Assistance

In a world where everything is digitalized and automated, an employer must take benefits of online recruitment software. The recruitment software offers a wide variety of options you can use to make sure you hire the perfect candidate for the job. For example, instaTalent is employee hiring software that gives you the best-fit candidates. It helps you find employees online. A recruiter just needs to submit a  job description and this employee recruitment software uses global web mining, big data analytics, taxonomies, and graph algorithms to recommend the top best-fit candidates for your job. Every employer must leverage the available technology to hire the perfect candidate.  

4. Find talent from your competitors

Another way to find the best talent from the industry is researching the competitor companies to see if any of their existing employees are looking for a job change. The benefit from this practice is that your organization will get the quality talent. Most of the employers follow this for getting the best talent. Here are some do’s and don’ts about hiring from the competitors (Source: hrmornings):

• Do offer them a salary increase
• Do make your team resistant to staff poaching from competitors
• Do invest in training the new employees
• Don’t ignore the non-compete agreement

5. Think outside the box

If you are really eager to get the best talent, maybe a purple squirrel, then you should find more and more innovative ideas for recruiting. Here are some examples.

1) In 2004, Google tried an innovative way of recruiting talented people, by posting a mathematical puzzle on a billboard.

The answer, 7427466391.com, would lead to a web page with yet another equation to solve, without any sign about the firm that wanted to recruit some of the best math guys out there. It wasn’t known that the company was Google until the puzzle was solved. 

2) Tonic communications posted three-worded advertisement displaying “hungry designers wanted”. By creating an image that is similar yet notably different from Apple’s logo, the company targeted people who are interested in Apple.  

There are many examples you can take. It depends on the type of business you run.