One way to encourage this behavior is to put creativity back into your recruitment marketing process! Set an expectation that being remarkable is rewarded in your job posts and the more likely you’ll receive remarkable candidates.

Here are a few great examples of of what companies have done to encourage this behavior:

What Habits should a top candidate possess?: A company looking for a Web Developer created a unique job description. Instead of including their contact information in the description itself they included it in the HTML with a message that said “If you read this HTML you are exactly what we’re looking for! Email your resume to us!” I guess when reading HTML on a web page is 2nd nature to you, that probably means you are a pretty good web developer.

Be Up Front: If you want remarkable, tell them you want remarkable. One job description I came across asked candidates to submit “an awesome cover letter including why you want to be part of our company and why we should hire you! Canned cover letters will not be read.” With this simple sentence, they have incentivized candidates to be remarkable and go that extra mile if the candidate wants to work for their company.

Test the right skills: As a part of another job interview, the first part of the recruiting process was simple. Write an article about the company’s industry that might included on the company’s blog. The company knew that they needed someone that could write effectively and could quickly understand the market environment to excel in the position. And only the best blog posts would guarantee a 2nd round interview.

With all three of these examples, the companies encouraged candidates to be remarkable and more importantly used being remarkable as a key filter in their recruitment marketing process. Also in each case the company was able to identify key abilities / characteristics that a viable candidate would possess enabling them to craft effective messaging and “tests” to help them identify the best candidates:

• For the Web Developer example, they were looking for a person whose first instinct was to look at the HTML of any Webpage.
• For the Cover Letter example, they were looking for a person that is creative, original and most importantly can sell themselves.
• For the Blog post example, they were looking for a person that can communicate effectively and quickly learn and understand a new market
  environment.

Identify the core abilities and characteristics that are needed for the positions you are hiring for and come up with some concrete ways to encourage candidates to show you that they have these abilities! That’s the way you recruit remarkable people!

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly provides a recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies to easily launch and more importantly measure all their recruiting efforts on the web.