With the job market being saturated with job seekers, many qualified candidates may be in a position to accept less pay for their skills. This competition can bring a challenge to any hiring manager and our goal is to make the hiring task easier.
After all, isn’t having a successful hire your number one goal? A great start is to put together a recruiting strategy with the hiring team, a recruiter, and a key employee. This allows everyone’s minds to be clear and organized with a true understanding of the common goal, and how to achieve it. The recruitment strategy starts before you even build a job description and should include things such as:
Actively Searching vs. Passively Searching Candidates:
Your recruiting strategy should include searching for actively looking candidates as well as passively searching candidates. Passive candidates are those who are already employed and not actively in the job market. However they are your dream hires because they will make the decision to come work for you because they see the true benefits of the position and/or company…not because they have to make the mortgage payment.
And, of course, this is what you want! You want the candidate to have handpicked your opportunity because it fits into their career objectives, not just take the position so they can keep their kid in college.
Get Creative on where you will search for Candidates:
Of course you can wait for candidates to come to you, but I highly recommend you take both a push and pull approach in your recruiting strategy. Pulling is a recruiting term meaning you are doing things to “pull” the candidates to you such as posting the ad on job boards, in the paper, and on your website…and then waiting for the candidates to respond. The downside of using this approach only is that you are merely targeting those candidates who are actively searching.
Pushing means you go searching for the candidates yourself. The pro of taking this approach is you are in charge and are able to approach candidates you feel have the skills and professional background you are looking for.
So where do you start when it comes to actively pursuing candidates? Think outside of the box! Have you ever directly recruited candidates before? If so, what worked and what didn’t? If you haven’t aggressively recruited candidates before, you may not know where to start and if that is the case, enlist the help of a recruiting company who is highly effective in direct sourcing quality candidates. We will go through how to select and work with a quality recruiting company in a future article.
Consider where you should post your ad:
Posting ads is a pretty simple task; however you want to put some thought into where you advertise in order to optimize the responses. In addition, think about what functions you want to participate in.
Advertise in places frequented by your ideal candidate.
Use Social Networking sites to both push and pull quality candidates.
Attend events that are NOT job fairs, but in your ideal candidate’s industry.
Advertise an Open House and mingle with many job seekers who may become quality recruits.
To build a Winning Team, weed through every resume:
For every 150 resumes that come across your desk, around 50 will be worth considering, and about 10 of those will be worth interviewing. You have to go through every resume to find that perfect candidate!
Recruiting Tip: I always ask follow-up questions through email to those candidates who make it to my “to be considered” list. This forces a written response from the candidates and therefore gives me a less formal writing sample; thus a clear indication to the individual’s personality and professionalism. You would not believe how many otherwise qualified candidates I have rejected at this stage due to their responses.
Don’t forget to consider your current team:
Part of your recruiting strategy should always be to have your current employees provide referrals. Offer them a finder’s fee if their referral is hired as this will incent them to provide leads to quality candidates!
Good luck in building your recruitment strategy; I am sure you will see amazing results in your effort. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them below and our team will be happy to assist.
Written by Martina Martin:
Dedicated to Every Client’s Success,
Angela Roberts
www.craresources.com
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Related Articles:
- How to Properly Qualify a Position
- How to Benchmark a Competitive Compensation Range
- How to Write a Great Job Description
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