how to better recruit top talent
TRANSCRIPT
How to Better Recruit Top Talent This is the million-‐dollar recruitment question. Or more precisely, the one and a half times the talents’ annual salary question (not including any required corporate training, materials, equipment or agency fees) – the real estimated cost to recruit and train an employee for the first 12 months. This doesn’t factor in the reason you are hiring that talent and the potential impact you require that talent to make. For example, if you want that talent to bring in a million dollars of new business to ABC Company, and your star talent fails miserably, then tack on a million dollars to that figure as well, plus the cost of a re-‐recruit. This is why I am going to spend some time discussing key points on how to build a strong foundation for a successful talent search, and not try to sell you on ideas to enhance your recruitment efforts. What is Talent, Anyway? I personally was facing this question back when I was 25 years old. I had just taken over my first small business, and was faced with a myriad of issues. Even though I only needed to hire seven people, I had made a lot of lofty goals to my Franchisor that we were going to increase gross margin, reduce theft, and drive up local traffic in six months. I knew I couldn’t be there 24/7 and I needed to be able to have a small army of people who could execute what I needed them to do, for a fraction of the wage I was making. My problem was I needed talented people who were good at one thing: people. Since I could train on processes and procedures but couldn’t train someone on personality traits, I recognized it was my job to train them and their job to bring their personality to the table. So in this case, my solution was fairly simple: I over-‐hired people who were very personable and willing to work, and had a good track record of being self-‐motivated. I then trained each person on customer service and selling techniques, and gave them exposure to what my goals were. I incorporated them into the company fabric, and rewarded the great-‐performing staff who sold the most or made a positive gesture towards the over-‐arching goal, with something they wanted. For example, I would provide them with a day off, buy them snacks, or a dinner out. The employee relationship was integral and that included showing I honestly did really care about them, even if some days I was completely exhausted and ready to throw in the towel myself. The result was a strong team: many went on to grow their own businesses or develop within the company. And that same store, which was performing in the bottom twenty out of the chain, shot up to the number one store in six months. Be Comfortable with a Vacancy As I moved on to agency recruitment for one of the top firms in the world, my responsibilities grew from making 7 key hires to almost a thousand placements for a variety of different companies-‐some start-‐up, others large, successful household
brands – and each had the same problem – the discomfort of vacancy. When I joined Tim Hortons and was responsible for their Franchising program for Canada, I still had the same problem facing me down – that teeth-‐chattering, tick-‐tock demand for talent needed within a reasonably, (and performance-‐measured) timeframe. Let’s face it -‐ vacancies make us uncomfortable. A vacancy, as any recruiter will admit, is a glaring reminder on our metric scorecard that there is a hiring manager without help, a team with a gap in the workflow, and an urgency that needs to be addressed. Now, I am not suggesting we throw our arms up, blow out a long sigh and go file instead of actually recruiting, but good recruiters are hard-‐wired to react. They are rewarded for their sense of urgency. It is the fine balance between urgency and decision-‐making that will make a good placement either really great, or really terrible. So the first step is to be comfortable with the vacancy and accept that yes, you would love that position filled yesterday, but if it takes six months, the organization is also willing to build a contingency plan and wait to have the right talent in place. Realize What You Really Need (Purple Squirrels Excluded) So let’s take a step back for a moment. Depending on your corporate size and structure, if your recruiter or hiring professional is the same person who manages the relationship with your agencies (if you can afford them), your hiring managers, and also holds the Holy Grail (The “JD” or Job Description), this can potentially be the source of your talent issue. Combine this with that same recruiter being held accountable to keep a pipeline to fill that vacancy in a timely fashion, the problem can potentially become filling the role with “Mr./Miss/Mrs./Ms. Right Now” instead of the right talent needed. If you are a recruiter and feeling defensive, I am going to pull the Canadian card and first, apologize profusely for making you uncomfortable. But this paper is kind of like competing in a triathlon. For some of us, it is going to be very easy, and we won’t need a lot of conditioning, For others, it is going to be utter hell and misery until we get our performance to where it needs to be to compete. This is because searching for talent is exactly that: a competition where your need to be fully trained, prepared and honed to know what talent is needed and when to TARGET and ATTRACT that talent to your organization with a mutually beneficial value proposition. It doesn’t need to be better than your competitors, it just needs to be honest and accurately depict the organizational needs. So it is time to get real: with your HR team, your hiring managers, and your people. Without diving into an entirely different subject on organizational structure, some quick fixes you can implement within the recruitment team are as follows:
1. Create a checklist/needs analysis template that analyzes the needs of the hiring manager and assesses if they have changed with each vacancy request. Some great organizations already do this, but not many.
2. Empower your recruitment team to present new ideas on how to recruit talent within your industry, and work together to assess and reassess your 12-‐month recruitment strategy.
3. Work with PR to help create an internal and external awareness that “Hey, we got talent and we want talent”. You could also make this a corporate competition, and reward the winning team with a getaway/prize. Throw it up on YouTube and your own team members are selling the company for you.
4. If you don’t already, have a standard template created for staffing agencies, offering a list of key attributes and competencies you are seeking, along with a departmental and corporate culture profile and growth potential of the role (don’t just send a job description and hope for resumes that match the attributes you demand). Agencies can be your friend, and working with them as a partner will result in better time spent for all. If your agency isn’t acting like a good partner, then fire them. There are other fish in the sea.
5. Assign a designated corporate “Talent Hunter”. Like attract like: If you received a call from a corporate “Talent Hunter” and at the same time a call from “Recruiter Bob from X Company” who would you want to call back?
Who is Selling That Job For You, Anyway? When I was in the agency world, I cannot begin to tell you how many times a frantic hiring manager called me up because they needed a vacancy filled “yesterday”, demanding to see resumes “ASAP or they will call the competition tomorrow”. Or even worse, a client that would call and demand a “Type A superstar who wants to grow within the company in 2 years, can perform backflips in the lobby, balance books, order my lunch, complete a full analysis of last year’s financials and has two degrees” but the job description states “Administrative Assistant”, well Houston, we have a problem. This typically stems from a break in the hiring chain. This could be from the hiring manager modifying the job description in smaller companies, to asking the incumbent to “write out what it is they do” (scary, but have seen it!) and a job description created out of that. Worse, perhaps it is an HR professional who believes their Human Resources career will really take off by accepting a “recruiting role” to “gain experience in HR”. While there is a human resources element to recruitment, recruitment is also sales. Recruiters need to know the organizational heartbeat, be excellent translators of job descriptions and manager requirements, and then sell the opportunity in a job posting to communicate the right tone to the right audience, to attract the right people.
Yes, you can definitely attempt a flurry of other activities to beef op your talent recruitment efforts such as: hold job fairs, pipeline passively on LinkedIn, visit schools, hire remotely, ask agencies to passively talent market top people when they get it across their desk (this is one of my favourite approaches: an agency you have a relationship with will be more than happy to actively promote talent that matches the attributes you need in your culture if you are willing to interview the best ones and make a hire once and awhile). There have been thousands of books and articles written about how to do just that. There is no quick fix that will stick if you don’t have a solid foundation to your recruitment process. Those talented people will walk right out the door and into the arms of another organization once they smell the stench of disenchantment from a dishonest recruitment experience (even if it is an accidental dishonesty, which most of them are). Having a strong recruitment team who is with you for a good length of time benefits the company and also the talent pipeline. So treat your recruitment team well and offer them rewards for meeting metrics responsibly and accurately. They own your organizational window dressing, including the responsibility to properly entice that sought-‐after talent to want to come in and stay awhile.