Can’t I just click one button and get candidates?

By Bert Sadtler

The age-old question for any hiring manager is where do you find talent?”

Sometimes this really means “How do you HIRE the best talent?” which is a very different question.

The “Finding of The Talent” has become easier thanks to the requirement that most everyone must be active with social platforming. Hiring the BEST talent or the RIGHT talent has become more and more difficult because many of today’s hiring efforts are outdated, stale or broken. Candidates do not favorably respond to bad hiring attempts.

The hiring tools have become heavily reliant on technology including artificial intelligence and robots who conduct interviews. People are very complicated. Hiring efforts should trend more toward meaningful human to human interactions versus shortcuts and tools that are just intended to speed up the hiring timeline.

With respect to identifying candidates, members of today’s workforce can be found on LinkedIn as well as other social networking platforms. No big surprise here.

Attracting the right talent and then having them join your company versus any other option they have is the real challenge. We could call this “The Art of Executing a Hiring Process”.

Good hiring should not be measured by simply counting the number of resumes collected. This is the amateur’s or fool’s answer to a hiring attempt. It includes a large amount of valuable time wasted with candidates who would never be hired.

The Art of Executing a Hiring Process

A “best practices” hiring process has several phases. First, there is preparation. Next comes the steps of interacting with candidates. Finally, there is the follow-through phase to insure that the talent you hired is on a tract for success.

A good hiring process is the answer to “How do you HIRE the best talent?”. Think about it, you could be in a dialogue with a highly qualified candidate. Without a good or great hiring process, that candidate is going to move-on and not consider working for your company.

The Boxwood Hiring Process

The Boxwood Hiring Process has proven over many years to be very effective with the phases of our process. There are no shortcuts to “getting it right”. It requires an investment in time by the candidate and by the hiring manager. This is the point. Hiring requires an investment in time. So does the thing we are hiring for. Yes, the job being discussed requires an investment of time by the hiring manager and an investment of time by the individual being hired.

Finding the Talent

Through the implementation of a best practices hiring process, the big question needing an answer is “What challenge or problem will be solved by hiring someone for this role?” Once this has been explained, then the requirements and other details can be added to create a detailed position description.

With a well written position description, the effort of finding the right talent is combined with discouraging, discarding or rejecting the candidates who would never be hired for this role.

Passive vs Active Searches for Talent

Passive searches for talent including posting on an employer’s careers page, posting on job boards such as Zip Recruiter, LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. as well as promoting a role through press releases or news announcements. Active searches would be likened to hunting for identified and targeted individuals through personalized, direct efforts.

Effective active searches have become tricky because some unscrupulous recruiters use active searches to simply add candidates into their data base, when there was never a real job opening. Active search efforts in some cases provide very limited information, making highly qualified candidates uncomfortable.

Active searches with the highest rate of success include a personalized message with details about the role including the company name, position title, requirements and compensation range. This type of information with transparency delivers the highest response from candidates.

Summary

In summary, it is worth noting that the simple question “Where to Find the “Right” Talent?” has a complex and complicated answer. It requires an understanding that hiring has become a mostly broken effort.

Adding the “right talent” to your organization may mean spending more time with qualified candidates versus finding the shortest route to making a hire. Sometimes spending more time with a prospective candidate results in uncovering red flags and ending the candidate discussions while also avoiding the perils of making the wrong hire.

Every hiring effort has unique characteristics as well as unique personalities. Taking a structured and process oriented approach will lead you to hiring the best talent.