As we have started the new year with new fresh plans and motivation (hopefully) I would like to raise one question. Are there still companies that have Lady Luck working as their Head of Resourcing?
You might now probably ask what I mean by that, and I am happy to elaborate on it a bit. Historically the hiring process has not changed that much, and it has repeated the same pattern for years. First we define the job specs and then we try to find the right marketing channels to let people know what kind of “Purple Squirrel” / super multi talent we are looking for this time. We might use online, social, print, TV, mobile, whatever in the campaign to try to reach the right audience, but as a process it is pretty much the same as it has always been. So what is wrong with this approach you might ask? Not much or everything depends whom you ask. I am somewhere between these two opinions.
The main problem with this post-and-pray method is that you essentially leave it for the luck to define, firstly who will ever see your job ad and secondly whom you will convert through those marketing activities. Of course, you can make this more efficient by targeting and through social channels you can even reach people who are not actively looking for a job. You can create appealing ads and creative campaigns etc., but still you are not in control. Results are also pretty much defined by the timing, who will see this noise you are creating and who at that time is ready to consider changing or even bothered to listen. So if you are honest you must admit that again it is totally out of your control, and you actually cannot influence those decisions effectively or hardly at all. Your words in paper or on the screen (big or small) just don’t do the job.
If you want to find something to compare recruitment process to, I would compare it to b-to-b marketing and sales process. If any business to business company in their sales process would only rely on marketing and inbound sales I wouldn’t bet that they will exist that long. At least I cannot find many examples for you as sales is one of those things that truly matter in business. This is the reason their sales team actively prospect the most potential companies and plans the ways that they can influence them with a right mix of marketing and sales activities. Trust me those prospects can be extremely “passive customers”, but they are still possible future clients. So let’s not be scared to reach out to the people we want to hire before they are actively looking for a job if we think we need them to get our company to succeed.
Actually there are many reasons in a sales process not to focus too much on the inbound sales. Primarily it is so because if the client already knows what she/he wants it is most likely going to be a race for the best price, terms and competition between us and multiple suppliers. Even though this position of order taker may look appealing it certainly is not, at least if you have competition and all of us has, direct or indirect. This principle also applies to recruitment, especially when we are talking about professionals that can choose what they do and whom they wish to work for. But when we reach potential candidates in the right time that is before they are active we might be surprised how willing they are to have a discussion about the new opportunities. This trend is all the time increasing and about 70% of the professionals that are currently working are willing to have a discussion about new possible opportunities.
So what should you do to finally fire Lady Luck from your team?
I am not saying you should totally stop the post-and-pray recruitment you are currently doing, there are often reasons for doing it. For example, to raise awareness and interest amongst your target hires (before you contact them). But what I am saying in many cases you should fully redesign your recruitment process.
First of all, it is essential to finally understand that you have access to the people you need to get access to right now and all the time, Rolodex has died years ago. You can find them, and you can talk to them, and you can know awfully lot about them before you do reach out to them. I know that at the same time it is somehow frightening when there is so much information available, but it is a massive opportunity for any recruiter that you just cannot ignore or if you do, you cannot call yourself a recruiter. You can finally do what you are hired to do, not to call to agency recruiter to do the job on behalf of you. You can finally focus on finding the right talent and convert them to be great hires for you organisation. So start sourcing the candidates today. Google, Linkedin, Twitter, Stack Overflow, Skype, Spotify, QQ and thousands of other channels and ways are there for you now – mostly for free. Dump your ATS that is only serving as a wall between you and your candidates and that will most of the time only screen out the best candidates. Demand and don’t settle for anything less than a modern CRM tool that can help you to manage the sourcing and headhunting process.
I won’t go too much into details now as I will write a separate post about how to design better process for your post-and-pray a.k.a. recruitment marketing later that you can benefit from in your candidate sourcing and headhunting activities. Essentially it is about building talent networks instead of talent databases or communities. So it is about different levels of engagement and access to the right people at the right time. Gotta go now, but about come back for more soon!
Aki Kakko
