How to Hire Someone When it’s Really Not Your Forte: Holly’s Top 3 Recruitment Strategies
The other day over a couple of Keurig specials, I was catching up with my friend Chris.
Chris’s official title at his small but growing employer is CFO. But a couple times a year, his title morphs into “temporary HR specialist extraordinaire.”
Chris looked pretty harried. I figured one of those HR duties must have landed on his desk recently. So I asked him what’s up.
It turns out Chris’s company needed to add a Project Engineer to the team for a new rollout. And it was Chris’s job to find the right candidate.
How’s it going? I asked, pretending not to see the obvious.
Horribly it turns out, as I suspected. The job market is tightening. Lots of companies are recruiting hard and heavy. And talented people are getting trickier to find.
To make things worse, Chris’s first strategy was a loser: He posted the job opening on Monster, CareerBuilder, and Dice.
You probably know how the rest of the story goes. It’s probably happened to you, too.
Chris got LOTS of responses. Lots and lots of UNDER-QUALIFIED, often automated responses. And on the rare occasion he decided one of them might be worth contacting, they rarely responded.
Fortunately, Holly, my hiring guru here at MEA, has the best handle on recruiting this side of the Atlantic. So to save Chris from further heartburn, I gave him “Holly’s Top Three Recruitment Tactics.”
I’m sharing them here in case they can save you from the Dicey Monster Mountain of Career-Building Resumes.
Holly’s Top 3 Recruitment Tactics
1. Incentivize your staff to find their newest best colleague.
Your employees are the ones networked in their fields. They likely have qualified candidates in their pools of professional contacts. Ask them if they know anyone who’s looking. Better yet, offer some sort of bonus to the staff member who leads you to your next hire.
2. Harness the power of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has changed the way we recruit. Search for candidates in the field you’re targeting and reach out to your network. It’s especially helpful in this case to upgrade the level of your LinkedIn account to take advantage of the advanced search features.
3. Search for passive job seekers instead of posting jobs.
You’re much more likely to find a qualified candidate searching the job sites’ databases than you are posting a job opening. Try purchasing a search package from Monster, CareerBuilder or for technical jobs, Dice.
Still overwhelmed?
Contact us at MEA to learn more about our reasonably-priced flat-rate recruitment packages.
When you just need to get back to what you do best, let us do what we do best. It’s a strategy that makes sense.