Build an Amazing People Magnet Machine: Proactive Recruitment

This is the sec­ond in a series of three blogs explain­ing the prin­ci­ples of build­ing what my Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast part­ner Brad Giles and I call an amaz­ing peo­ple-mag­net machine - to make sure you attract a flow of awe­some peo­ple to sus­tain your growth.

The first was about estab­lish­ing your brand as an employ­er. Here is the sec­ond prin­ci­ple to help you to attract a flow of awe­some people.

Proac­tive Recruitment

Most com­pa­nies have a low suc­cess rate hir­ing and pro­mot­ing high per­form­ers because they don’t have enough great peo­ple from whom to choose. They scram­ble to find peo­ple and then make choic­es out of scarci­ty or des­per­a­tion. Bet­ter to have an abun­dance of excel­lent contacts.

I’ve met a num­ber of lead­ers who are excel­lent at proac­tive recruit­ment, and it is a game chang­er. Here are a few strategies:

Keep a prospect list.

This is no dif­fer­ent from the prospect list on which your sales team con­stant­ly works.

This isn’t an HR project. It’s for senior lead­ers and man­agers to work on and is as sim­ple as reach­ing out to have a chat. It might take one, three or five years before a prospect is ready to make a move because high per­form­ers are almost always employed, and well tak­en care of by their com­pa­nies. When they decide to change, you want to already have a rela­tion­ship and be top of mind.

In an inter­view we did with Top­grad­ing™ CEO Chris Marsau, he shared research that, in a pool of suit­able can­di­dates, 80% are will­ing to have a con­ver­sa­tion. (More about this lat­er when we talk about using recruiters or headhunters.)

One CEO has a list of the country’s top per­form­ing peo­ple, in his indus­try, and con­stant­ly has cof­fee dates to chat and build rela­tion­ships. He’s prim­ing the pump for the time when they are open to some­thing new and interesting.

Ask your best peo­ple to recruit from their networks.

This strat­e­gy is often missed because peo­ple are either too busy or think recruit­ment is HR’s job. Not the case. HR can sup­port and dri­ve the process but, gen­er­al­ly, man­agers are a big fac­tor in suc­cess­ful recruitment.

It can be as sim­ple as remind­ing peo­ple to reach out to their net­works. One con­struc­tion com­pa­ny asks employ­ees to stop work for a few min­utes to for­ward a pre-writ­ten text to a bunch of their con­tacts to try to flush out can­di­dates. Anoth­er lead­er­ship team uses a half hour of strate­gic plan­ning meet­ings to ping peo­ple on LinkedIn, to ask if they know of any­one who may be inter­est­ed in a cer­tain role.

Use a recruiter or head­hunter.

The best will either have a data­base of peo­ple who could be excel­lent for a role or will proac­tive­ly con­tact peo­ple. You don’t need to get a recruiter to run job ads for you because that’s not usu­al­ly the best strat­e­gy and you could do that your­self. Get them to put their ener­gy into reach­ing out to peo­ple who you believe are in com­pa­nies and roles suit­able, to see if they may be inter­est­ed. Make sure you’re spe­cif­ic about the com­pa­nies and roles or titles in which you are most interested.

The Chal­lenge

• What do you need to do to be excel­lent at proac­tive recruitment?
• Who are you going to work with to get 10 to 20% better?

For more on this top­ic, check out Episode 37 of The Growth Whis­per­ers podcast.