Proactive Recruitment Strategies

What do you do when you have low num­bers of can­di­dates apply­ing for open roles?

In this chal­leng­ing job mar­ket, it’s impor­tant to invest in recruit­ment, prac­tice proac­tive recruit­ment strate­gies, and remem­ber the basics. While every­one’s sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent, the struc­ture and dynam­ics of the mar­ket have not changed, and the ways in which peo­ple seek employ­ment are still the same.

7 Proac­tive Recruit­ment Strategies

1. Ral­ly & recruit your inter­nal network.

Lever­age your exist­ing team who already know you’re an awe­some company.

A high­ly engaged team are your best spokes­peo­ple, espe­cial­ly if your engage­ment sur­vey scores – the Net Pro­mot­er sys­tem for employ­ees – are an excel­lent north of 50.

Ask each mem­ber of your team to come up with two or three poten­tial can­di­dates and cre­ate a lit­tle com­pet­i­tive peer pressure.

A great time to do this is when you’ve just recruit­ed awe­some peo­ple from oth­er com­pa­nies, and they can bring friends and col­leagues along.

Let’s talk about refer­ral incentives.

Incen­tives can be a ​‘thank you’ but after test­ing in many dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, we have found they won’t dri­ve behav­iour. Finan­cial incen­tives don’t move the nee­dle. If peo­ple love you, they don’t need to be bribed.

Sup­port­ive peer pres­sure usu­al­ly works bet­ter because most peo­ple aren’t coin oper­at­ed – they are pride oper­at­ed. Results are dri­ven by ral­ly­ing peo­ple, align­ment, account­abil­i­ty, mak­ing the chal­lenge fun and excit­ing, then giv­ing them space and time to think and act.

2. Make it easy for peo­ple to recruit for you.

Tell them exact­ly what you are look­ing for and arm them with copy for draft mes­sages, job descrip­tions, and links.

Exam­ples:

When a US com­pa­ny we work with need­ed to recruit a lot of peo­ple, they ral­lied the team. Each depart­ment, giv­en a tar­get of gen­er­at­ing 15 pos­si­ble can­di­dates a month over the quar­ter, brain­stormed ideas – includ­ing draft­ing brief mes­sages, with brief job descrip­tions and links to find out more — to make it easy for the team to reach out to their net­work. They got amaz­ing results.

Anoth­er client, in the Mid­dle East, cre­at­ed a Wild West theme to put peo­ple ​‘behind bars’, com­plete with ​‘Want­ed’ posters. The fun, com­pa­ny-wide theme and engage­ment, with team-based account­abil­i­ties, drove peo­ple to con­tact their net­works to recruit candidates.

3. Proac­tive­ly lever­age your exter­nal network.

Prospect­ing for tal­ent is no dif­fer­ent than prospect­ing for cus­tomers. Put your­self into a dif­fer­ent bub­ble to lever­age oth­er peo­ple’s networks.

• Invite great­ness to join you. It can help to give peo­ple a script like this one…

Hey, Kevin, we’re on a growth tra­jec­to­ry, and we know that you deal with peo­ple just like us all the time. I’m just won­der­ing who might be the best per­son, you’ve seen or heard about, you think might be an awe­some fit for us?

If you repeat that across your net­works, you could get 10, 20 or 30 candidates.

As you go, build a data­base of the best referred peo­ple in the business.

• Make the time.

Every­one is busy and know they need to carve out time to recruit peo­ple. But no one does.

Idea:

One client with 750 employ­ees stops strate­gic plan­ning ses­sions for recruitment.

For half an hour, every­one brings up LinkedIn on their lap­top, with three key open roles in mind, to iden­ti­fy and con­tact peo­ple. They also include inac­tive con­tacts who now run in dif­fer­ent cir­cles. This works well, and we’ve hired some great peo­ple this way.

4. Get more muscle.

Dou­ble down on inter­nal recruiters or exter­nal recruiters.

For many roles, it’s worth pay­ing the extra cost to hire an exter­nal, or an addi­tion­al/­part-time recruiter, depend­ing on the scale of your business.

The quan­ti­ty of can­di­dates in an exter­nal recruiter’s data­base can be of great val­ue, but they don’t know every­one, so make sure you cast a wider net to cap­ture all poten­tial can­di­dates in the market.

Tip: Choose a recruiter who takes an active role to open doors and chase peo­ple in tar­get­ed com­pa­nies — not just recy­cle their exist­ing database.

5. Put on your mar­ket­ing hat

Get cre­ative with your ad to sell the oppor­tu­ni­ty, stand out from the crowd and reflect who you are. Be compelling.

• What need are you solv­ing for candidates?
• What’s unique about what you have to offer?

Lever­age your mar­ket­ing team

• Allo­cate more mar­ket­ing dol­lars to get talent.
• Use social plat­forms — Face­book, Insta­gram and Tik Tok, job sites and LinkedIn — and good old Google search and oth­er strate­gies — to reach out to peo­ple who either don’t know you or haven’t thought about you recent­ly. Invite them to see what you’re about and what you have to offer.

Note: Check out Episode 67 of The Growth Whis­per­ers in which we talk about why

any­one should come work for you, at the same salary as your competitors.

6. Ask every­one, everywhere.

Talk to friends, neigh­bours, col­lege room­mates or pro­fes­sors, the coach of your kid’s base­ball team who is in a sim­i­lar industry.

Exam­ple:

Apple employ­ees are giv­en a busi­ness-size card to give to any­one they come across, who pro­vides excel­lent ser­vice. The copy on the card acknowl­edges their excep­tion­al ser­vice and invites them to chat with Apple, if they ever want to move.

7. Do the Web work.

Make sure your com­pa­ny web­site and Jobs page is awesome.

• Does it reflect what you want peo­ple to know about you?
  • Does it reflect your cul­ture and uniqueness?
  • Why should any­one work for you at the same salary as your competitors?
• Are you SEO friendly?

The Chal­lenge

• If you have open roles for which you need more can­di­dates, which of the ideas above might help?
• How can you work with your team(s) to get them working?

Want to hear more? Lis­ten to Episode 103 of The Growth Whisperers.

Learn more about Proac­tive Recruit­ment Strate­gies.