How to Build Your Recruiting Process to Appeal to Top Talent

At all levels of your organization, you need top talent to survive. In today’s candidate marketplace, the challenge is more daunting than it’s been in quite some time. To outpace your competition, you need to treat hiring as a year-round critical business process. Its basic elements include:

• Planning: Develop a robust hiring strategy, outline your process, identify key stakeholders, and create and communicate a written plan.
• Recruitment: Identify talent profiles, engage prospective hires via the right media venues, screen and interview, and then narrow it down to a short list of candidates.
• Selection: Perform preliminary checks and screenings, negotiate an offer, and then schedule and launch a well-developed onboarding program.

Best Practices

When establishing the best talent sourcing and recruitment approach, begin with the end in mind. This gives you a clearer sense of who will best fit with the players already on your team.

• Strive for cultural fit and goals alignment. Skills and experience always get attention, but fit may be overlooked. Yet, it’s equally if not more vital to successful outcomes.
• Benchmark winning teams that you admire. What do these organizations have in common with yours? Build on these commonalities, identifying what has worked for you in the past and assessing talent against related successes and failures.
• Identify the top priorities that a new hire must accomplish. Set 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365-day milestones for performance updates. Then, think even further forward as you shape your long-term leadership team and workforce. Hire accordingly.
• What’s in it for them? In the end, it’s about your company and its success. But for now, it’s all about the candidate. Prospective hires want to know what’s expected of them and what they can expect in return. Learn and address their personal goals and drivers.

A Winning Rewards Package

Never underestimate the power of fundamental rewards in attracting quality talent. Key elements of your rewards package should include:

• Transparency: High-value candidates want – and deserve – to know about your company’s business plans and financial stability.
• Job security: Research has supported employers’ assumptions that challenging work drives employee engagement. However, even top performers seek a secure position in order to feel comfortable enough to thrive.
• A link between personal and organizational goals: A pay-for-performance culture directly impacts long-term engagement.
• Training and development: Companies that score higher on the Gallup Employee Engagement Index have a significantly higher earnings per share growth rate than their counterparts. At these organizations, employees who report being less engaged attribute it to shortfalls in training and/or career development opportunities. Focus your attention on helping your employees grow and be more successful.
• Competitive benefits: High performers know their worth. Although salaries must be at a competitive market level, these candidates typically command more than just cash. Stock options, bonuses, equity and such enhancements as flex time, telecommuting and convenience services like on-site day care can be true game changers.

Create a Community

Your best talent recruitment approach circa 2015 is to court candidates by building long-term relationships with them. Give them a community to join. Otherwise, you may lose the chance to engage them and as a result, drive them to your competition.

• When a candidate visits your career site, invite them to receive further information. Get their contact information. This lets you track potentially interested individuals and provides them the opportunity to learn more about your company.
• This is your chance to keep your employment brand in front of top talent. Candidates can receive information from you on a regular basis. This information should do more than just promote job openings; it should show prospective talent that they could have a great career working for you.
• Keep the candidate experience top of mind. Your community should be easy to join. Keep it simple and don’t ask for too much information. Keep conversations flowing and engage candidates on a regular basis.

The BrainWorks team of search consultants can help as you fine-tune your sourcing and hiring processes to attract top talent. For more information, contact us today.