The Unwritten Rules for Recruiting: A Guide for New Executives

As you acclimate to your new leadership role, it can be overwhelming at times. Among the myriad items on your professional plate are employee sourcing and recruitment. How can you ensure that you bring only the best people to your organization?

The answer lies in a well-structured, strategic hiring program that aligns with your overall business plan. Here’s a primer to help you achieve your talent acquisition objectives right out of the gate.

Don’t Cut Corners

You want to make a difference quickly – and this includes surrounding yourself with the best leaders possible. And you’d like to do it, well, yesterday. But be careful never to omit critical steps in your quest to onboard your dream team. It’s a carefully calculated process and every detail matters.

• Develop accurate job descriptions. Your job descriptions should reflect your careful thought on every employee’s role, skill set and personality traits. Include details on relevant experience that differentiates one candidate from another. This may sound obvious, but a surprising number of companies fall short of formulating or maintaining updated job descriptions.
• Compile success profiles. Carefully observe your top performing team members to identify their skills and attributes. Use this information to select the candidates most likely to succeed in a given role.
• Narrow the field. Develop a list of suitable questions to use during telephone interviews. As you review resumes, know what you’re looking for based on your job descriptions and profiles. Then use your phone screen questions to select the candidates you feel are best qualified for the next step.
• Utilize proven assessment tools. Resumes and phone interviews are important, but they can only tell you so much. Dependable assessment tools will help you analyze candidates’ core behavioral traits and cognitive abilities. Your success profiles will help you determine which qualities are most important for a position; for instance, you would expect a good salesperson to be extroverted.
• Have a consistent set of interview questions. This provides uniform structure to your process and offers a sound base for candidate comparison.
• Do your due diligence. Complete background and reference checks to uncover any potential issues not revealed via testing and interviews.

Use Social Media

Social media allows you to seek out, communicate with and get a feel for candidates. As an added benefit, information gleaned from social platforms often provides deeper insight into a person’s character and personality.

• Target your recruitment to specific job seekers. Set up separate career pages and tabs. Go beyond LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and determine how you can use other social media as additional recruitment sources.
• Optimize keywords. Create concise, keyword-rich content that makes your job descriptions stand out in the vast social sea of postings. Consider the words that your ideal candidate would use when searching for a job. Use trending industry terms so your posts show up in conversations among the most qualified talent.
• Track results. Experiment with different post types, images and verbiage. To determine which posts and tweets are working, insert a trackable URL into each one. This will allow you to track views and clicks and analyze the results.
• Use social media to vet candidates. Search prospective talent on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other relevant platforms. Compare information with what they’ve provided during the hiring process. Get a read on their social media personality. How candidates behave online can tell you a lot about what they’re like in real life.

Encourage Employee Referrals

To deepen your talent pool, encourage current employees to recommend potential candidates. They know your company and understand its culture and can provide a good sense of whether or not a person will be a good fit.

• Offer incentives for successful referrals. You may want to start with smaller rewards upon hiring and bigger ones after a new employee has been on board for a set period of time.

Partner with the executive search consultants at BrainWorks, not only for acquiring the leadership talent you need, but also for the resources and expertise to develop that talent for ongoing success. Read our related posts or contact us today to learn more.