How to Transition your Company from Reactive Hiring to Proactive – And How It will Benefit Your Business

Most executives feel that they have too many other day-to-day responsibilities on their plates to focus on recruiting – especially before an opening even exists.

They could not be more wrong. Taking a proactive approach to sourcing talent significantly improves your recruitment metrics. This means engaging prospective hires long before a position becomes open. It is accomplished by building a pipeline of qualified individuals who are ready to be put into place as soon as a job becomes available.

Successful proactive recruiting is based on enhancing your hiring strategy through:

• Timing: Most companies hire only when there is an opening and not a moment sooner. This can hamstring your successful recruitment process. Employers who apply an “always be recruiting” strategy are the ones with the most robust, qualified talent pools.
• Quality: Locating qualified candidates involves more than just finding people who can do the job. They must be employees who will grow, thrive and have passion about their role. Look beyond resumes and even your ATS capabilities to find the cream of the crop.

Challenges to Hiring Proactively

For proactive hiring to succeed, you need a set plan and list of guidelines. This starts with your talent drivers including:

• Your recruiters and/or HR professionals.
• Your managers.
• The rest of your organization from executive leadership down through your rank-and-file workforce.

Proactive Recruitment Guidelines

Follow these tips to build your proactive hiring strategy:

• Involve current employees. Everyone company-wide should be proactively involved in recruitment. Your current employees – especially those in customer-facing roles – are your best brand ambassadors. For example, salespeople engage customers several times a day. Someone at their next client meeting or networking function could be a potential prospect.
• Hold your managers accountable. Managers should always keep potential future job openings on their radar screens and casually interview for them. Their industry knowledge gives them keen insight into who is out there. Managers’ performance plans should include hiring metrics.
• Beat your competition to passive talent. Take the initiative to reach out to top-level prospects who have not actively considered a job search. Recruiting equals selling. Find passive talent and engage them. Otherwise, someone else will.
• Practice data-driven recruiting. Use data analytics to forecast your upcoming hiring needs. Translate them into goals you can measure. Be sure to align your talent strategy with overall business objectives. Identify your competitors and follow them on LinkedIn to understand to what extent they engage and employ your target market.

How can you adopt the best proactive hiring stance to position your company to win the war for top talent? The executive recruiters at BrainWorks can partner with you to make this happen. Read our related posts or contact us today to set up an informational strategy session.