Can Social Recruiting Help You Find Top Talent?

Social Recruiting – Everyone’s talking about it – no one’s doing it!

What is Social Recruiting?

Social Recruiting is using the various social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to improve the flow of top talent for current and future positions. This post is an introduction to some of the benefits and tactics of using Social Recruiting to find candidates, such as sales professionals, create an employer brand, and present your company in a positive light to attract candidates who already have a good job. Leveraging Social Recruiting also allows you to engage with potential candidates for future roles by engaging, nurturing, sustaining, and communicating over a period of time to create a Just-in-Time recruiting pipeline.

In subsequent blogs posts, we’ll delve into each of the various services, tools, and techniques you can leverage to begin attracting top talent.

Social Recruiting Benefits

What are some of the benefits of using Social Recruiting to find and engage with top talent at every level in your organization?

• The activities do not have to be centralized in HR. All Hiring Managers and Executives can participate
• Inexpensive or FREE
• Easy to learn the proper techniques and tactics
• Simple to implement
• Low time investment
• Branding, PR, and marketing side benefits
• Creates a powerful recruiting message (also known as employer branding)
• Ability to engage with future high potential candidates

Sounds almost too good to be true. You’re probably wondering “what’s the catch”. It cannot be that simple.

The good news is that using Social Recruiting to find, engage, develop, nurture, sustain conversations with top talent at every level is truly that easy. Of course there is a small learning curve. Of course there is an initial investment to get everything set up properly. Of course it requires the involvement and participation of your hiring managers and executives.

Another huge benefit is that you can STOP paying expensive recruiting fees when you can do much of this work on your own.

Most of you know that I make my living primarily through executive search. This might sound like I’m cutting off my future incoming stream by recommending you start using Social Recruiting instead of recruiters. I’m going to suggest that most companies waste a lot of money on recruiters for positions they could have easily filled through Social Recruiting.

How Can You Get Started with Social Recruiting?

These techniques are so powerful that my partner, Brad Remillard and I will begin in August offering a series of webinars on using Social Recruiting. Our first one will be “How to use LinkedIn to Find Great Sales Professionals.” We’re excited about this webinar series and we’ll be structuring a series of tools (FREE of course) to use in establishing and building your Social Recruiting capability.

Here are some questions to consider as you start to look at implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy:

• What are some of the tactics and best practices available to you for Social Recruiting?
• Blogging – especially having employees share their successes and joy at working in your company
• Forums and Discussion Groups – featuring stories about the contributions your employees are making to your company
• LinkedIn – Strong Branding through a profile, audio, powerpoint, case studies, Q&A, active participation in groups
• Linked and Facebook – searching for potential employees
• Twitter – Job Postings
• Industry Sites/Trade Association Social Networking
• Are you leading your industry/business segment in using these tools?
• What steps have you taken so far in implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy?
• Do you have any good success stories to share with other Vistage Members?
• Are you wondering where and how to get started?
• What’s the one thing you need to know to get started on implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy?

Stay tuned as we tackle all the various best practices in implementing a Social Recruiting Strategy.

Barry

P.S. Hold the date for our upcoming Webinar on Using LinkedIn to Find Sales Professionals – August 26

graphic by Robert Scoble

Why Are So Few Hiring Managers Responsible For Hiring?

Seems like such an obvious question. Of course hiring mangers are responsible for hiring, that is why they are called hiring managers. Isn’t it?

The truth is that most hiring managers do not think of hiring as part of their job.  They know they must perform the function every now and then, but few actually consider it as a critical job function. I have reviewed thousands of job descriptions ranging from CEOs to managers in my 30 years as a recruiter, and I can’t think of one that included hiring as one of the job functions. NOT ONE.

Here is a classic example. I was recently speaking to a group of executives on how to develop an effective hiring process.  One of the executives complained that with all of the other work he has, he doesn’t have the time it takes to continually be working on hiring. I was amazed. With all of the other work he has? Isn’t hiring just as much a part of his job as any other function? He certainly didn’t think so. Would a VP of Sales accept from one of his sales managers, “With all the other work I have to do, I don’t have time to complete the weekly sales reports.” Should a CEO accept from their CFO, ” With all the other work I  have, I don’t have time to know what is in all the accounts.”  Aren’t these functions just as much a part of their job as hiring?

What they are really saying in my opinion is, “Hiring just isn’t a priority for me this month.” Time is just a function of priority. Since it isn’t important at this moment in time, it isn’t a priority, therefore I don’t have time. Yet, when an opening occurs this becomes a priority. Then the hiring manager hopes that the best person for the job will be on the market and looking at the exact same time. In a slow market that might be true, but think back a couple of years to when unemployment was under 5%. That rarely happened.

Here are some suggestions to make hiring top talent the priority it should be in your company:

1) Consider linking some level of hiring activity to your performance management system. This doesn’t have to involve a great deal of time. Just something that demonstrates that hiring top talent is a priority not only for the department head but for the company.

2) Have all of your managers participate in different professional groups, alumni associations, and professional networking groups. Participation should be at a minimum of attending the monthly meetings or even serving on a committee. This is where they will meet potential top talent or people connected to that top talent. Most of these meetings take place after working hours and only involve an hour or two a month.

3) Identify key positions where any turn over will be damaging, potential future openings  in the next six months, and high turnover positions, then each month allocate just 10% of your time working to build a  queue of  names, people, and contacts that might be potential candidates. Just 10% of your time.

4) For each key position in the company maintain a list of at least three people to speak with if a position opens. This will not be a stagnant list.  These people’s situations will change over time so you will have to make sure it is current.

5) At least quarterly, engage every person in the queue. Send them an email, a newsletter, an article, give them an update of some kind, connect with them via LinkedIn, meet for coffee,  or just small things that don’t involve a lot of time that will keep them connected with you.

Just doing these 5 simple things can dramatically change how you prioritize hiring the best people in your company. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, it just has to take some time.

If  your managers aren’t doing these simple things, isn’t it time to put hiring back into the job of your hiring managers?

For more information on hiring top talent, join our LinkedIn group – How To Hire And Retain Top Talent. CLICK HERE to join the group and participate in the discussions.

Would you like to assess the effectiveness of your hiring process? Download our 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard to do an evaluation. CLICK HERE to download this. It is FREE.

 

 

Is Hiring Included In Your Performance Management?

All successful companies agree that hiring top talent is one of the keys to their success. In many cases, the reverse is also true, not hiring top talent was one of the key reasons for not succeeding.

I have asked hundreds and possibly thousands of key executives, “By show of hands, who believes hiring  top talent is important in your personal success?” Just about all hands go up. I follow-up with, “How many of you that raised your hand make this one of your top priorities as a manager?” Some hands go down but most will still be up. Now the real demonstration if this is true, “How many of you spend at least 10% of your time a month networking to ensure top talent will be available when you want to hire them, versus waiting until you need to hire someone and hope they are available?” Just about all hands go down.

Even though most hiring managers agree this is critical, few demonstrate it with behavior.

CEOs are not much different. I have asked hundreds of CEOs if they included growth as part of their strategic plan. All hands go up. Then I ask how many have included a section on how to find the top talent needed to meet this plan, and most hands go down. They plan for the growth, but not where the talent will come from as they expand. Many haven’t even defined what top talent is for these needed positions. In many ways, it is we will cross our fingers and hope the right top talent is available when we need them.

One way to begin to ensure your company is focused on hiring top talent is to consider integrating it into your performance management system.   Some of the best companies I have worked with do just this. Each hiring manager’s bonus is in some way linked to their ability to identify,  attract, hire and retain top talent.

Does your performance management system hold your hiring managers accountable for these?

Here are few things to consider:

1. Your hiring managers should have replacements identified for key positions within their departments. This is just good succession planning.
2. Your hiring managers should be held accountable for all hires in their department. If they fail at hiring top talent or have high turnover, should they be rewarded as a “hiring” manager?
3. Your hiring managers should be held accountable for retaining top talent.
4. Your hiring managers should be held accountable for helping other departments identify top talent. Hiring top talent benefits everyone in the company, simply because the company’s performance benefits everyone.
5. Your performance management system should reward those that refer top talent.
6. X percent of your hiring manager’s bonus should be linked to turnover. High turnover is often a result of desperation hiring.

As with most things, we tend to reward the areas we want to focus our attention. Bringing accountability for hiring top talent into to the performance management system sends a signal that hiring is critical. It demonstrates that as the CEO, hiring is important and not just something everybody agrees is important, but that it is practiced by all.

Hiring top talent is something that many companies can improve. Adding it to your performance management is a positive way to re-enforce it as a priority in your company.

You can validate whether or not your hiring system encourages hiring top talent by downloading our free, 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. CLICK HERE to download your scorecard.

Retaining top talent is also critical to a successful company. Our 8-Point Non-Monetary Rewards and Recognition Matrix will help you identify if your company is taking advantage of the these non-monetary issues to retain your best talent. CLICK HERE to download  your matrix.

Join our LinkedIn Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Group. There are excellent discussions and articles to help you build a team of top talent. CLICK HERE to join the group.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

You’re Running Out of Time to Upgrade Your Team

Have you taken action yet to identify which roles should be upgraded?

In April, I put up a blog posting titled “Hiring 101 – Use the Recession to Upgrade” suggesting that you should be using the Job Market Recession to upgrade a few selected roles in your organization. I provided a few ideas and recommended paths to begin this process.

Have you started yet?

Probably NOT!

Why? What’s holding you back?

I have yet to come across a management team that didn’t have at least one or two under-performers.

Raise your hand right now if you’ve got someone on your team that is not living up to your full expectations of performance.

Why have you not yet moved on trying to find their replacement?

I’ll restate in this blog posting the idea I put forth a few months back:

You’ve got a unique window of opportunity to acquire talent in this recession that you may never again in your lifetime be able to capture at an affordable level. Force yourself to rank the members of your team, and start down the path of upgrading your weakest members.

Here’s a few other articles you might be interested in on this subject of whether or not to upgrade your team:

Forbes Interview of Me on Using the Recession to Upgrade

Internet Radio Show Broadcast talking about Upgrading Your Team

Food for thought:

Do you have the role you are going to upgrade identified?

Do you have a plan in place of how you’ll find this new person?

What is your precise timeframe for letting the current person go and having the new person start?

What is your contingency plan if your first few sourcing ideas don’t surface the caliber of candidate you desire?

Have you made this a major priority – or are you just crossing your fingers hoping things get better?

What is the first action item you’re going to take right now to begin upgrading a role or two on your team?

Don’t be left behind!

Don’t be the one who has the worst team because you didn’t take action when you had the opportunity.

Your window of opportunity to acquire better talent is very small. The window is closing. I give it another 4-6 months and you’ll have missed the upgrade train. Fewer candidates will be open to talking with, you will not have enough money to offer them a better opportunity, and you’ll be stuck with the same average performer dragging down the rest of your team.

What a depressing scenario I just painted. Don’t let this happen to you.

I would love to hear what your doing to upgrade your team with the best talent possible. Start thinking like a coach trying to maximize the success of the team. It’s all about the talent. You could be the world’s greatest manager/coach – but if you don’t have the talent that can deliver your expected outcomes – then you’ll never have a strong enough team.

Barry

PS – Your first step should be to define the expectations you need in the role – not a traditional job description – which is worthless from the perspective of managing and predicting success. Download a few of our FREE Success Factor Snapshots to see how this is done.