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

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.

Using One Degree Of Separation To Hire Sales People

One of the major failure points in hiring top talent is not being able to find enough qualified top talent candidates. Most companies use traditional methods to find great candidates. The result of using these traditional methods like advertising, light networking, and job fairs –  is that most companies bring the bottom third of the candidate pool to their doorstep. In this recording of our live show, we share a key element of our Success Factor Methodology in finding great talent – a networking technique we term “One Degree of Separation.”

Click here to listen live or download.

Only You Can Prevent Desperation Hiring

Question: When do most companies start the hiring process? Answer: When they need someone. It can then take up to three months to hire someone. By this time, the hiring manager and their staff is overworked, projects are falling behind schedule, overtime is through the roof, work is backing up, short cuts are causing mistakes, and everyone is frustrated. At this point the hiring manager is desperate. We call this stage in the hiring process, desperation hiring. The only good news is that the hiring manager doesn’t reach the depression stage until 6 months.

Question: What kind of hire do you think the hiring manager will make? Answer: Poor. They are likely to take the next best person that comes along, or worse, settle for one of the previously interviewed good solid below average candidates.

Why does this happen? We believe it’s because most companies don’t start the hiring process until they need someone. They then cross their fingers and hope that the person with top talent that they want to hire just happens to be looking at the same time.

We refer to this as the “random luck” hiring methodology. Unfortunately, this is the hiring methodology for many companies.

Desperation hiring is one of the easiest mistakes to correct in the hiring process since most hiring managers know in advance of an opening. Granted not always, but most of the time good managers know.

Simple recommendations to avoid desperation hiring:

1. Begin a soft launch. Don’t wait until the last minute to start the search. There are many things hiring managers can do prior to instigating a full blown job search. Start letting people know you will be looking to hire a person and ask for referrals. Let everyone in the company know the opening is coming.
2. Consider attending local association meetings that these people attend. Start identifying and engaging people you believe have the right attitude to fit your culture.
3. Use the social media sites to identify potential candidates. LinkedIn is one of the best tools for doing this. You can search LinkedIn for people in your geographic community. Start by requesting to be linked together. Then maybe meet one morning for coffee just to get to know each other. Don’t even mention you are considering hiring someone.
4. If hiring sales people, start asking customers who they think are the best sales people calling on them. Your customers know it is in their best interests to have the best sales people calling on them.
5. If you attend trade shows, when you meet people you think will be a good fit you should talk to them, get their business card, and follow-up once back in the office. A follow-up might be as simple as an email letting them know you enjoyed meeting them at the show. It could be some information on your company or anything that begins to engage this person. Eventually, ask to meet for coffee or for a short meeting when you are in their area.
6. When unsolicited resumes come in don’t just throw them away because you aren’t looking now. Instead review them, and if the person looks like someone you would hire start to connect with them. Begin the rapport building process. Recruiters do this all the time. That is why we seem to always have candidates when companies call us. I have placed people 2 years after first receiving an unsolicited resume.
7. Start building a queue of potential people. Most companies and hiring managers know those key positions that are hard to fill. These are the positions you should always be on the lookout for. Just start a file on who and where these people are. Don’t worry that they may not be on the market 6 months from now. If they are passive candidates chances are very good they will be available.

There are a lot of things that hiring managers can do proactively that will shorten the hiring process and bring better candidates to the table. Too often most managers only think about hiring when they need someone. Like most things, the time to do anything is when you don’t have to and aren’t under pressure.

Committing just a few hours a month can help your company or department avoid desperation hiring.

You can take a quick evaluation of your hiring methodology with our 8-Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. Download this free tool and see if your hiring process will avoid desperation hiring. CLICK HERE to download your assessment.

The chapter on sourcing top talent from our best selling book, You’re NOT The Person I Hired, is also available to download for free. CLICK HERE to download your free chapter.

Join our LinkedIn Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Group. It has many discussions and articles to help you. CLICK HERE to join the group.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Why Is It So Difficult to Find Outstanding Sales Professionals?

In my last blog post on hiring sales professionals, I introduced the concept of why it is difficult to hire great sales professionals and we drilled into defining success as the starting point of best practices in hiring.

In this blog post, let’s talk about why it’s so difficult to find great sales professionals.

You’re Doomed To Fail Before You Start

The vast majority of companies search for candidates in traditional approaches that might include a little bit of light networking to find out who knows someone looking for a job, attending local job fairs, and running an advertisement on a job board, such as Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com.

Most of the time these traditional methods bring the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool to your doorstep. If all you’re seeing is the bottom 1/3, then you’re doomed to fail before you start. It doesn’t matter how great the job is, how wonderful your company is, how much of a leader you are – You’re Doomed to Fail Before You Start the Hiring Process.

You get 300 responses to your networking, job fair, on-line ad — 298 of which you can’t figure out what keyword did the candidate click on that brought them to the conclusion they should apply to your job. Two in the group were excellent. Unfortunately, they were so good – they went on and off the market in the blink of an eye. Now you’re left with all the rejects, retreads, poor performers, toxic and dysfunctional (perhaps semi-psychotic), dregs, and bottom of the barrel candidates.

Then we choose from this group.

One of my clients the other day called this approach to finding candidates “picking from best of the worst”. Another one of my clients recently coined the phrase “picking from the cream of the crap”.

Does this sound dysfunctional? Why then do most companies use this approach to finding candidates?

I was speaking with a potential client toward the end of last week who told me he ran advertisements on a couple of job boards. He got hundreds of responses. He personally interviewed over 50 candidates. Over the course of 3 months, he hired 3 candidates for his sales team. One is very good and the other two he is considering firing. His track record is somewhat shy of 50% and he’s already invested over 80 hours of his personal time in the process.

Is there any other process in your company where that investment of time yields a result of less than 50% accuracy? Probably NOT! Why then do we accept this random variability as OKAY when it comes to hiring?

Speaker Presentation Responses

The responses I hear in my presentations to trade groups, associations, and management team meetings for our “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” program include:

• We don’t know any better
• No one has shown us a more effective process
• That’s the way we’ve always done it
• Isn’t that what HR is supposed to do?
• Sometimes we hire good people this way

At the beginning of my speaker presentation, I’ll cycle one by one around the room asking the participants to share their greatest frustration in hiring. Finding candidates always comes up as one of the top 3 for the past decade. It doesn’t seem to matter if the economy is going straight up, straight down, or sideways – it’s always tough to find top talent, especially in hiring sales professionals. I just did a program a week ago in Vancouver and 7 out of 15 participants raised their hands that they were struggling to find candidates. Some of the members had been looking for 2 months, 4 months, and over 6 months to find someone to fill a critical role.

What a minute – are we not in one of the worst job markets since the Great Depression? Millions of candidates are aggressively looking for a job. Shouldn’t we be able to grab one of those candidates? NO – ABSOLUTELY NOT! You’re not trying to put bodies in chairs – you’re trying to hire an outstanding sales professional who can achieve your desired expectations and do so within the context of your company culture and values. The problem is that most of the methods traditionally used to find candidates bring warm bodies to your doorstep, not high performers.

Sometimes, you get lucky. You find a great candidate at a job fair, in your second networking call, off an advertisement. LUCK IS NOT AN EFFECTIVE HIRING STRATEGY. I would like to suggest that you can make finding top-notch candidates a process so that you can consistently bring great people to the table instead of depending on luck.

What’s Next – Improving Sales Hiring Step-by-Step

In my next few blog posts, I’ll break down in more depth “Why it’s so difficult to find Outstanding Sales Professionals”. We’ll talk about how hiring is a lot like recruiting for a public high school sports team, the 4 pools of candidates and which one should be your sweet spot, why using a job description masquerading as a job advertisement doesn’t work, and a few simple and inexpensive best practices to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of candidates into the top of your sales candidate funnel.

Between now and my next blog post, I’d love to hear in the comments section what your greatest frustrations are when it comes to finding outstanding sales professionals.

Barry

If you’re looking for a job – don’t apply here.

One of the things I’ve noticed when working with successful business owners and executive leaders in large corporations is that they know who to hire. They look for certain characteristics in the person they put on the team. One of the first things they try to determine (once the skills are out of the way) is whether or not the person is hunting for a job or a position of responsibility.

If the candidate is looking for a job, they don’t go any further with the interview. If the candidate indicates that what motivates them and gets them up every day is a position with responsibility for which they are held accountable, then the interview continues in earnest, with success factors and lots of questions. The open ended questions will focus on how to figure out if the candidate takes responsibility for the consequences of her/his decisions. “What was the single biggest failure you’ve experienced professionally and what did you learn?” “Can you provide an example of  how you made an uniformed decision and then went back to correct it to take the project down a new path?” “Give me an example of how you allowed hard data analysis to override your instinct when making a business decision.” The candidate had better be prepared to give substantial examples that can be verified.

As you might guess, the person asking these questions isn’t looking for someone who is simply wanting to come in, do what s/he is told, let others take responsibility and go home at five. Nor is the hiring manager looking for someone who always sees outside forces or internal bureaucracy as getting in the way or causing failure. No, this manager or executive is not hiring someone for a job. Instead, they are looking for a person who takes responsibility; one who analyzes situations and is willing to look at data with fresh eyes. This manager is likely building a team that isn’t afraid of admitting mistakes, pointing out areas for improvement, or being the bearer of “bad news.” They are looking for a professional.

Let’s look at the other side. If I am a candidate who thrives on being in a position of responsibility, believe in being held accountable, and believe in being “data driven,” then I would want an interview to proceed as outlined above. If the hiring manager isn’t asking questions that lead me to believe they are looking for a professional, then I might take the initiative to ask some of the questions myself. I’d be very tempted to ask, “How will you know that the candidate you hire is successful?” What would you expect to be accomplished in the first three months and how will you measure it?” “How would you describe the culture of accountability in your organization?” If the manager fumbles the answers to these questions, this is not a cultural match for me and I may want to move on. That’s a very difficult decision, especially in these times. However, to settle for a job when you are looking for responsibility and a career position is going to hurt you in the long run.

Readers of this blog will not find too much surprising in this post. Yet, I see hiring managers make the same mistakes over and over again. I also see senior executives taking jobs in a panic – they have bills to pay and a family to support. Here is where I see the problem manifest most often – hiring a salesperson or sales manager. Sales people have a built in aversion to accepting responsibility for failure. Now before you fill my in-basket with hate mail, let me admit that I have come up through the sales ranks and managed a multi-channel sales team at several companies. I found myself succumbing to the very mindset that I’m suggesting isn’t healthy. There’s a simple and understandable explanation for this stereotype of the salesperson (apologies for those of you who have figured this out and grown out of it). A salesperson always faces more rejection in the average day than many people face in a year. They have to build up a thick skin. They have to accept the rejection, BELIEVE that it isn’t personal, and move on to the next opportunity. That understandable need tends to create a habit of looking outside of our own actions for the reasons for failure. We have to guard against that eventuality and admit that while understandable, it is not acceptable to ALWAYS assume the failure is not ours. As the hiring manager for a high functioning sales team, I found it very challenging to dig down and get to the point of “when are you accountable for the failure of a sales initiative or forecast”; both for my sales team (including myself) and with prospective candidates for the team. It turns out getting there was crucial for a successful hire.

So back to the beginning statement. If you’re looking for a job (no responsibility, just put in the time, collect a paycheck and go home), don’t apply here – even if the position is for the assembly line. If you’re looking to take responsibility for your actions, hold yourself accountable and are willing to grow, then let’s get started on what it will take to be successful. Be ready to give examples of how you’ve made mistakes, accepted the responsibility for them and learned from them. Be ready to demonstrate how you are open to various views of and conclusions derived from the same data. If you’re successful, we will be building a highly functional and exciting team. In my book, that’s better than a job any day. Even in this horrible market.

Hiring sales people is difficult for everyone. We just launched our Sales Recruiting Division to help companies with this issue. As the economy turns, good sales people will be harder to find and even harder to identify. CLICK HERE to get a Free Success Factor Snapshot for your sales position.

For more information on hiring top talent, read our best-selling book (0ver 10,000) You’re NOT the Person I Hired. CLICK HERE to read reviews.

About the author

Dave Kinnear is a sought after business advisor and mentor. He works with highly successful executives through one-to-one mentoring and coaching meetings. Individuals who are presently running successful businesses and executives in transition work with Dave to ensure meeting corporate and/or career goals. Through his affiliation with Vistage International, Dave convenes and facilitates Advisory Boards comprising Business Owners, Company Presidents and Chief Executives dedicated to becoming better leaders who make better decisions and achieve better results.

Average Networkers Make for Average Executives

Effective networking can make or break your career

The most successful (top 25%) executives and managers are great networkers.

Executive and managerial networking are critical skills for success. The bad news is that so few see it as important until it is too late. The good news is that it can be taught, learned, coached, and constantly improved upon.

Signs of Mediocre Executives and Managers

Average and mediocre executives and managers downplay the importance of networking, and as a consequence they achieve less than stellar results in their career. These less than stellar results take the following form:

• Passed over for promotion
• Average pay increases year over year
• Lack of job opportunities and leads presented
• Passed over for career enhancing projects and meaningful work
• Job searches that take 2x-3x longer than peers in the top 25%
• Inability to stay abreast of industry changes
• Poor hiring track record – lacking of knowing the best candidates
• Unable to validate candidate information through references due to poor network
• Inability to forecast/look ahead due to a lack of connections with “folks in the know”
• Guessing at setting standards and expectations due to a lack of connections to benchmark success in comparable companies

Our Series on Executive and Managerial Networking

Networking is simple, takes very little time and nurturing when it’s done effectively and consistently. Networking is a painful experience when it is done sporadically and with little discipline.

In this series on “Networking for Executives and Managers”, we’ll take the major elements of networking at a tactical level, and break them down into manageable and actionable items you can easily implement with very little time investment.

In our next blog post, we’ll try to put a few parameters around what is executive and managerial networking so that we have a common definition.

Questions about Executive and Managerial Networking

I’m very curious if our readers could respond to a few of the questions below about networking:

When was the last time you engaged in some form of networking through your job (not including a job search)?

What has been the greatest direct benefit you ever received through a networking activity?

Have you ever recruited a great candidate for your team by networking vs. running advertisements?

Resources for Executive and Managerial Networking

Here’s a helpful link and idea until our next post. Many of our readers have expressed frustration over finding great candidates (sounds strange in the depths of one of the worst recessions since the great depression). One of the great best practices in finding top talent is to use a method of networking called One Degree of Separation.

CLICK HERE to learn more about how to find great candidates by using the networking technique of One Degree of Separation through our Success Factor Methodology.

You can also listen to our archived radio show programs on this subject and download samples of Compelling Marketing Statements to use in One Degree of Separation Networking. CLICK HERE to explore our FREE Resources Library for Hiring Executives and Managers.

Barry Deutsch

Join our HIRE and RETAIN LinkedIn Discussion Group by CLICKING HERE to learn more about executive and managerial networking strategies and techniques.

Recruiters Don’t Steal People, Managers Lose People

So often recruiters are accused of  “stealing your best employee.”  While it is true that we do present opportunities to your employees, the fact is, we don’t steal them. To the amazement of most recruiters, the vast majority of the time the employee already has a resume prepared and ready to go.

All we do is ask them if they would be open to discussing a potential career opportunity. Virtually 95% of the time the employee replies, “Yes.” Why would anyone not want to know what is going on in the market, have a discussion around their career or just get a feel for current compensation ranges? Even if they are completely happy in their current position, this is good stuff to know.

The important, and I believe the most relevant question is,” Why, out of the 95% that are open to discussing career opportunities, do roughly 10% indicate that they are happy with their job, and although it sounds like a good opportunity, they aren’t interested in pursuing it further?”

What do these 10% have that the other 90% don’t? That is something a recruiter has nothing to do with. They generally have four things, 1) they are learning in their current position, 2) they feel they are having some impact on the company, 3) they are growing, and 4) they respect their boss. When these four things are part of a person’s job, the best recruiter can’t get them to move.

An example of this recently happened. I was jointly interviewing candidates with one of my clients.  At dinner one night, my client started asking me about the job market, “Is it picking up?” and  “Are any particular industries hiring?”  He mentioned that he thought the market was getting better because in the last couple of months he had been contacted a couple of times by recruiters for potential opportunities.  Like most, he listened to what they had to say, but in both instances he thanked the recruiter for the call and flatly turn them down.

Why, I asked?

Like most, his answer had nothing to do with compensation. He commented, “I enjoy what I’m doing. I have a great boss and most of all I’m challenged.” Then he added, “When I stop being challenged it is time to move on.” In fact, prior to being promoted to his current position he was looking. If his current position had not come open he would have left the company.

As he explained it, “My last boss treated me like a step child (I used step child. His word did start with an S). The position had lost its challenges, the job was the job, and that was all there was to it.” His boss was rarely around to support him and he was doing the same thing this year as he had done the last three years. Boredom and lack of respect for his boss had set in. The good news was that he worked for an excellent company. BTW, he has been with this company for 12  years and in his current position for 4 years.

This is a classic example of how one employee went from engaging recruiters to telling them, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

We realize that not every company has the ability to promote someone or move them to another position in order to retain them. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of things a company can do to help their best talent feel challenged, feel that they are learning, and be respected by their boss. This can happen in just about any sized company.

The best recruiter couldn’t “steal” this person.  It all had to do with the job and the person’s boss.  The vast majority of people leave because they lose respect for their boss.  The best selling book, First Break All The Rules, validates this. This book should be required reading for all managers, regardless of how many years they’ve been a manager. As recruiters for the last 30 years, my partner Barry Deutsch and I, can also validate this is clearly the number one reason candidates tell us they are open to talking about a new position.

To help companies and hiring managers identify some of the things that managers can do to retain their best talent we have put together for you to download our 8 Level Retention Matrix. This matrix will help you identify whether or not your managers are doing what it takes to retain your best talent.

If your managers do some, or most of these, you won’t lose your talent to a recruiter. Your competition will.

You can also download for free our most popular chapter on sourcing top talent from our best-selling book, You’re NOT The Person I Hired. CLICK HERE to download your free chapter.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Jobless recovery – been there, done that.

There is a lot of talk about the “jobless recovery.” Well, I’ve been there, done that – back in the 70’s. Seems like the glass half-empty versus the glass half-full syndrome to me. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re in transition or out on your own trying to “drum up business,” this is a very tough economy. Bear with me on this though; even if the real unemployment rate is close to 20% rather than the 9.8% number being bandied about, that means 80% of the people are still employed. And if 3 million people were let go last month, but the unemployment number stayed the same, then that means that 3 million people were hired. Okay, you get where I’m going with this.

If you’re in transition and looking for your next great position in the corporate world, what are you to do to make yourself the next person hired? To begin with, if you’re reading this post then you’re off to a good start because you’ve found the best blog for researching what you need to do. Between Brad, Barry and their team, the information they post here about how to go about finding your next position will be invaluable. And since I am not an HR, recruiter or retained search person, I will leave all of that to them. However, I can give you a bit of perspective of the hiring manager.

I am very lucky to be able to work with a great set of business owners, company presidents, CEOs and senior executives in a wide variety of businesses. I can tell you what I am observing in the small business world. You can take that information, marry it to what you learn on this blog from the search/recruiting professionals and come up with a plan. Here is what I’m seeing.

Money is tight. Hiring at this point is going to be done at a very slow and deliberate pace. Part time employment or outsourcing work to 1099 independent consultants is what is happening now. Are you able to take advantage of that trend? Can you do some outstanding work as a part time employee or consultant that will make you the lead candidate when full time employment is justified?

My advice to business owners in this economy is to be ruthless in “husbanding your cash.” Do not waste money on bad hires or employee turnover. I advise them to make sure they do hire when the time is right, but to make sure they take their time, define their success factors and are deliberate in finding the right candidate. If you, as a candidate know that many employers are taking that point of view, what can you do to help them reach that goal while at the same time helping yourself? When you are presenting yourself to a prospective employer or on-line or to a search firm are you focused on yourself or on their challenges? Are you appearing confident and results oriented or self-interested and perhaps “desperate for employment”? Clawing our way back to profitability is going to be a very long process for all of us. Employers can’t afford to make mistakes. You have to convince yourself and them that you are the right person, understand their challenges and can be successful in resolving those challenges.

On the employer side, have you ever assessed the full and true costs of a bad hire? Few companies take the time to conduct this assessment. I think if could be they are afraid of the results. If you can handle it download our Cost Of A Bad Hire Worksheet. CLICK HERE and be sitting down when you complete the worksheet. A respirator near you is recommended.

LinkedIN is a powerful tool for hiring top talent. Join our Hire and Retain Top Talent Group. There is a wealth of articles and discussions for you there. CLICK HERE to join.

About the author

Dave Kinnear is a sought after Business Advisor and Mentor. He works with highly successful executives through one-to-one mentoring and coaching meetings. Individuals who are presently running successful businesses and executives in transition work with Dave to ensure meeting corporate and/or career goals. Through his affiliation with Vistage International, Dave convenes and facilitates Advisory Boards comprising Business Owners, Company Presidents and Chief Executives dedicated to becoming better leaders who make better decisions and achieve better results.

Stop Attracting The Bottom Third Of The Candidate Pool

Most professional sports teams have scouts. These scouts are constantly on the lookout for talent. Most of the time these scouts are engaging potential talent long before they are ready for the big leagues. In fact, often long before they even need them.

The one thing that these teams and scouts know is that they will always need top talent if they want to win.

Who are your scouts? Are you engaging potential talent before you need them? Is this important for you to win?

Over the last few years I have asked hundreds of CEOs and key executives, “When do most companies start the hiring process?”  Rarely do I hear anything other than, “When they need someone.”  Then, how long does it take to hire a person? Most believe that can take between 2 and 4 months. At which point the hiring manager is so desperate that they are pretty much willing to take the proverbial, “Cream of the Crap.”

I believe that “desperation hiring,” if it isn’t the biggest hiring problem, certainly is very near the top.

The problem is not that most companies start the hiring process when they need someone, it is that companies start the hiring process with an empty bench. They have to start from scratch every time. It can take weeks or months just to start locating talent. Top or otherwise.

This may explain why so many companies do an exceptional job attracting the bottom third of the candidate pool.

There is a better way. Companies, like professional sports teams, need to have scouts. They need people out engaging people that might be a fit for key positions.  Most companies know the key positions that sooner or later will have to be filled once the economy changes. Even in good times, most companies know way in advance the positions they are contemplating hiring for. However, unlike professional sports teams, companies don’t have anyone out scouting for talent prior to it being needed.

So how can companies get scouts out looking for them? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Whether you have one employee or one thousand employees,  they should be your scouts. Make sure all of your employees are constantly aware of potential positions you are thinking about filling. Make sure all employees have a Compelling Market Statement. See some examples of these by CLICKING HERE.

2. Approach the hiring process with a proactive approach. Encourage all of your employees to be constantly on the lookout for people they think will fit your culture. When they encounter someone, all they have to do is give the potential candidate a copy of the Compelling Marketing Statement and let them know that your company is always looking for talented people and if they are ever looking, to be sure to think of your company. The farming process has begun. That is what scouts do.

3. Don’t be afraid to engage people you think might potentially be great employees. This can be as simple as meeting them  for coffee, including them on your newsletter, updating them of company announcements, sending an email once a quarter, or anything that keeps them on your radar screen and you on theirs.

4. Make it a habit of building queues of potential people for key roles or upcoming roles. Don’t wait until the last minute to start looking for people. Both myself and my partner Barry have placed many people that have been sitting in our database for years. That is why recruiters have people ready to go for you when you call them. You and your team can do the exact same thing. Just knowing where potential people are located is a good start.

5. Build a compelling LinkedIn profile and a Facebook Fan page. Update the Facebook fan page regularly and invite these potential employees to join your page.

6. If you attend trade shows or conferences, don’t just throw the business cards your team collected away. Send each an email to join you on LinkedIn and your fan page on Facebook. If there are a few  really good potential employees in the cards, set a time to meet for coffee. Let them know the next time you will be in town and attempt to get together.

7. Do you ask your vendors, customers, trusted advisers, and other service providers for referrals of the best people they work with or know? These can be the best source for building bench strength.

8. Do you encourage your managers and key executives to be active in professional associations, their school alumni association, serve on non-profit boards, or other community associations such as Rotary? These are outstanding places to do some scouting.

I recently wrote another article, “Can’t Find People? They Are Hiding In Plain Sight” because so many hiring managers we work with walk right by potentially great people. This article has three real examples of how people are right there for the asking.

As the economy turns, top talent will be in demand once again. Think back to just three years ago. This top talent will generally end up in one of two places, your team or your competitor’s team.

To find out just how effective your hiring methodology is, download our free 8-Point Hiring Methodology Scorecard. This will help you to develop a truly effective hiring process. CLICK HERE to download yours.

We also have the chapter on sourcing from our book, “You’re NOT The Person I Hired” as a free download. CLICK HERE to download your chapter on sourcing top talent.

You can also join our LinkedIn Hiring and Retaining Top Talent group. This is an excellent source for discussions and articles on these topics. CLICK HERE to join.

I welcome your comments and thoughts.

Brad