How is recruiting like a high school sport?

As many of you know I also coach high school girls basketball. I love to use metaphors of basketball to describe hiring, motivation, and performance. High School Basketball season is about to begin again in few weeks and it brings back a painful memory of the last game of our last season.

My team had a great season – however, they are disintegrating before my very eyes in the last season game. It’s almost as if the entire team has forgotten how to play. I’m using every motivation technique I’ve learned in 25 years as a recruiter and performance consultant I can think of to get my girls to play better. Nothing is working.

Then it hits me like a lightening bolt. I sit down on the bench and realize that the team members I have cannot deliver against my expectations. I don’t have the talent to do what needs to be done. What could I have done about my frustration: NOTHING! It’s high school basketball. In most high school districts you cannot recruit. Whoever shows up at your doorstep that year is who you’ve got to work with on your team.

Here’s the hiring manager irony: Why do most companies and hiring managers treat recruiting like it’s a high school sport? They take whoever shows up on their doorstep after a few simple basic tactics of finding candidates (a little bit of networking and an ad posting on one of the major job boards). These tactics fall into the worst of the primary pools of possible candidates. You can read more about the four pools of candidates under our Strategic Sourcing Plan Service.

As a hiring manager, recruiting top talent is not a high school sport. Don’t expect to ever build a top notch team by taking this approach to finding candidates.

If you want to truly build an exceptional team, as a hiring manager you must break the tribal hiring mode of treating finding candidates like it’s a high school sport. Perhaps, it’s time for a Sourcing Check-up on whether your company has a hiring process in place to attract, excite, engage, and motivate top talent to come forward for your open position. Most of the methods that hiring managers use to attract candidates not only brings the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool forward, but also repels and turns off the very best talent.

If you would like to get our FREE Assessment of your sourcing, jump to our FREE Sourcing Assessment Page and we’ll be glad to walk you through how to determine if your hiring process is strong enough to attract outstanding talent at every level in the company.

You can read more about how this tribal hiring process of treating recruiting like it’s a high school sport impacts your overall hiring success by viewing our study, The Top Hiring Mistakes – of which poor sourcing and finding of candidates is a major factor.

Barry

Related posts:

1. Why Is Recruiting Sales People Like High School Sports?
2. Can Social Recruiting Help You Find Top Talent?
3. Can’t Find People? They Are Hiding In Plain Sight – 3 Examples