One of the most frequent questions that I get is, “What are the best practices in recruiting?” Well, one best practice that always appears near the top of my list is developing a “most wanted list.”
Unfortunately, this approach is rare in the corporate world, where 100 percent of all hiring is “immediate need hiring.” What this means is that when a manager has a sudden opening as a result of new budget or turnover, they go to Sourcing and ask for help in quickly filling their immediate need. But what if your recruiting target was Stephen Curry or someone of that caliber? You would be relying on what I call “coincidence hiring” in order to capture him. It’s called coincidence hiring because it would be a pure coincidence for Mr. Curry to be available during that precise window of time when you have a job opening available for him.
Well, when you’re trying to recruit truly top talent, like senior executives, innovators, industry icons, and purple squirrels, you can’t leave things to coincidence or chance. Under the traditional “post-and-pray” hiring approach, it’s mostly luck if the most desirable candidates decide to enter the job market precisely when you coincidentally must have a job opening. Also, if you want to hire an industry icon, you simply can’t approach them out of the blue, sight unseen, and expect them to be willing to even talk to you, no less consider your job or firm. Instead, you would need a recruiting effort which allows you to approach them slowly and then to use “personal courting” to build a relationship with them.
Once you build up a trust relationship, then you will have a reasonable chance of landing them, provided that you had an opening precisely when they enter the job market. Their window of availability is likely to be quite small, because top candidates are out of the job market in as few as 10 days. But fortunately, there is a recruiting program known as a “most-wanted list” that is designed specifically to capture these hard-to-hire executives, purple squirrels, and industry icons.
The concept behind the most-wanted list recruiting approach is simple. At the beginning of the year when there is no rush to hire, you work with senior executives to put together a list of the game-changers who you should target throughout that year. These are individuals who are so impactful that they can by themselves give your organization a phenomenal boost in capability. Once everyone agrees on who to target, you focus your recruiting effort on slowly building the trust relationship with them over time. And the final component is that you set aside an open position, often known as a “corporate resource position,” so that when one of the targeted individuals enters the market, you have a slot available for them.
This pre-need most-wanted approach is a type of talent pool. It is superior because it provides you with sufficient unrushed time to build a relationship with them and an immediate opening at the precise time that one of your target icons becomes available. In the Curry example, obviously, you would need to build a relationship before he would even consider your team, but you would also have to wait until the season ended and his contract was up before he would consider a new job. Under the most-wanted approach, you would have time to “court” him. And fortunately, you wouldn’t have to tell him when he became available that he would simply have to wait until you had a vacancy. This is what often happens with standard coincidence hiring.
A most-wanted list is a strategic approach that is borrowed directly from the sales function. Salespeople could choose to wait for major customers to come to them. However, any salesperson worth their salt instead realizes that a more proactive approach is required. The sales version of this most-wanted approach creates a list of the most desirable customers in advance so that the salespeople can focus their sales efforts on those targeted customers. It’s time for recruiting to learn from sales and to adopt a similar process.
Best practice firms like Cisco, EA, Pixar, and Red 5 Studios have all at some point used the most wanted concept with success. Users find that not only do you bring exceptional talent to their firm but you also slow down your competitors by taking away their top talent! An additional advantage of hiring well-known industry icons is that they will bring other top talent along with them. I’ve found that managers love this forward-looking concept and that they are more than willing to help you compile the list of names to target. So if executives at your firm have been clamoring for you to start some workforce planning, a most-wanted list is a good place to start.
