article by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett
Last week, we introduced numerous examples of organizations using talent contests, corporate challenges, and awards programs to source top talent that might otherwise be overlooked. This week, our attention turns to the action steps required to take advantage of this recruiting approach. Hopefully, you’ve had time to think about what recruiting needs you have that could be resolved through contests, and can start to develop a program as you read on.
Action Steps
If you want to take advantage of contest and award recruiting, here are some suggestions to get you started. We have broken the suggestions down into two categories: using other organizations’ contests, and running your own. Each can be wildly effective. If you don’t have the budget to launch your own contest, taking advantage of those that already exist is the next best thing.
Using Existing Contests, Challenges, and Awards Programs
The first step is to ask your current top performers in each mission-critical job family what prominent awards and contests already exist in their field. Professional organizations tend to offer the most awards and contests, and could often use sponsors and judges. Focus on the associations that represent your hard-to-hire and mission-critical functional areas. While sponsors can make demands in some cases, judges are given greater access to the actual talent, so figure out what you need from the relationship and pursue the role that best suits your needs. If the opportunity to serve as a sponsor or judge is not available to you, consider building a relationship with the judges and follow up with them after the event to find out which contestants impressed them. If the judging panel isn’t cooperative, look for a way that is not as barrier-prone. For example, you might consider sponsoring a special section of a local university’s newspaper to profile the contestants or interview the judges.
Examples of Professional Association Contests and Awards Programs
Other creative approaches to finding contests to use include:
Running Your Own Contest or Challenge
While running your own contest or launching your own registration-required publication may seem like a lot of work, it’s a relatively quick data-generating process in which people voluntarily tell you about themselves.
To top performers, competing in a process that tests their skills and provides recognition is significantly more palatable than sitting through an online assessment designed by a training professional using a textbook as the source of expertise. To get started, determine which job families within your organization will need or currently need an infusion of more than one candidate. Work with functional leaders in each of the areas that need talent to devise a real-world business problem that could serve as the basis for a challenge. Collaborate with line managers and corporate finance to determine the relative value of both the solution and the influx of new talent and secure resources for the award and the program. With a topic in mind, next map out potential media partners.
Media partners will bring participants to the process and lend the entire challenge more credibility. You might also want to approach your organization’s strategic partners to cosponsor the challenge, offering them registrant information as a benefit and the opportunity to serve as judges. With all of that in mind, the next step is to work with an event planner to build out the time line, requirements, process, and event components. A contest will not happen overnight. If that seems like too much work, consider outsourcing the challenge to a local university; universities always need more resources, access to companies, and visibility in the community.
Conclusion
Because the very best are not hard to find, you should expect some competition in recruiting them. However, competition will be less of a barrier than you might think because few recruiters have the courage to target award winners. That said, there’s one challenge you will have to overcome. These individuals are generally employed and now know that they are at the top of their game, so convincing them to consider another job requires you to provide them with an offer that is clearly superior to their current job. When you use contest recruiting, the battle shifts from finding prospects to convincing them to apply and accept. If you’re not sure what it takes to convince them to shift jobs, consider asking them directly, “What would be your dream job?” Also ask, “What criteria would you use to determine if a new job was right for you?”
If you can get these two questions answered, all you have to do is tailor the job and the situation to fit their criteria. It might seem like a lot of work to tailor a job to these individuals, but these award winners are likely to be game-changers and magnets who will almost automatically attract other top performers. Organizations keep saying they want the very best. Now you know where to find them. The remaining question is: Do you have the courage to try contest recruiting?
