In the first part of this series I introduced the recruiters paradox. The Paradox is that unemployed / malcontents are the easiest people to recruit but they are the exact opposite of what managers want! If recruiters want the very best in a field they have to target content, employed people. That requires different tools than the more traditional approach to recruiting, which I call “coincidence” hiring! Stop relying on coincidence hiring: Most recruiting is based on the ludicrous premise that the best people just happen (by coincidence) to be actively in the job market at the exact time that our firm has a job opening. Recruiter’s paradox #3 – The very best people are on the job market for such a brief period of time that it would take an incredibly lucky coincidence for your ideal candidate to be actively in the job market during the brief period your job was open. If the best candidate became available a week before a requisition opened or a day after it closed they would be ignored because there was “no open req.”! The odds of such a coincidence (where the best in the field just happen to be available the same day we have an opening) is incredibly small. So if a firm is to attract the best from the ranks of the employed it must add a long term, continuous recruiting strategy. I call this strategy “Relationship Recruiting” which finds the best people in key job areas, independent of whether there is an open requisition. RELATIONSHIP RECRUITING: Relationship Recruiting (also known as continuous recruiting) is a strategy that targets the very best currently employed people in high demand fields. It is a continuous process whose goal is to set up a pipeline of candidates. It stretches the recruiting process over a period of months (or even years) until the targeted candidate finally decides they are ready to move into the job market (and to our firm). After the initial step of capturing the “names” of the “best” employed people phase two, known as “personal courting” begins with the goal of building trust with the candidate. This deliberate trust building process is necessary because the very best recruits require that you build up mutual respect and trust before they will even consider your firm. Stop hiring “strangers”: Most people we recruit using traditional tools are “strangers” because we have never met them prior to receiving their resume. In contrast, using relationship recruiting we build a long-term relationship, and as a result, we will know a great deal about the skills and interests of the target candidate. We are now hiring “friends”. By not hiring “strangers” we dramatically lowering the chance of being fooled by a “stranger” during the traditional and relatively brief candidate screening process! Steps in the relationship recruiting of “Michael Jordan”: Let’s look at an example. Take for instance if our goal was to hire a great “player” (like a Michael Jordan). As a top performer, he would most likely not be actively looking for a job during the several week period in which we had an open requisition.
Additional benefits of relationship recruiting: By getting our managers and employees involved in identifying and talking with most of the best performers in our industry, our firm can easily stay in touch with changes in the market. It also helps us gather competitive intelligence and benchmarking data that has a value of it’s own. Furthermore, because the details of what the candidate expects, the assessment of their competencies and their “fit” would have been completed over a period of time, a hiring decision could be made in as little as one day. This ability to make a “fast” decision would mean that the targeted candidate would never have to formally enter the job market, where they might receive competing offers. Most executive search firms do some form of relationship recruiting already. In a tight job market, it’s time that corporations adopted the practice. Toolkit of things to do to help build the relationship: Here are some of things you can do to build a relationship with a “future” hire:
