This is the third piece in our multi-part series on smart hiring. This article takes a look at how all companies, regardless of size, can turn the best practices we’ve discussed so far into a robust pipeline of talented candidates. That way, when an opening emerges you aren’t scrambling to fill the role.
Any company founders who have experience in sales or marketing will recognize the model for a smart-hiring process: a funnel. It’s wide at the top, it’s narrow at the bottom, and it qualifies candidates as they graduate from one stage to the next.
And really, it makes sense to think in sales and marketing terms. You’re prospecting candidates, qualifying leads and nurturing relationships. You don’t wait to go after customers, and you shouldn’t wait to go after the people who are going to help grow your company.
Be Proactive, Not Reactive, in Your Search
Perhaps the biggest flaw in reactive hiring — i.e., waiting until you have an immediate need before you start searching for candidates — is that it forces you to target only people who are actively looking for a job. This is a small percentage of all available candidates.
According to research put together by recruiters Armstrong Appointments, only 12% of the workforce is actively looking for a new job at any moment. Meanwhile, only 15% of people are content to stay right where they are. That leaves a yawning gap of 73% of the workforce, nearly 3 in 4 people, who are open to having a conversation about switching jobs.
A smart recruitment strategy budgets time and energy to vetting these potential candidates, as well. “Waiting until the moment a position opens up to start searching for talent to fill it ensures that employers and hiring managers will always be playing catch-up,” ClearCompany cofounder and CEO Andre Lavoie writes at Entrepreneur.
“Instead, employers should have an ongoing pipeline of qualified candidates in their back pockets. Ideally, when a position becomes available, employers should have at least one person in mind who qualifies — especially for companies that often hire for very specific jobs.”
The question, then, is how can a company — especially a smaller company — build such a pipeline of talent?
By shifting the paradigm a little. Instead of acquiring talent, you need to be marketing your company to talented people.
Create a Funnel to Market Yourself as an Employer
Chris Brablc, director of marketing at recruitment marketing platform SmashFly, argues that potential candidates have begun to behave like consumers: They expect quality content and personal messages from companies, and they research potential employers with real diligence.
“Candidates are wholeheartedly embracing their alter ego ― the consumer ― when they look for their next career opportunity,” he writes at TalentCulture. “Talent acquisition organizations need to adjust by not just being recruiters, but by also being recruitment marketers.”
The good news is many companies already have an inbound marketing funnel they can essentially copy/paste to begin targeting these candidates. The goals of a talent funnel are different than the goals of a marketing funnel, but the basic idea is the same.
Siofra Platt at Social Talent has an excellent post in which she shows how to apply a funnel model to finding and eventually contacting candidates, particularly those so-called passive candidates who comprise the majority of the workforce. Here is her five-stage funnel, starting with the top:
- Need recognition
- Information search
- Evaluation of alternatives
- Purchase decision
- Post-purchase behavior
Translating this to hiring is pretty straightforward. “Need recognition” means a candidate — passive or active — realizes she could benefit from taking a new job, and “purchase” means her accepting a job offer. “Post-purchase” would roughly translate to onboarding.
Platt then goes on to describe how recruiters (or whoever is in charge of hiring) can make contact with a prospective candidate, which we will cover in a moment. The next step, however, is creating a pool of candidates at the top of your funnel, and that starts with prospecting.
How to Fill the Top of Your Talent Funnel
“Prospecting” is the right word, too. Just as a solid business development team identifies clients who would be a good fit, a solid recruiter needs to find ways of identifying candidates who would be a good fit.
“As you set out to build your funnel, write out the characteristics of the employees you hope to attract to your team and try to reverse-engineer things that would be attractive to these people,” VENTUREAPP cofounder and CEO Chase Gabarino writes at the BostInno blog.
There are several ways to approach this process:
- First, if you already know what roles you will be hiring for in the near term, you can begin to put together a list of skills and qualifications necessary for each specific role.
- Next, Kathleen de Lara at Entelo recommends coming up with “must-have” and “nice-to-have” candidate traits. “You’ll find more candidates who are close enough to perfect, than candidates who hit every single mark,” she writes. “Learning how to work around the candidates you find, which can be viewed as the typical result to expect from that search, teaches teams how to evaluate using variable baselines, and how to adjust their onboarding strategies to grow candidates within their role.”
- Finally, draw directly from sales and marketing again and come up with candidate personas. Employer marketer Allison Kruse has a great guide at LinkedIn for creating these kinds of personas.
One more paradigm shift might be helpful in this need-recognition state of your funnel. Recruiter Darren DeLuca argues against the idea of someone being a “passive candidate,” a term mentioned earlier. Instead, he writes a company must think in terms of “those who are aware of us and those who are not.”
That’s what the top of this funnel is all about. Someone who might already have a pretty satisfying job can be alerted to the idea that better options exist, and your company could be one of those better options.
It’s a matter of communicating that.
How to Engage and Nurture Your Talent Pool
Here is where we need to loop back on Platt’s advice at Social Talent. Once you have identified a list of prospects, you need to reach out via email to trigger that need recognition. This initial email doesn’t have to be long, but it does need to be personal. Platt recommends keeping the email no longer than three sentences:
- A good hook to set you apart from other companies and recruiters
- A to-the-point sentence that lets the prospect know what’s in it for them
- A specific call-to-action (Platt’s example: “Can you take a call at 6:30pm this evening to discuss further?”)
That’s all you need at this point because all you are doing here is starting a conversation. “You need to remember that your initial email alone will NOT convince a candidate to apply for your job, but a good email WILL start them on the road to seriously considering the job and putting their hat in the ring to apply,” Platt writes. In other words, this email will trigger qualified prospects to move into the research phase, the second stage of the funnel.
At that stage, you can begin to simply add value to the relationship. This can, and should, take some time. “The name of the game here is a long lead nurturing cycle,” Catherine Hess from GreenJobInterview writes at Business2Community. “If you pluck them before they’re ready, you may risk burning the lead. So take your time as you get to know these candidates and usher them into your passive talent funnel.”
Depending on company size, need and your team’s own capacity, you can scale this process to whatever size necessary, whether that’s two candidates on deck or 20. Dr. John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University, has three tips to keep in mind as you scale:
- Always be identifying prospects and reaching out.
- Try to predict any future vacancies.
- Make sure to build all of these candidate relationships on trust.
Putting It All Together
J.T. O’Donnell, founder and CEO of CAREEREALISM, has an excellent example of this approach to hiring in action in a post she wrote for LinkedIn. In the piece, she spoke with Yahoo recruiter Rachel Saunders, who described the end-to-end process a team member used to recruit a software developer they were interested in.
It’s worth quoting Saunders at length here — and capping off this series with the story — because her’s is a textbook example of smart hiring:
“One of our recruiters is a self-proclaimed tech nerd who follows a lot of blogs that discuss cutting-edge projects being worked on at various companies. He saw [the developer] was involved in a technology we were using and reached out to her to learn more about her projects and to hear what she thought of the technology. While she wasn’t considering leaving her current role, the recruiter stayed in touch with her by email for two months, exchanging articles and insights.
“Eventually, he invited her to come to our campus and tour our facilities to see what we were working on. She agreed. Several months later, she called him and said it was time for her to find a new role because she wanted to work on projects she cared about and had recalled the ones she saw during the tour. She was hired shortly after. It’s that kind of nurturing that helps us find and hire the top talent with the best superpowers.”
images by:
Edu Lauton, Llywelyn Nys, Francesco Gallarotti