On the first day of a new search I am often handed a giant stack of resumes. "There are the 300 people who applied to our ad" some exhausted, disgusted hiring manager says.
Often the hiring manager has ruled out anyone who did not follow instructions and provide a cover letter. ”If they did not care enough to follow instructions, I’m not interested in them.”
But that's a big mistake, here's why ...
If you want to hire great people, the key is to cultivate relationships with great people. That requires a strategy beyond the traditional recruiting cycle of ON: "What have a job opening!" or OFF: "We're not talking to anyone right now."
"Much of the published information and opinion about HR and Recruiting tries to establish norms or best practices as if local culture made no difference." And, of course local culture makes all the difference, just read the article to see why.
"Is your curiosity attracting talent, or your lack thereof chasing it away? A leader’s ability to seek out and embrace new ideas will serve as a magnet for attracting the best talent. The best talent desires to be a part of a culture that encourages contribution rather than stifling it. If you’re the leader who looks around the organization and asks “why can’t we attract better talent?” it’s because you value a compliant workforce more than a talented workforce. Real leaders don’t care who is right, they care about what is right – never forget this."
When it comes to salary trade-offs, I’ve learned that “showing” works far better than “telling.” When a manager’s expectations are not aligned with job market realities, I don’t spend much time telling them about salary surveys–it’s far more effective to show them candidates. They need to see what they get for their money. “Here is a superstar who is 20% above your target salary. And here is someone right within the target salary, but they lack this critical skill you wanted. And here is someone below the target salary, but you will need to invest a lot of your time to bring them up to speed.”
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In the B to B world, recent data suggests that between 70-75% of decision making is completed prior to contacting a vendor or solutions provider. If that is true, I wonder how many job seekers have made their choices prior to speaking to a recruiter from your organization?
Big companies are notoriously bad at keeping their best people. Here's why Dilbert lives in most big companies.
Some great advice on how to appeal to Gen Y workers. Like this: "Just because I'm young, Just because I'm Gen Y, doesn't mean that I want to be communicated with via email or via social media." And this: "I get a lot of frustrated calls from Gen Ys when they feel they're applying into a black hole, and that the process takes too long. They really prioritize speed, so the fact that hiring has traditionally taken weeks and weeks, if not months, is a big turnoff to Gen Ys."
Conventional wisdom is that job boards have a short life expectancy. Here are two interesting examples that suggest something quite different.
"If you want to lock in a long-term competitive advantage for your organization, be among the first to read and apply the lessons of George Anders new book "The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else."
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