There was an article published today on LinkedIn Pulse that parallels and emphasizes the philosophy we have at S. Benjamins & Co. In Lou Adler's article, "The One Thing You Must Do to Hire Better People and Find Better Jobs", he addresses a few necessities to help bring the human factor back to recruiting. With the explosion of internet recruiting, it is much less common for a recruiter to engage actively with a passive candidate. Candidates are flooded with links to job postings and requests to fill out online applications instead of personal phone calls and "old school" referrals. In our organization, we often find that are happiest searches are the ones in which we connect with both our client and candidate in a way that goes beyond the checklists of requirements and soft skills necessary for a open position. For S. Benjamins & Co, relationships matter most and our clients and candidates appreciate that anomaly .
Here are a few of Lou's suggestions to help "humanize" a search:
"Recruiters: when you contact a potential candidate, don’t ask if the person would be interested in your specific open job. Instead, ask if the person would be open to an exploratory conversation if the position represented a potential career move. Asking people who aren’t looking if they’d like to chat for a few minutes about a potential career move is far more productive than selling lateral transfers. We just completed a survey with LinkedIn that indicated that 81% of the fully-employed are open to this type of discussion."
"Recruiters: build a relationship and forget the box-checking exercise. When you start the phone screen, don’t tell the
person much about the job other than providing a quick overview. Instead, suggest that the purpose of the call is to determine if the job represents a true career move to the person. For the next 5-10 minutes review the person’s LinkedIn profile and try to find 4-5 learning and opportunity gaps your job offers that the person’s current job is missing. These are things like a broader role with more responsibility, bigger budget, more impact, faster growth, and more visibility. You’ll use these to fashion the potential career opportunity as you move on to the next step."
"Hiring managers: conduct exploratory phone screens before meeting any candidate in person. After the recruiter conducts the first exploratory conversation, I suggest that all hiring managers then conduct a similar 30-minute exploratory phone discussion with the prospect. Top people are very open to these types of more serious, but still exploratory, conversations. During these sessions hiring managers should describe the big challenges in the job and ask the candidate to describe his or her most comparable accomplishments. This forces the conversation to focus on factors that best predict success – comparable past performance. When the candidate and hiring manager agree to an in-person interview, the stage is set for both to determine if the job represents a career move. Another advantage: the phone screen minimizes the corrosive impact of first impressions increasing the accuracy of the subsequent assessment."
Do you think that the "human factor" of a search has influence in a candidate's decision to pursue a new opportunity?
You can read Lou's full article here