What are your Recruiting Goals – People or Numbers?
Posted by Cabot Jaffee on Tue, Feb 08, 2011 @ 09:43 AM
We all know recruiting is a numbers game, but at the end of the day—you are looking to hire a person; someone with a personality, skills, and traits, unique to themselves. Ideally, you are looking for candidates that have experience and skills sets that assimilate well with your company’s values and culture.
So using just one recruiting strategy and message to all recruits will not work. Just like school children who are all so unique and need different learning styles—people need different recruiting touches (in terms of both content and process). And ultimately the personal touch is needed—you need to talk to a live body—to engage and to show you care enough to spend the time.
Recruiting is a process—and the successful companies—uses many approaches and processes to move candidates through the funnel—which ultimately yields the goal—bringing on new employees into your organization.
Today Social Media is clearly at the forefront of everyone’s mind—how to use it, to be unique and to make it work for your company. While Social Media is essential to the process, it’s only part of a process vs. the entire process. It is a tool to get people in your funnel—your database—ultimately that is the pot of gold—that is what will yield the “numbers” in your recruiting goals but not necessarily the right people. Don’t worry if you aren’t exploring every social media tool—play with them all and tweak them and find what works for you. Facebook, twitter, linked-in and blogs—all are useful tools to ultimately connect with individuals. But in that connection—you need to provide some value—information, ideas, results—this is ultimately what will create a following. You need a game plan—to ultimately move people from your social media to your database of real prospects.
From there—other tools come into play (while still working the social media assets.). Email drips and follow-up and touches—still are useful. Some people may say email is not effective anymore—again that’s like saying the old way of teaching doesn’t work—it does for some people, but in moderation. As we all know—too much of anything isn’t good for us—finding the balance is a key to being successful in meeting your recruiting goals. Email still is effective—with the right message, the right time and the right sharing of information. Constant advertising campaigns may prove to become ineffective—but sending information and sharing of thoughts and ideas—that likely will work well with a combined advertising approach. The goal is to be a valuable resource—to last over time—this ultimately can help position your company as the “place to work.”
After you have followed up and emailed folks that are interested with information that you can share—now it may be time for the personal touch -- phone calls. Pick up the phone, call the person, engage in conversations and move them further down your recruiting pipeline.
If you don’t have the quantity you’ll have a much harder time finding the quality you’re looking for. So once you fill the funnel that’s where other steps are needed if you are interested in picking the best matches—those folks that will provide a significant return on investment. Assessments are essential for this—this takes out the subjective part of the process and makes it completely objective-that way you are dwindling down your pipeline to talk to only those folks that will be successful in your firm. Then it’s a matter of fit and chemistry which will most often be determined during the live interview.