Recruiting Strategy

Most salespeople spend a majority of their time trying to “steal customers” away from their competitors. Great recruiters also realize that the best hire a firm can make is a hire from their direct competitors’ top talent! Perhaps an example or two can help to illustrate. I was consulting in …

Smaller firms need talent also, but they normally have more limited resources and recruiting expertise than larger firms. If you are a small business owner, here is the way to approach recruiting. 1. Realize that the firms with the best people win. Most entrepreneurs spend too little time on people issues, even …

Many managers complain that during tough economic times it is difficult to give candidates the “big money” that it takes to get them to say “yes” to an offer letter. There is no need to fret however, because when you survey candidates about their job acceptance criteria, you often find …

As any good hunter would tell you, you’re unlikely to bag the best game when you’re hunting with a large group of hunters who are all congregated in the same location. The same can be said for recruiting at most “recruiting” events. I am constantly amazed at managers and recruiters …

The most crucial step in developing a world-class corporate recruiting function is to attract and retain top recruiters. There are many types of recruiters in the world, but the best are aggressive recruiters with excellent research and selling skills. I call them “warrior” recruiters. If you owned a sports franchise, …

If you are going to start (or improve) a college recruiting program, it’s essential that you look at what most firms do with a cynical eye. Almost all college programs follow a cookie-cutter approach. They are run on emotion and tradition. Few, if any, have any hard evidence that they …

One of the primary ways of convincing applicants to work for your company is by building your brand as a great place to work. You can build your brand in a variety of ways: getting written up in articles and getting listed on great-place-to-work lists are two good examples of …

Most recruiting strategies are relatively static and unchanging. Unfortunately, keeping the same strategies during an economic downturn that you utilized during an economic upturn can have a disastrous effect on your recruiting results. Often it’s hard to see a downturn in the economy coming, but the recent crash has been …

Managers frequently ask me, “What is the best recruiting source to use when you have no budget, little time, and don’t know much about recruiting?” Without hesitation my answer is…use reference referrals. The Definition of a Reference Referral A reference referral is quite simply asking the references (that were given to you …

If you want to dominate your competitors in the talent “war,” you need to act a lot differently than they do. If you expect to win more than a majority of your head-to-head “battles” for talent, you must take a deliberate approach to recruiting. The following 20 rules outline just …