#004 - A different approach to Talent.
● Stay invested, payoff will be great.
● Save the life of a recruiter (and 💲💲)
● Speed matters.
● Practical guide to start.
🚀 Welcome back to the Imprv.ing newsletter, Andrea’s here.
Every week I send you a handful of guides to introduce innovative practices in the the world of work.
Enjoy this article and feel free to get in touch!
The market is your best friend if you know how to use it.
Talent acquisition is HARD. Most of the Companies fail at it. ❌
The harsh truth is that having the right people to perform the scope of the business IS the most crucial activity that managers are required to master.
Unfortunately, there is a lack of competence in this field that no HR department, no matter how well-trained and competent, can fully solve.
You have to gain advantages on the market BEFORE you may need it.
Let’s be real: you may not always be hiring but you should always be active and never stop recruiting bright people for the organization. 🧠
Using this powerful habit as a tool for Employer Branding will make you faster, lighter, and able to select the right people with ease.
Let’s see how you can gain a strategic advantage and reduce the stress of finding the right talent. 🎯
“Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was — and still is — the most important thing we do.”
⏩ Stay invested always pays off more.
Have you ever seen a Talent Manager jumping from one meeting to another just to collect all the ‘people needs’ for the current year?
It’s stressful and time-consuming eh? 🤯
But here’s the solution:
Spoiler: this might be an Hollywood production 📽️
Having in mind the talent requirements coming from the business is crucial, and it’s also a good way to properly share the responsibility between HR and Business and plan timely the needs.
But times are changing and the required skills are becoming so fluid that you cannot simply hire based on specific (and time-fixed) requirements.
Waiting until resignation, firing or the end of the employment relationship is just a reactive approach that will turn the company into a slow behemoth.
That’s why you need to turn 180° the Talent Acquisition process and become proactive. ↩️ (cool word, somehow overused)
The scope is to have a talent pipeline always filled with potential candidates who can be the right choices for future opportunities.
👉I know what you’re thinking: If I do not have the formal approval or the budget assigned, how can I contact people?!
Every time you get out of recruiting activities, you are slowing down your Time-to-Hire because you need to restart from scratch.
💶 An example from the financial market: if you save 400 € per month for 30 years at an 8% yield, at the end of the period you will have nearly ~1 million!
But if you simply get out of the market ONCE and return to it with the same conditions, you will lose more than 80% of the total interest!
Like staying invested will use the full power of compound interest at its best, always screening for A-level profiles will reduce your effort and put your company in a calm and relaxed manner while recruiting.
🗺️ Save the life of a Recruiter (and 💲💲)
Good news: the learning curve for transforming this approach is not so steep, and the activation will bring better business performance.
The key is to see recruiting as a neverending process, always listening to the business and continuously studying the markets to see what is trending.
« CEO: “Find an AI & Prompt engineer, now!” - “Whaaaat?!” »
If this sounds familiar, follow these steps to modify your strategy:👇
Trend analysis, Internal & External.
Understanding where the market is going is crucial, so probably the most powerful is still Linkedin. Check their Resource Library to have the latest available information about the Job market.Benefit: Help you to target more precisely and avoid salary inflation.
Collect information.
Understanding how you can attract the target, looking into competitors, and defining a specific value proposition. i.e: Communities and Reddit are great resources for discovering the underlying behavior.
Benefit: Create a tailor-made approach to candidates.Activate the right channels.
The market is like a fishing sea. It contains all the information required to start a scouting and reduce the degree of distance between you and potential future colleagues. But you have to possess an active profile on Linkedin and the various job boards.
Benefit: Present yourself as a reliable professional with a clear scope.
These steps can help to be ready BEFORE the business asks for it. If you want to gain a competitive advantage check also this useful blog by Microsoft.
▶️ Speed matters.
Be aware that top candidates are usually passive players. Since they’re full of opportunities, the best way to attract and create a link is to arrive at them via networking.
Your managers are the most important source of information: typically business colleagues know the market and the trends before corporate functions. Use this relationship to catch the ‘weak sign’ of talent needs. Tip: create meaningful conversations about what they’re thinking about the future.
When you find the right candidate, contact him/her with transparency, communicating that you do not have a specific offer. Declare your values and the challenges that might happen in the company. Show a powerful Value Proposition that they might appreciate.
Tip: Create trust by giving them an open amount of information.
It might seem counter-intuitive to ask for a call with a potential A-Player without an offer in hand, but this is exactly how you can create interest in your company without the economic interest bias.
They will see you as a trustworthy and honest professional from day 0.
But you can gain another advantage from Continuous Recruiting: SPEED.
If you keep the investment of time, networking and passively looking for candidates, you can drastically reduce the stress and the time-to-hire.
With constant, low-latency recruiting, you can save the momentum of the research and maintain a high reaction velocity.
Otherwise, if you give up recruiting at the moment you fill all open positions, your ability to select promptly will decay.
🌱 Practical guide to start
Ok, now you know. Invest a small, but constant, amount of time to recruit the best people is necessary to outperform competitors.
Where to start?
Developing a compelling value proposition (useful also for your internal employees!!)
Pitch your company like it’s a sales meeting in front of a customer! Future candidates have to know what they might expect.
Train your employees to serve as ambassadors for the company. People buy from people, so a direct experience is a plus.
Find the pain points that they’re facing and address them with any successful business practice you can offer.
Create a human relationship by being accessible and encouraging open communication. You don’t know when, but you will need it!
Ready? All you need is a trust the process and not only peak activities. 🛠️
In the beginning, my suggestion is to start with creating a presence in a specific subset of potential research, like communities.
This will give you the feeling of the market and an idea about what to scout.
That’s all! I hope to have put the flea in your ear. If you need help or want to know more, feel free to get in touch!
See you in the next letter, follow me here to stay in touch with the next publications!
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