You’re Losing Crucial Talent Opportunities? - Mending The Process

By Chris Murdock

It is your goal to find the best talent through any platform you think is right for your recruitment purposes as the CEO or head of Talent Acquisition. But why stop there? There are always potential roadblocks depending on how your Talent Acquisition team runs. What does your team do during times of hiring influx?

Do you have an in-house recruitment model developed or being developed?

• Does your TA team have the bandwidth to source candidates while the recruiters work on the remaining recruitment details? (85% of small businesses looking to fill open positions have no luck finding applicants)
• Does your team have the time or spend to source, hire, and train new sourcers and recruiters? (The average time to fill is 52 days, which doesn’t account for the recruiting, onboarding, and training it takes to get employees up to par with your hiring functions)

When recruiting, look at the bigger picture and don’t settle for what the candidate appears to be on paper. Merely looking for potential recruits versus finding top talent to hire are goals that are worlds apart. There are three possible reasons firms miss out on finding crucial talent opportunities…continue reading to find out how to avoid these recruitment pitfalls.

1. Where Does Your Recruitment Process Fall Short? We’ll Tell You…

Do your sourcers and recruiters fully understand your company’s values, missions, and highest-ranked candidates qualities for each open job description? 53% of employees don’t understand how what they do on a daily basis pads the company’s bottom line. When recruiters don’t understand the purpose of a position, how can they best search for fit candidates, and properly iterate the purpose, responsibility and value in each unique position?

Sourcer and recruiter must-haves:

• An understanding your organization’s objectives, values, and expectations
• Ability to create fixed action plans to target the recruitment quota
• A comprehensive view of the company culture, placing value on inclusivity and diversity
• Developed ideas about high output talent, entry-level, and common pitfalls/successes with candidates you’ve hired in the past

Keep in mind that measuring just your success will not work — you should measure your failures and calculate ROI as well before making your next recruitment move.

2. Who is Your Ideal Candidate, Really?

Filling open positions to meet your own recruitment quota is a mistake that will come back to you later. The Harvard Business Review reveals 80% of employee turnover is due to poor hiring decisions. Some simple and very common reasons for turnover:

• Talent’s previously outlined skills are not suitable for the job description or company requirements and expectations (85% of candidates will lie or fabricate information on their resumes).
• Candidates were not fully communicated what their exact job would entail leaving them either overwhelmed or underwhelmed upon hire
• New hires don’t “blend well” with the teams when onboarded identifying poor cultural fit
• New hires don’t feel their unique skills and abilities are properly being used — identifying a poor match in the sourcing process

Avoiding these common pitfalls in the sourcing process isn’t simple, yet not impossible. Start by building candidate personas for each job description your company is looking to fill. Ask your executives and department heads to contribute or approve the building of these profiles so they’re receiving the candidates they actually need.

Building a Candidate Persona Crash Course:

• Prioritize candidate attributes you need over the “nice-to-haves” and clearly identify each
• Identify where your ideal candidate is from (geographically), their educational background, what they studied, groups they participated in, internships they completed and interests
• Get to the nitty-gritty: what makes them tick? How do they work best? In teams, independently or both? Do they thrive when asked to present or lead projects? Do they tend to shy away from travel? Where do they hang out on the weekends? What do they do to build their professional skills? Who would they be most likely to network with and where?

Building a candidate persona should feel like you’re meeting an actual person you would want to hire. Build their story, their purpose, why they get up and go to work every day. Once your TA teams have a total grasp on what to look for, the sourcing lens clears up immensely.

3. Build an Undeniable Line of Communication with Your TA & Recruitment Teams

When communication fails, teams fail.

“Companies risk $135 million for every $1 billion spent on a project and new research indicates that $75 million of that $135 million (56%) is put at risk by ineffective communications…”

How often does it feel like your hiring process is less of a formatted workflow and more of a “let’s do what we can to get butts in seats” type of cyclone?

Sourcing, recruiting, and department leads need to have a tight-knit web of communication with a deeply ingrained process in-line before you start thinking about who to hire. Think about each team’s functions and steps, how they align with each other to help quicken the process in a smart, never rushed, process. This especially stands true if your company is considering outsourcing any piece of your recruitment process.

Outsourced Recruitment Services Should be…

• Adaptable & flexible
• An extension of your previously-built recruitment model and process
• Able to conduct executive searches using the in-house model
• Act as a fill-in when recruiters are on leave or when hiring new permanent recruiters
• Provide recruitment tools your organization doesn’t own in-house (ATS & interviewing tools)

Give each “team” a designated point-to person to keep track of each department. This ensures a clear line of transparency in your communication between teams to help your process flow from start to finish.

With clear processes, point-to managers, and communication ties in line, your organization can maintain a strong grip on the candidate experience and lifecycle without missing a beat. Yes, hiring talent that speaks to your organization’s bottom line is a vital piece to organizational success, but when teams are focused on keeping internal processes together, the bottom line blurs and crumbles.

About Chris Murdock:

Chris Murdock is the Co-Founder and Senior Partner of IQTalent Partners. Chris has over 12 years of executive recruiting experience and leads search execution and client relationships along with supporting searches across the firm. Prior to Founding IQTalent Partners, Chris was a sourcer with Yahoo!’s internal Executive Recruiting team in the corporate offices in Sunnyvale, California. 

  Back to Recruitment blogs