Building a Hiring Strategy
In Part I of Could you pitch your hirning strategy, I broke down why posting a job on a job site is not a hiring strategy. Now I’d like to offer some ideas and strategies for developing a hiring strategy that will help you build a phenomenal team.
There are three parts to a hiring strategy:
- Determining your employee target market
- Figuring out how to reach your employee target market
- Figuring out how you’re going to convert leads into applicants, and then into hires.
1. Figuring out your employee target market:
To determine your employee target market you need to ask: “Who do we want that also wants us?” Hiring managers already spend a lot of time thinking about who they want, so you’ve probably got that covered. The next step is to take that total set of people the hiring manager has described and figure out which of them would be attracted to the job you’re offering. If your job doesn’t appeal to your target employee, you’ll need to change the job or your employee target market.
Here’s an example. Say you need a C++ developer with 8+ years experience for a C++ developer job you have. You can’t go after every C++ developer with 8+ years experience because some of these people want to be managers after 8 years. So, you need C++ developers with 8+ years of experience who don’t want to be managers. This is a high level example. You’ll need to think much deeper about your hiring needs.
2. Reaching your target market:
About 25% of people are active job seekers and will regularly visit job sites. If active job seekers are part of your employee target market, job sites are a good place to start. However, posting a job into a sea of other jobs means you can’t be assured your targets will see your job posting. There is software out there that works on “matching” qualified candidates with jobs, but I still regularly get “matched” jobs sent to me for CFO positions so I have my doubts.
For the 75% of people who are not actively looking for a new job, you need to find marketing tools for letting people know about you as an employer. Things you can do to promote your employer brand include keeping an active presence on social media (because 90% of Millennials are on social media daily) and blogging. It`s also a good idea to sponsor local networking events where you can speak to people and people can see you.
You can also use networking websites like Jobhubble which allow you to connect with people through the content channels they already subscribe to, and to their personal networks via candidate referrals.
3. Converting leads
After you’ve established your employee target market and begun marketing your employer brand to your employee target audience, the next step is to convert these leads into candidate applications and eventually into hires.
First, you need a kick ass career page. Career pages are a chance to have a conversation with potential candidates. Not having a career page leads to a much lower conversion rate of visitors into motivated candidates. So invest in a great career page. Pictures of team members are an absolute must and ideally they’ll be smiling 😉 Even better, they’re smiling at an offsite team building event. So if you don’t do any offsite team building events, start planning some. They are an invaluable tool for employee retention, boosting employee morale and hiring new employees.
Second, make sure your website has responsive design (meaning it`s optimized for mobile browsing). This is especially true if you’re hiring developers. If people can’t view your website on their mobile device, they’ll think you’re “behind the times” and top performers will not apply to your jobs.
Third, make your job description fun and exciting. Job descriptions don’t have to be boring, they’re actually a great opportunity for you to stand out from the crowd and speak to your target employee.
Finally, after you’ve put in all this work, don’t lead your interviews off with the tough technical interview. Round 1 should be as much about cementing the positive image the candidate has about you, as it is about learning about the candidate. It is better to begin the interview process assuming that every candidate is someone you’ll want to hire. That way, when you finally interview the candidate you want to hire, you’ll be assured you handled the process correctly.
If you’re getting too many candidates that are “wasting your time”, don’t change your interview process. That’s like treating the symptoms. Go back to the beginning and ask “why are we not attracting better candidates?”