Chefs, Cooks, and Recruiters

Being an excellent recruiter  is like being an excellent chef, there are some who have true talent, and others who are really “cooks”, best suited for diners and roadside cafes.  There is a place for both.  They both know how to use the oven and the range, but they don’t always know how to pair the perfect ingredients to cook an exquisite dinner.

Today, the “cooks” of recruiting are passively shuffling through resumes that come in from boring posts that they think they have cleverly and uniquely posted in various cities on various job boards.  Often times they have just copied and pasted one post from another and changed a few words around.  I know this because these “cooks” of recruiting often times make mistakes and they don’t bother to change the city name.  I was looking at a post recently for a sales manager job in San Antonio, TX and the body of the posting all of a sudden shifted and started talking about starting up a distribution center in Shanghai.  The company and recruiter should be very embarrassed!

The “chefs” of recruiting know that the top talent is probably not unemployed, and they probably aren’t searching through job boards and applying to every job they are qualified for.  Here is a rundown of what the Top Talent that YOU want is probably doing:

• Working for a great company for great pay and benefits
• Being groomed for a higher level position
• They are continuously educating themselves in their field
• They are networking with others in their industry and sizing up collaboration opportunities
• They may be teaching or mentoring others in their field

So how do you get these people to look at your job?  How can you stop wasting precious resources on average workers and start getting the Top Talent to want to work for you?

1. Accept the fact that they are not unemployed and waiting for you to call.  Once you wake up and realize this and start aggressively pursuing these folks the quicker you will get results.
2. Get to know the current top talent in your organization.  Go to lunch with them, build rapport with them, and keep tabs on their progress.  The top talent in your organization is the best source for getting other top talent….they won’t refer average talent to you because they don’t want to work with average talent either!
3. Don’t just ask for a referral; ask to have a conversation, just to get to know the person.  Sometimes employees don’t give referrals because they don’t think their friends or associate will want to leave their current job.  That’s your job to deal with, just get the conversation
4. Get out of the office and into the world in which the Top Talent lives.  Network, network, network! When you’re out there you need to sell your company, what’s exciting there that would make someone want to leave their current situation?  You need to have those things down like a script so that when you’re talking it becomes conversational.
5. Once you get the top talent sitting in front of you, you need to put your sales hat on and close the deal.  Make sure you get the right interviewers together and pre plan the interview process.  The interview should be equally about their fit in your culture, as it is about what’s in it for the candidate to change.
6. You will have to appeal to their greater life objectives.  If they are innovative entrepreneur types then you need to describe the vision of the company 5 years from now and what exciting projects the candidate will contribute to.  If they are environmentally conscience, talk to them about your sustainability initiatives. The key here is knowing their hot button issues and addressing them.
7. Know the weaknesses of their current employer—you have got to research this before they come in.  If you know their company missed their earnings the last 3 quarters and has laid people off, you want to play up the stability of your company.
8. Have the candidate spend time with your Top Talent, as well as the highest level management that makes sense for the position. Give them a sense of the excellence that your company can attract and retain.
9. Make the candidate feel like they will be valued in your organization. Don’t attempt to do this just through an attractive compensation package. Give them specific examples of where some people have ended up inside your organization. Strong professionals are most likely looking for opportunity – introduce them to other people that have flourished in their career with your company. These individuals don’t have to be in the same functional area as the applicant – just people who have been given a chance, have risen to the opportunity, and have been rewarded for their efforts.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, you’re right.  It’s not easy being a Top Chef of Recruiting, especially when the unemployment rate is high.  You’ve got to spend your time wisely…but it’s all worth it when YOU get the big fish hired on, and the other cooks of recruiting are just bringing in the “same old, same old” bottom feeders. Good luck out there!