In previous Blogs we’ve discussed:

• How to Make Your Career Site a Talent Magnet – A outline on how a carefully crafted Career Site can cut your recruiting expenses by 50% or more and significantly reduce the time your staff currently invests when you have jobs to fill.
• Six Do’s and Don’ts for Sourcing the “Right” Candidate- A plan you can apply to sourcing candidates that will insure you hire better candidates faster while reducing hiring mistakes and recruiting costs.
• Selling your Job – It’s the Sizzle that Counts  – An article that outlines how to give truly qualified candidates all the information they need and all the reasons why they should want to apply to your company.

Now it’s time to examine what happens when you’ve followed all these suggestions and you occasionally become inundated with candidates when you post a job opening.  Handling a glut of unwanted and unqualified applicants can take a heavy toll on the time and the resources of your HR staff…you need a way to cope. You need an automated candidate screener.

Stepping into the realm of candidate screening can be a little like falling down the rabbit hole in “Alice in Wonderland”…you can end up in some very strange places, examining a multitude of choices that won’t get you what you want. 

There are a lot of choices available.  There are software selections that can look good but are in fact so inflexible that you must adjust your needs to the vendors’ definition of  screening criteria.

There are candidate screening options with modular pricing that when totaled can put a very nasty crimp in your budget and may represent “overkill” in what you really need. 

The best way to avoid making an errant choice when it comes to candidate screening is to first give serious consideration to what you want and need…and what you’re willing to pay for.

If your using an online screening questionnaire to collect candidate information, be sure the software you select gives you the flexibility to define both your required as well as the desired characteristics you want and need for each open position.  Be certain that you have the ability to use your terminology rather than having to select from a pre-set list of choices.

The candidate screening method you choose should allow you to select the  educational level and, if necessary, the major you wish the candidate to possess.  You should be able to ask about specific skills, experience, industry and/or job experience including minimum years of experience.  And as importantly, the candidate should be able to address these questions by answering multiple choice and “Yes/No” questions so one candidate’s answers can be weighed against others responding to the same job and questions.

You may also want to ask whether or not each candidate possesses specific behavioral traits that will help the person “fit comfortably” into your company’s work environment. You may need to know if a candidate is legally able to work in the United States or what type of work visa the candidate has.

And in addition, you might want to include questions that require text answers so you can judge how well a candidate responds in writing.

Finally, you will need to allow the candidate to attach or upload his/her resume for your review.

And once you have collect all this data…you need candidate screening that can match the candidate responses to your specific needs and display the results in a format that is easy to read and easy to use…but we’ll cover all that in my next Blog

Bye for now…The Sourcerer

It occurred to me that I might have led you astray. I recently wrote a blog on the use of Posting Pages to attract candidates by “selling the sizzle” about your company and the job you have available.

In the article, I plainly said that getting candidates to go to your career site was “not all that difficult”. A number of readers disagreed and said quite the opposite.  They found it very difficult to get qualified job seekers to go to their career sites.

Therefore, instead of following my plan and writing about candidate screening (and how it can save you lots of time while reducing your recruiting costs), I am going to discuss non-traditional ways to drive talented candidates to your career site. 

In a previous commentary, I gave you a long list of the more traditional methods of candidate sourcing from internal job postings to the use of third party recruiters. You can review that list by clicking on:

http://www.talmax.com/sixdos/

The purpose of the next few blogs is to give you a number of “non-traditional” ideas to attract the talent you want to hire. Each of these ideas requires a little thinking “outside-the-box”.

Leverage Relationships with your Vendors

Ask yourself if the candidates you want to respond to your job opening might now be working for a competitor. If so, who are the companies that sell to you and may sell to your competitors?  Chances are someone at one of those suppliers may know a potential candidate who matches your requirements.

Finding a list of these suppliers is simply a matter of reviewing your supplier list and using a little internet research to identify their competition. Once you have a number of companies who currently sell either to you or to your competitors, go to the website of each of these companies and look up the names and e-mail addresses of any of the sales people you can find.

Yes, this takes some time; however, if you are not getting the response to your job opening that you need, why not take the time to do a little investigation? You can either do this yourself or spend thousands of dollars having a third party recruiter do it for you.

Next, create an e-mail (I have included a sample for you) and send it to every sales person on the list you have created. Provide a description of your position (if you read my article on Posting Pages, you will know how important a well-crafted job description is when attempting to attract the right candidate). Ask each person you contact to forward your e-mail to anyone they know who may be qualified and interested.

This process is not hard to do and it can help you find referrals who are potentially great candidates for your job!  Will it work every time…No, but it is definitely worth trying anytime you cannot attract the talent you need.

I have included the following sample e-mail for your use:

Subject Line: Do you know anyone who may be interested in this job?

Dear #Contact Name#,

We are attempting to locate a suitable candidate to fill a key position with our company.  I believe you sell to our industry and I thought you might be aware of someone (perhaps a friend or business acquaintance) who might be both qualified and interested.

So that you can review the position in detail, click the link below or simply copy and paste the URL into your browser. 

Enter posting page URL here

 If you know of someone who might fit our need, please forward this e-mail to him/her for review.

We would be most appreciative of any help you can offer.

Regards,

Your Signature
Your Company

I’ll have more suggestions for you in my next blog.

If you want to attract the “right” candidates, you first need to consider your job through the eyes of the candidates you want to attract. Good candidates crave information. Great candidates make decisions about applying for a position based on the tried and true proposition of “WIIFME” (what’s in it for me).

What really interests the candidate?

• Highlights of the company’s history (brief, noteworthy pieces of data)
• Job requirements (the absolute, “MUST HAVE” requirements)
• Background/skill requirements (the “must have” only)
• Job/background preferences (it would be nice if the candidate also had…)
• Duties and responsibilities (how will the candidate will spend his/her time)
• Company “selling points” (why would a candidate want to work here)
• Job “selling points” (specifics about the “what’s in it for me”)
• Company benefits (extremely important to so many candidates)
• Relocation information (can be “broad-brushed” but candidates need some info)
• Travel requirements (how much, how often, where to)
• Compensation/bonus opportunity/overtime pay possibilities (if you can, this key component is very beneficial to include)
• Testimonials from co-workers (tidbits from satisfied, enthusiastic employees are very appealing to quality candidates)
• Information on the culture & working environment (what would you want to know about this category if you were a candidate)

 What is the best way to present this information?

• Use headlines on your job presentation to separate each category of information
• Make your headlines intriguing (for example, instead of “Company Selling Points”, call that section “Reasons why you might want to work here”)
• Use short sentences or bulleted points
• Keep your job presentation attractive but concise
• Present a picture of the company and the job that candidates can visualize
• Make an effort to tell your story in a compelling manner
• As a time saver, use a format that lets you re-use sections of your job presentation such as company history, reasons to work here, environment & culture, etc. in future job listings

Instead of requesting that the candidate e-mail his/her contact data and attach their resume, allow the candidate to apply on-line, directly from the job presentation page. Doing so encourages qualified people to apply immediately using a process that gives the company a more complete picture of each candidate and gives the candidate a positive impression of the company and of the company’s sourcing process.

To implement a sourcing system like this there are several components you should explore.

1. Flexibility – You want an automated sourcing system that allows you to define all the fields you want included on your Posting Page.  You also need to define the number of categories you want, as you will want to present certain jobs using a less comprehensive format with fewer categories while others will require a very comprehensive explanation with a lot of “sizzle”. In other words, the software must present a job the way a candidate wants to see it.
2. Ease of Use - You should be able to enter your own data without the need to involve technical support from your IT department or tech-support team. The software must be easy to understand and the navigation must be intuitive.
3. Information retention - You need to be able to re-use or change certain data in future job listings without technical support. You must be able to edit, save and archive information for future use.

 Attracting the quality of candidates your company needs and converting the best of those who apply into new employees starts here:

• Create a plan and make-up a schedule
• Select the sourcing tools that will drive candidates to your career site
• Set the bait and sell the “sizzle”

Sick of your “normal” recruiting methods?  Tired of reviewing resumes from unqualified people who answer your ads or postings in droves, with no regard to whether or not their credentials match your need? Interested in saving your valuable time…and lowering your recruiting costs?

If this sounds like a pitch to buy a new service, it’s not.  It is simply an idea you might want to try.  It was done for a real company… and it worked!

An accounting firm needed to replace a key administrative person who had been with them for a very long time and was retiring.  They hired Talmax to find candidates.  We searched the databases of Monster and CareerBuilder for someone in their area with the background they wanted.  Talmax found about 100 or so “run-of-the-mill” possibilities, but no one really special.

Because the type of person we needed could come from a lead adinistrative job in a law firm, we searched the local member ALA site for potential candidates. That’s when the light bulb went off. 

The site contained a rather long list of vendors who were sponsors of various local ALA activities and who regularly called on all the member firms in the organization. We sent an e-mail to the contact at each of these vendor companies asking for referrals.  We included a link to a Posting Page, which contained a detailed description of the job that they could forward to anyone they felt would be qualified and interested.

We received eight referrals, all of high quality including the person who was ultimately offered and accepted the position.

How’s that for “out-of-the-box” recruiting? 

Got a recruitment story of your own?  Send it to The Sourcerer so we can share it with other interested parties.

Here’s a story of “creative recruiting” worth recounting…a Nursing organization in a small East coast city was extremely frustrated with the lack of qualified nursing personnel they were able to attract.  They tried everything from billboard advertising to radio ads; but their efforts were consistently falling short of their needs.

Finally they devised a plan that worked.  They sent an e-mail to every Nurse who currently or previously worked for them or who had registered with them at any time over the last five years, asking for referral names of qualified RN’s. They offered every person who e-mailed to them the contact information on an interested referral, the chance to participate in a drawing for an all expense paid trip for 2 to an island resort in the Caribbean.

The offer ended up on a couple of the social networks and the organization got over 120 referral responses.  They subsequently hired 6 RN’s from this program… and one of their referring sources got a great paid vacation.

The company calculated that they actually saved money when compared to the costs of using more traditional recruiting methods to find and hire 6 qualified RN’s.  Nice “Creative Recruiting”!

The head of a small insurance firm recently received this e-mail from a recruited candidate: “Thank you for considering me for the Executive Director position.  While I believe I have the background in administrative and facility areas, unfortunately I do not believe I have the level of financial background that the position requires.  In the event that other positions become available, please do not hesitate to contact me again, since I would be most interested in pursuing employment with your firm, based on the detail about your company included in the Job Listing.”

The Sourcerer’s creative recruiting tip for today: When recruiting, make it a point to “sell” the reasons why qualified candidates should be interested in your company. Fortune 1000 companies regularly do this with every job opening.  On their career sites and in their job descriptions, they provide information designed to appeal to the best talent available…and that appeal does not have to tie exclusively to compensation. Sure a compensation package is important to any talented candidate; however, there are other elements of the position and other information about a prospective employer that are every bit as critical.

Quality candidates want to know about the work environment, about their co-workers and the attitude their fellow employees have about the company. Candidates want to hear about the “social” side of your workplace including things like company events and the organization’s participation in charitable activities.  Top talent needs to understand the potential career path this position could take including the advancement possibilities and the degree of responsibility they will have in the position and in the company. The appealing picture you “paint” of your company and the people who work there can go a long way in attracting and landing the best available candidates. You need to provide this information as part of your Job Listing when you are looking for the best people you can find.

I have included a link to a Posting Page that contains a sample Job Listing to show you how easy it is to create an effective presentation that sells the job and your company.

View a sample Posting Page

Today’s high unemployment numbers do not preclude your need to provide these “selling points” in your recruitment advertising if you really want to source exceptional people. Even if a top quality candidate is not interested in or not qualified for a currently open position, he/she will return to your website to review future opportunities if they find your company an attractive place to work.  You can build that perception.  In recruiting, if you “sell”, they will come.