The demand for talent is at a record high, while aggressive recruiting is sadly at a 20-year low.
Today, Successful Recruiting Leaders Need Bold And Aggressive Practices
Yes, it’s sad to report that aggressive recruiting is fading into the past, just like rock ‘n’ roll. As a result, most corporate recruiting functions have slowly transformed into conservative copycat functions.
Today, even former recruiting powerhouse companies like Google and Amazon have slowly joined the crowd. They are becoming painfully conservative. Of course, when you rely on these traditional methods in hot recruiting areas like AI and data security. You literally stand no chance of meeting your recruiting goals and business results.
I have found two primary causes of this damaging conservative avoid criticism at all cost trend. The first is that recruiting leaders have built up an excessive fear of lawsuits. However, I calculate that the cost of these lawsuits is minuscule compared to the business damage that is done due to conservative recruiting. The primary culprit is the pounding that recruiting leaders receive daily on social media and employer review sites like Glassdoor.com.
Unfortunately, these inordinate fears don’t come without a cost. This avoidance of criticism prevents recruiting leaders from being more aggressive and damaging everyone’s recruiting results. I further find that this trend will continue. Few corporate recruiting leaders today are even looking for innovative, bold, and aggressive recruiting practices that would make all the difference.
The Benefits Received From Bold Recruiting Practices
A quick scan of this next section will reveal that you will receive six primary advantages after implementing any of the listed aggressive recruiting practices.
- This unique approach will get your organization noticed by many potential candidates.
- These bold practices will allow you to identify prime recruiting prospects others can’t find.
- You will finally be able to attract bold and aggressive candidates because they will take your bold recruiting approach as a positive indicator that your corporate culture encourages aggressiveness and innovation everywhere.
- No one else is using these practices. You will gain a competitive advantage over your talent competitors.
- You will attract the best recruiters from throughout your industry who are eager to innovate.
The Boldest And Most Aggressive Recruiting Practices
To help slow or even reverse this troubling trend and encourage the wider use of bold and aggressive approaches. I decided to put together a list of my recommended approaches. I can’t say that any of them are new or innovative because each practice has proven successful. These practices can now only be classified as dormant because they are no longer used.
I recommend each of them to those ready to make a big splash in recruiting. The boldest, most aggressive, and highest impact practices appear early in the list.
Hire To Hurt (and hire those that beat you)
This is the most powerful and aggressive of all of the recommended bold approaches. The “hire to hurt” approach is unique among recruiting practices because it provides four significant benefits.
First, this approach builds your talent capabilities higher and much faster than normal recruiting. Why? Because those that you target and hire under this approach are all currently employed. Unlike when you hire from the ranks of the unemployed or those from lesser companies. You are guaranteed that each new hire will be completely up-to-date in their latest skills, training, and experience.
Your company also receives a second benefit. Your new hires will all currently work at your competitors. That means that these recruits will not only bring their talent with them. But they also bring your direct competitors’ ideas, plans, and best practices.
A third benefit is that this initial recruiting campaign will likely lead to a steady flow of new hires from your competitors. Once they have worked at your organization for a while, these new recruits will likely successfully encourage several of their best colleagues to follow them.
The fourth benefit is that, while you are rapidly building your talent capabilities, you are simultaneously, without extra cost or effort, lowering the talent capabilities and damaging the business results of your competitors. Incidentally, I found that CEOs especially appreciate this last ironic benefit. This extremely aggressive approach does carry with it a fear of retaliation (this retaliation seldom happens). There is a variation of this approach that specifically targets the competitor’s individual employees who frequently beat you in head-to-head competition. This is the “hire those that beat you” approach. It specifically targets and then recruits the competitor’s employees that beat you in competitive areas like sales, property acquisition, patents, investments, and yes… recruiting.
You can learn more details about the “hire-to-hurt strategy” here. And the “hire those that beat you strategy” here.
Right Time Hiring When The Competition Is Low
The standard practice in recruiting is to begin hiring immediately after a requisition is approved. Unfortunately, “hiring any time” can be a problem. The number of candidates available in the marketplace and companies actively recruiting them varies significantly throughout the year. So, the key to successful recruiting under this “right time” hiring approach is to postpone a significant portion of your hiring until the ideal time when the supply of candidates is high and the competition for them is low.
So, the first step in this approach is to begin gathering data for each job family that can be used to identify the time periods that are most favorable to recruiting. However, if you have savvy recruiters at your company, a shortcut is to simply ask them. Because the very best already know these times for the different jobs within your industry. Of course, to effectively postpone hiring, you will need to help your hiring managers maintain their productivity for up to two months using existing sharing of work approaches or temps, contractors, or overtime hours.
Low competition times vary by job and industry. However, as a general guide, I have found that low levels of talent competition often occur during the fall holidays and August vacation time (when most hiring managers are unavailable). Competition is often low during May and December, right before the corporate fiscal year ends. The most favorable time to recruit commissioned salespeople is after commissions are paid out in December.
You can learn more details about hiring at the right time here.
CEO Calls – The most effective candidate-convincing tool
A CEO call is when your own top executive personally calls and sells one of your critical “must-have” candidates in a strategic job. I have found that this CEO’s call is the top offer closing tool that works worldwide.
First, it works because it’s unique. Every candidate will be pleasantly surprised or even shocked when they receive the call to the point where they will talk about this experience widely among their colleagues (and that will help to build your employer brand). Each call will likely be successful because CEOs are almost always exceptional salespeople.
A second reason why this approach is effective is because such a call is so difficult to arrange. So, after it occurs, the candidate will realize how much the company and its CEO are willing to invest in them (even before they are hired).
Finally, most candidates assume that if they take the job. This strong relationship with the CEO will continue throughout their tenure, and that relationship will help them get more accomplished.
Of course, getting the CEO’s cooperation isn’t always easy. To start, you need to make a compelling argument to them about its impacts and the high ROI of this practice. And to ensure that the call has the desired effect, your CEO must be thoroughly briefed on the candidate, their background, and their criteria for accepting their next job.
After CEOs make a few calls and see the powerful results, they are more than willing to schedule 3 to 4 monthly calls. I would also add that even though this call is usually made at the end of the hiring process to close your finalist, it has convinced valuable nonactive job seekers to apply to your company formally.
You can learn more details about these CEO calls here.
Make Candidate References A Major Source Of New Recruiting Prospects
Getting job references to provide you with names is a bold approach. Unfortunately, it is seldom used, primarily because those responsible for reference checking are usually narrow thinkers.
Despite that fact, getting additional names from current and past job references should be a primary recruiting goal. Your name-capturing should start early in your sourcing efforts.
Begin by scanning the files of recent new hires and the top two candidates from your recent job openings. Then, specifically, identify the names of the references provided who currently work at companies in your industry and are known for their talent bench strength. During the call with each reference, compliment them as someone who comes highly recommended. Both because they are extremely helpful but also because they are well-connected in their field. Next, ask them directly, “Would you please help me?” I need help identifying one or two prospects in this field that I should be considering for my future openings. And because these references currently work at a top company. In some cases, they will be willing to provide you with the names of “up-and-coming talent” at their own company who are struggling to find a new opportunity.
Next, turn your attention to the references from your current candidates. Realize that in many cases, these candidates select their references based on how connected they are. So, consider all references as a prime source for names. At the end of your recruiter’s standard reference check call, ask each reference if they would help you identify one or two additional prospects you should consider for future openings. Don’t forget that each reference should be considered current or future recruiting targets. Finally, realize that the current references of your top candidate might be willing to help you sell them on your job. So consider recontacting the most enthusiastic of the finalist’s references. And ask for their help in closing the deal.
You can learn more details about the many ways that you can use references in recruiting here.
Reconsider Top Candidates That “Came Close”
Unfortunately, it’s almost always true that once an offer is accepted, the remaining candidates who participated in the recruiting process will usually be forgotten. So, this “reconsideration approach” aims to determine if any candidates who “came close” to being hired should be revisited and considered for future jobs. Recruiting these candidates makes sense because you already know a lot about them. They have been thoroughly screened; most would still love to work for your company.
There are four primary ways that a candidate can be labeled as “came close.” First, because they turned down your offer, and maybe now their circumstances have changed. Next, they came in second (which is why they are called silver medalists). In this case, they didn’t get the job primarily because they were competing against an exceptional candidate (and any other time they would’ve been hired). Third, they were rated as a top finalist but dropped because they weren’t deemed to be a close fit for this team/manager (But they might fit at other teams). And fourth, even though they became finalists, they prematurely withdrew themselves before your hiring process ended.
You can get more details on how to recruit “came close candidates” here.
Name Capturing During Every Recruiting Step
This last approach also deserves consideration, even though it requires several additions to your recruiting process. This “name capturing” approach aims to identify the names of potential recruits (for your talent pipeline) at every phase of your recruiting process. For example, at the beginning of your sourcing effort, gathering names from your employees who have successfully made referrals to this job family makes sense. However, when approaching these employees, don’t ask them for a formal referral (because most employees see them as time-consuming). But instead, tell them that you’re using a “names only” approach. Ask each of them for help identifying one or two additional names.
Interviews are also a prime time to capture additional names. You can capture additional names from each finalist if you follow this approach closely. First, establish the premise that one of your primary hiring criteria is whether the candidate is well-connected in their job and industry. Then, ask them to show the value of their connections by identifying a handful of impressive industry colleagues who work one level above them. Then, add those names to your talent pipeline. Next, during onboarding, ask each of your new hires to provide you with the names of their best colleagues still working at their former company. This approach works because the new hires’ loyalty has now shifted to your company.
You can learn more about how to continually capture names for your talent pipeline here.
Final Thoughts
The phrase I hate hearing from recruiting leaders is “acting with an abundance of caution.” Those who use that phrase mean acting without the possibility of risk or criticism. And if you remember the message contained in the old phrase, “You can’t make a great omelet without breaking a few eggs. That should reinforce the fact that obtaining most things of value requires both a fight and some degree of risk. That means that within recruiting, it’s time to stop benchmarking best practices. Because doing that ends up with every recruiting function merely copying what most have been doing for a while. So, my advice to smart recruiting leaders is to continually search for the most effective and powerful tools in recruiting rather than experience or education. The “tools that you use” make the primary difference in corporate recruiting.
Note for the reader – Please help to spread Dr. Sullivan’s ideas by sharing this article with your team/network and by posting it on your favorite media.
