3 Commonly Missed Hiring Opportunities

December 1, 2015 at 1:24 PM by Kathleen de Lara

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The blueprint to hiring is often reduced to a cookie-cutter recipe: Source, outreach, interview, offer – but the key to attracting people to your company requires a concurrent formula lead by your colleagues and the marketer within you. 

A carefully planned recruiting approach is more than just building your pipeline, sending personalized emails, and scheduling interviews. Where are candidates slipping through the cracks? Here are three places to start double-checking.

Telling your company story. 

Your reputation as an employer matters. That strong, positive company culture and mission the team boasts about doesn’t make a difference to anyone in the outside world if you don’t make it tangible. What sets apart your company from the others also “solving problems”? The company’s story could very well be the deciding factor between you and another. Knowing ways to deliver your company and product’s origin story, what inspires you most about the team, and how your role drives where you’d like to be in the future makes a mark on candidates.

Recruiters and hiring managers often harp on about their company as they would if they were making a sale. Anyone can read through your product page to get that same story. Talk about the bigger impact and make a personal connection to the problem – how you’re helping others, what customers have to say about how you’re supporting their growth, and the narrative about where your team is headed. 

Following up with candidates who turn you down. 

A candidate’s rejection letter shouldn’t mark the end of your conversation with them. The Never Stop Recruiting concept takes its truest form when you maintain a tactical approach to learning more about what people are looking for in a role, and that can change over time, meaning your org could be a better fit in the future. Building relationships takes a lot of time and research.

Terminating your relationship with an uninterested candidate is wasted real estate for building upon the connection you’ve already developed, and candidate’s network of viable people you have yet to get to know. Instead of marking these candidates as a loss, keep tabs on your top, unforgettable 10 people. Take note of the company they’re at, projects they’re working on, and most importantly, when they start making changes to their online profiles, a signal they could be interested in another opportunity. Without talking about a specific position, take the approach of treating candidates as thought leaders and ask for help with a particular problem, primer for revisiting a possibly suitable, timely opportunity for them.

Keeping in mind people are curious consumers. 

People will inevitably take to the web to learn more about your company, and that goes beyond your company page and social profiles. How often are you checking what employees are saying about your company? Sites like Glassdoor and Indeed offer no holds barred company reviews by employees themselves, and a nonexistent profile is just as bad as a page with lots of negative reviews.

Try this method: Check in with employees regularly to get feedback on job expectations, management, and career progression. (Officevibe and TinyPulse are good tools to start with.) Remind candidates quarterly to share something related to your company – a recent press piece, job openings in their department, a company blog post, and of course, their contribution to your company’s review page.

Now, what about ex-employees? Exit interviews are as important as regular interviews. Employees quitting are out of your control to an extent, but setting time aside to understand where a company fell short lets people know you’re concerned about critiques and improvement.

What other ways are you bolstering your hiring plans? Leave a comment or tweet the details @Entelo. Be sure to read through this guide we created with Jazz (featuring William Tincup, Kevin Kruse, and other talent heads) on keeping employees engaged from the start!

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