Working as a cleared recruiter is a talent puzzle as you are hoping to fill fully funded positions on contracts and balance submitting key personnel for your proposal efforts. Managing turnover, supporting newly awarded programs, and helping to sustain your business capture team is an equilibrium that’s tough to manage.
How to Ace Your Proposal Recruiting
Winning new work to add to your past performance is critical in the defense contracting game. Here are five ways to ace your proposal recruiting and support future revenue for your company.
1. Maintain a good relationship with your prime contractor.
Best athlete approaches to gaining billets as a subcontractor can seem like a shot in the dark – whether you have a long list of candidates to submit or are having trouble identifying talent for a role, continue communication with your prime’s hiring manager or recruiters so they remember you and your company’s name for future positions.
2. Meet with your hiring and project managers immediately after the RFP drops.
The volume and value of important information on a position or qualifications is generally lower from an RFP over a SOW. Therefore, the substance given to recruiters for this type of recruiting is much lower than fully funded positions. Meet with your internal teams to get a full sense of what the contract is and what the role will be doing so you can build a full job requisition, identify the right candidate, and sell them to sign with you.
3. Continue to pipeline in the off season.
Even if you are not currently hiring for a specific skillset, continue to have networking conversations and pipeline for your future proposal efforts, ensuring that you touch base with candidates in locations that are outside of your fully funded contracts and could potentially have work in in the future. Go a step further and have a VIP list of candidates that you can lean on for quick turns.
4. Streamline your processes.
For every key position / resume submitted with a proposal, you should have a Letter of Commitment (or Intent) along with formatted resumes. Make sure that you and your HR team’s processes are succinct so that when it comes time to a quick proposal crunch, you have all the necessary documents to send and receive back from candidates.
5. Maintain expectations.
Proposal recruiting could mean that you put in a lot of work and effort with candidates only to not win the work. Maintain expectations, take a moment to reflect, and move on to the next position you need to staff.
THEÂ CLEARED RECRUITINGÂ CHRONICLES: YOUR WEEKLY DoD RECRUITING TIPS TO OUT COMPETE THE NEXT NATIONAL SECURITY STAFFER.
