Steve Lowisz, President and CEO, Qualigence, Inc.
As you may recall from Part One of this look into key strategies for recruiting the best talent, we were examining important questions to consider. Let’s take a closer look at the first two:
1. What is your organization’s candidate value proposition?
Although we need to understand the perceived selling points of our opportunities, relying on canned pitches identified by your marketing organization or some third party branding organization does not really provide you with the edge you might think.
The best answer to this question is not that you have “bring your dog to work day” or that lunch is free each day. The best answer is in fact a question – how many of us ask potential candidates what is important to them before we tell them why they should work for us? Few recruiters or hiring executives can tell me with certainty what the hot buttons are for any candidate they are potentially courting, with the exception of very few superficial issues.
Although it is always important to understand the selling points of the organization we are recruiting for (value proposition), the key differentiator as competition increases is being able to deliver a more compelling value proposition based on information gathered from the potential candidate.
Learning what to ask candidates, when to ask candidates, and how to ask candidates about their motivation is the key to unlocking the door to their minds. Understanding what makes them tick and crafting an appropriate value proposition is much more effective than a mass marketed value proposition.
2. Are you leveraging your social networks/connections?
It seems that in recent years the badge of honor that recruiters wear proudly on their chests is the number of 1st level connections that they have on LinkedIn, the number of friends on Facebook, or the number of followers on Twitter that they have. Unfortunately when you look at many of the statistics on source of hire, these same tools still lag behind other more traditional recruitment tools.
Expanding your network for the sake of claiming that you are the most connected is a bit like saying you have the most friends, but when it’s time to move, no one shows up to help, leaving you to fend for yourself. Sheer numbers do not guarantee success, as many organizations have discovered since social media hit the scene.
Why does social media based recruitment often fail? Let’s look at a few of the reasons:
- Disregarding the branding aspects of social media.
In today’s age of technologically savvy consumers and candidates, social media is a key tool often used to uncover more about an organization than often known by its recruiters and hiring managers. It used to be joked that a consumer who had a negative experience with an organization’s service or product would tell 7 people, only telling 1-2 about a positive experience. With social media, one negative hiring experience can now be tweeted to thousands of others in seconds. Other sites like Glassdoor provide a dedicated medium for potential candidates to learn about the darkest secrets of your hiring process, management staff, and other company related dirt.
So what do you do? Here are a few suggestions:
· Leverage your current employee population at all levels to create a balanced social media picture of your organization. Let’s be honest, people love to use Facebook, Twitter, and the like to convey their dissatisfaction with their previous or current employer. Encourage employees at all levels to post honest, positive, and encouraging information regarding their experience. An employee praising their internal mentor; an executive thanking an employee for their contribution; the CEO openly tweeting the success of their organization and thanking all team members. These are just basic examples but I think you get the picture.
· Encourage staff to join and contribute to user groups on sites such as LinkedIn and others. Get your team involved with others in their specific function or discipline – relationships can be made with future candidates while at the same time placing your company name front and center in each group.
- Primary focus on taking without willing to give back.
We have all seen this happen time after time. Recruiter A joins LinkedIn, connects with as many people in a given industry user group, has 6-9 months of success identifying candidates and then complains that the well has dried up.
Social networks are all about relationships that include give and take. Always being the friend that asks for help but never offers to help others eventually leads to the lone mover syndrome mentioned above. Joining user groups solely as a way of recruiting candidates without providing some benefit to the group is similar.
· Join user groups where you actually have something to contribute in the form of information, statistics, trends, etc. This could include hiring statistics for a specific related position or compensation trends based on recent recruitment data. The list goes on but the key is to be seen as a valued member of the group that is not just sucking information from the group.
- Primary focus on building contacts and not relationships.
Quantity over quality of relationships is an ongoing battle in recruiting candidates. Whether a recruiter, hiring manager or company executive, this is often the #1 cause for failed recruitment initiatives. Social media increases the issue since it seems to tout numbers of connections over quality of relationships. The intent of social media was to foster relationships, yet its poor application usually detracts from its success.
Building real relationships that foster an exchange of ideas and a willingness to refer others should be one of the primary goals of tools like LinkedIn. Consider this – qualified candidates are being Inmailed on a daily basis from multiple recruiters and hiring managers regarding the “great opportunities” they have. How does a potential candidate decide which unsolicited request they will respond to?
Potential candidates have an overwhelming propensity to respond more often to a request that is based on developing a relationship then on selling a “great opportunity.”
In simple terms, there are basically two ways to approach a consumer or candidate when approaching them regarding a potential opportunity:
- Selling what we have
- Selling what the buyer needs
The problem is that most recruiters and hiring managers make assumptions about why candidates should be interested, rarely uncovering the real needs of a candidate. The right value proposition in recruiting must be tailored to the unique needs of each individual, especially when they are being courted by multiple organizations – namely your competitors.
Most recruiting processes look like this:
1. Fill the need (Pitch the value proposition – “Great Opportunity”)
2. Ask pre-closing questions (Does the proposition fill the need?)
3. Close the sale
Effective recruiting looks like this:
1. Build a relationship – it’s tough to find out what motivates or demotivates someone if we don’t have some type of common ground.
2. Identify the need – what does the potential candidate like about their current role/organization and what could be improved? (This is how to create a real value proposition)
3. Overcome objections – if the candidate is happy and we just pitch a canned story about our great opportunity, how do we uncover their real motivation?
4. Fill the need – now it’s time to deliver a tailored value proposition based on specific candidate desires.
5. Advance the sale – if done correctly, your value proposition sets up the candidate in a way it becomes very difficult to say no!
These thoughts are to be followed up with two more pertinent questions, and Part Three of this series will look into these in greater detail.
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Steve Lowisz is founder, president, and CEO of Qualigence, Inc., a recruitment research and professional search firm that specializes in identifying and attracting passive candidates.
