Time is the Key to Recruiting Top Prospects
With business picking up and top talent increasingly hard to find, corporate executives are finally reawakening to the importance of recruitment. While that's a happy development for those of us in the recruiting field, it is also a challenge. Greater priority means increased visibility, but not necessarily increased budgets or support. To take advantage of this more favorable situation, we must be able to sell our executives on the one resource we'll need to do our job. We must find a way to help them understand what it takes to recruit the best talent or risk being unable to do so even as they pay more attention.
The first theater of the War for Talent taught us that the best talent cannot be sourced on an ad hoc basis. Waiting until an opening actually exists before beginning to recruit candidates for employment is an outmoded and ineffective strategy. It is an artifact of a surplus labor market that no longer exists ... except, perhaps, among mediocre performers and those with obsolete skills. To recruit the best prospects in the workforce-rare performers and those with rare skills-you have to identify them early and woo them continuously.
That's the lesson we must clearly and convincingly convey to corporate executives today. The key to success in recruiting top talent is time. Not a little of it, but a lot of it. There is simply no short cut to the process because those who have plenty of job opportunities from which to choose don't make snap decisions or rely on the advice and exhortations of strangers. They expect recruiters to earn their confidence and trust or, to put it another way, to invest the time required to build a relationship with them. That's the only way they can be convinced to do the one thing that people most hate to do: change. In effect, we must convince top talent to go from the devil they know (their current employer) to the devil they don't know (our employer and its opportunity). It's a feat that simply cannot be accomplished on the spur of the moment.
To be successful in the rapidly emerging War for the Best Talent, therefore, we must acquaint executives with that fact and show them what they must do to give us the time we need. In short, we have to tell them how we're going to get started early on the sourcing and recruiting of the best prospects and what it will take in the way of support to do so.
I call this process of preparation "pre-cruiting." It involves forecasting recruiting requirements in advance of actual staffing needs so that three key tasks can be accomplished:
- enough of the best prospects for each expected opening in the enterprise can be identified and sourced,
- enough data can be acquired from those prospects to pre-qualify them for the openings, and
- enough information can be provided to the candidates to pre-sell them on the organization and its employment opportunities.
The goal is not to forecast open positions, but rather, to determine how many top people we must begin to build relationships with now in order to have enough of those quality prospects to fill our openings in the future. Acquiring that inventory is the secret to winning the War for the Best Talent, whether your strategy involves doing the sourcing yourself or turning it over, in whole or part, to a recruitment advertising agency or a staffing firm.
Now, I know what you're thinking: most organizations have little or no workforce planning capability, so just where are these recruiting forecasts going to come from? I acknowledge that expecting hiring managers to provide such information is the stuff of fairy tales, so pre-cruiting adopts an alternative approach. It is based on the simple premise that the future looks a lot like the past. In other words, your organization's staffing needs next year will not be dramatically different from those last year. While this approach clearly won't afford you perfect predictability, it's certainly good enough to help you with two important challenges:
- it will give you the data you need to establish the business case for your receiving additional resources (budget, staff or some combination of the two) over and above that required for filling the openings you have now, and
- it will give you the lead time you need to invest those resources and thereby find and build relationships with the top talent you will likely have to select and hire in the future.
How does this pre-cruiting forecast work? First, it's based on a formula that uses only data you have or can acquire. Second, the calculations within the formula do not require a super-computer to complete or an MBA to understand. In fact, you can roll up the requirements calculations for an entire corporation on a simple spread sheet. And third, the entire process can be easily updated as events unfold and workforce needs firm up.
The formula looks like this:
Projected requirements for a given skill category =
(NRLY + ARLY)/ARTO
Where:
NRLY = Last year's recruiting requirements in that skill category generated by new openings
ARLY = Last year's recruiting requirements in that skill category generated by attrition
ARTO = Your acceptance rate among top talent in that skill category to whom offers were made last year
The following example will illustrate how it works. Let's say that, last year, you recruited 10 C++ programmers for new openings, had an attrition rate of 20% among all C++ programmers in your organization, and achieved an acceptance rate of 30% among the C++ programmers to whom you made offers. Therefore, the total number of top performing C++ programmers with whom you must build a relationship is 40 or (10 + 2)/0.3. That's the inventory you must acquire today in order to deliver ten new hires and replace two former hires in the future ... if you want those employees to be the best in their field.
Some of that inventory may be available in your current candidate database, but even if it is, you must still use the time you have until the openings occur to woo those and other, new prospects effectively. In essence, the purpose of forecasting recruiting requirements is not resumes, but relationships. It's about investing the effort to build confidence and trust with the quality candidates you'll need to meet your organization's staffing requirements and the expectations of those reawakened executives.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Who is Peter Weddle?Peter Weddle is a recruiter, HR consultant and business CEO turned author and commentator. Described by The Washington Post as "... a man filled with ingenious ideas," he has earned an international reputation, pioneering concepts in Human Resource leadership and employment. He has authored or edited over two dozen books and been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The National Business Employment Weekly and CNN.com. Today, he writes two newsletters that are distributed worldwide and oversees WEDDLE's LLC, a print publisher specializing in the field of human resources. WEDDLE's annual Guides and Directory to job boards are recognized for their accuracy and helpfulness, leading the American Staffing Association to call Weddle the "Zagat of the online employment industry."
© Copyright 2007 WEDDLE's LLC.
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