Do you need to change your long-term approach to recruiting?

How are you attracting qualified candidates?

 

As the war for talent has heated up, most firms have been forced to change how they are trying to attract qualified candidates for their jobs.

 

We’ve talked with a lot of employers and can tell you that most of them have focused on one core type of change… throwing money at the problem.

 

They’ve either increased their pay or sign-on bonuses or are spending more money to attract candidates.

 

All of these options can be beneficial for employers, but they are all short-term changes to their recruiting strategy.

 

Why are these options not sustainable?

 

Throwing money at the problem seems like the easiest thing to do…the problem is that that means it is also the easiest strategy for everyone to copy.

 

If you increase your pay by $1 an hour, your competitors can immediately turn around and increase their pay by $1 an hour.

 

Almost immediately after you make a short-term change, your competitors can see the change you made and do the same thing… therefore nullifying the benefit you would get from your short-term change.

 

So why do employers do this when hiring?

 

They assume that a short-term, monetary change is their only option for keeping up with or matching their competitors in the marketplace.

 

The fact is, it's not the only option…it's just the easiest one.

 

So what is the right approach?

 

The more long-term approach for attracting top talent when hiring would be to change your firm’s recruiting strategy drastically!

 

This includes changing one or more of the core variables in your equation of hiring talent.

 

That means changing the WHO…

  – what type of person you're searching for

  – where your talent pool is located

  – pulling people from other jobs and other industries

  – pulling people from lower jobs and moving them up the career ladder

  – pulling people back into the job market (hiring retirees, stay-at-home moms, etc)

 

Changing the WHO is one of the main things you can do to completely change where you stand in the talent competition… you could suddenly be competing with different organizations than you were before.

 

The second thing is changing WHAT you have to offer.

• What is the experience of working for your firm?
• What is the job structure like?
• Can you offer part-time work?
• Can people work remotely?

 

Those changes are much harder to make because they affect not only the new hire, but also your existing employees, management, and the way that you drive performance in your organization.

 

However, when you do change against the status quo in these areas, it has a more lasting impact on the competition for talent because you're now targeting a different pool with a vastly different offering… this is the best long-term strategy!

 

If you'd like some help talking through this, our team of hiring strategists is here to help! Click the button below to get something scheduled...

 

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