3 Old Recruiting Rules For The New Year

If you want to hire the best talent in 2017, you need to consider a few old recruiting rules that have never changed and that will serve you well if you follow them.

It’s gotten to the point where the online recruiting industry generates more spam than Viagra. Job boards have become such a commodity that the market has spawned coupon sites offering discounts on recruiting.

Yet in The Atlantic comes a warning from Ahu Yildirmaz, lead economist for ADP Research Institute, which puts together the private sector jobs report: “The greatest challenge employers will face in 2017 will be finding skilled workers in the tightening labor market,” he said.

So why aren’t the job-posting services raising their prices and charging premium fees to help recruiters fill jobs for which there seem to be precious few available workers?

It’s simple: Nothing has changed. The best talent doesn’t come when you post a job because the best workers expect what your customers demand: the personal touch. They don’t read job boards or respond to recruiters dialing for dollars—recruiters who know nothing about the jobs and employers they represent. They want to hear from people like you, top managers who can talk shop and who can attract exceptional workers.

That’s why if you want to hire the best talent in 2017, you need to consider a few old recruiting rules that have never changed and that will serve you well if you follow them. The state of corporate recruiting is so bad today that I’m framing two of these rules as “do nots” simply because before you can do this right, you have to stop doing it wrong.

Rule 1: Don’t Send A Flunky To Do Your Recruiting

Yes, I said a flunky. A stand-in. Don’t expect that a personnel jockey from your HR department is going to impress a hard-to-get marketing whiz. Only you can do that.

It’s also an old rule that most jobs are found and filled through personal contacts. So why would you take an impersonal approach to hiring while your best competitors are scarfing up the best people by making recruiting personal?

If you want your HR department to do something useful to help speed up intelligent recruiting, assign the department the task of figuring out where the best talent hangs out. Then go there and impress the talent with your motivation to reach out and attract them yourself.

Rule 2: Don’t Ask Busy People To Fill Out Forms

Do you launch marketing campaigns that require prospective customers to fill out five pages of online forms to qualify for a sales pitch to buy your company’s products? Of course not.

So what makes you think it’s OK for your HR department to treat marketers like they have to qualify to talk to you about a job? Your head of HR will explain that someone has to “screen” and “qualify” those people. That’s why they have to fill out forms and provide their experience and history.

Sheesh. Why is your HR department recruiting people whose experience and history HR doesn’t already know? Do you let your sales team chase low-probability prospects, or do you invest loads in big data analytics that tell you exactly the people worth selling to?

When you identify people worth recruiting, wine and dine them. Don’t ask them to fill out forms.

Rule 3: Be Ready To Close The Deal Now

When you have a high-value prospect in your office, someone who’s ready to buy your product after hearing your pitch, do you thank the person for listening, then explain that you’ll get back to the person in a few weeks about closing the sale?

This rule can actually be rewritten another way: Interview only candidates worth hiring. It’s no different than qualifying a customer before you invest in selling to the person. Of course, you know it requires a big investment to qualify customers.

When you bring a job candidate into your office, you should already know whether the person is worth hiring. You should have made that investment in advance. The job board industry wants you to forget that step because the more people you interview and the fewer you hire, the more money the job boards make from you.

This is not to say that job interviews are for making job offers every time. A job interview helps you determine whether a person is really worth hiring. But when that meeting ends, you should have the final bits of data you need to look the candidate in the face and say, “No, thank you—this won’t work out, but thanks for your time” or “I’m so glad we met to talk shop. I want you to work with us, so I’m going to offer you a job right now, before my best competitor snatches you up!”

Nothing has changed in sales and marketing or in recruiting, except the availability of rich data to help us close the right deals quickly, before our competitors get the jump on us. It’s critical to remember that we’re not dealing in commodities and that we can’t expect discounts when recruiting. The basic rules have not changed: Do it yourself, respect your candidates, and be ready to hire them now.

For more tips about high-value recruiting, see “Overcome 3 Obstacles To Hiring Better And Faster.”