InsuranceNewsNet By Alisha Frederick
February 15, 2019
Although the burgeoning job market
has been a boon for business growth, it has created unprecedented pressure on
recruiting and hiring. Talented people have always been difficult to find, but
the current employment landscape has only made that talent rarer and the
recruiting process more competitive.
For advisors, that can mean a cap in
growth until essential roles are filled, whether they are sales or back-office
roles. An unfilled position can mean limits on your ability to add more clients
and can strain the relationships with the clients you already have as they too
begin to feel that the business is at or above capacity.
Bringing in the right candidates is
often the most important step a business takes to grow.
Today, recruiters are salespeople.
Top candidates have their choice of positions or, perhaps, are not actively
applying to new positions. This means that more businesses must rely on
extensive outreach and sourcing campaigns to fill critical roles. This has
always been the case to some degree. Historically, headhunting for high-level
positions was often a necessity. But now we are seeing a growing number of mid-
and entry-level positions requiring more proactive approaches to finding,
vetting and recruiting candidates.
A more sales-driven approach to
recruiting means a shift in the way many recruiters have worked up until this
point, and that has led to an evolution in recruiting best practices. When
candidates aren’t coming to you, new recruiting best practices look like this:
- Recruiting with direct sales
tactics.
Top companies are thinking about candidate searches the way that salespeople
think about prospecting. They build an ideal candidate profile and get on
the phone, doing extensive outreach — often with cold calls — to get in
front of the right talent. Sometimes they hire external firms to handle
this first layer of outreach.
- Refined candidate benchmarks. When talent is easy to come
by, recruiters can chase “purple unicorns” (dream candidates), which leads
to inflated job requirements. When sourcing candidates looks more like
marketing in terms of identifying demographics and desires in candidates,
having a clear picture of who is a good fit for the role is critical when
you invest in recruiting.
- Fit over volume. More candidates do not
necessarily lead to better results. When you have a refined candidate
profile to work from, focusing on fit will lower the overall number of
candidate conversations, but the quality of those candidates will go up.
Pursuing fit should also extend to the interviews themselves, filtering
out candidates early in the process to save time and increase your chances
of ending the search with an employee who stays with you for the long
term.
- Deeper conversations. Recruiters have always worked
to vet candidates, but today we need to go beyond basic skills assessments
and be willing to challenge or unpack the answers candidates give you. For
example, if a candidate tells you, “I really want to find a place to
settle down,” don’t leave that open to interpretation. What does that
mean? Where one recruiter sees that as proof that the candidate is looking
for a place where they can make a long-term impact, another recruiter
might see that as proof that the candidate is not hungry for success
anymore. Let the candidate tell you what they mean.
- The candidate pitch. In your quest to find fit, you
also have to share the journey with the candidate and sell them on working
with you. This conversation is in part about compensation and job perks,
but culture is a big factor as well. If you can emotionally connect with a
candidate via your company’s mission while checking all the boxes on
things such as salary and benefits, you are more likely to end the search
with the right hire.
Yes, the recruiting process is more
intense than it used to be. That reality is unlikely to change anytime soon, so
the sooner you can rethink how you recruit, the sooner you can find the
employees you need. As you make the change, you may need to shift how you
invest in recruiting. For example, perhaps you spend less money on job boards
and more money on external recruiting services to call on candidates. But the
end philosophy is still the same: If you find the right candidate the first
time, the upfront investment pays for itself a dozen times over since you won’t
need to replace that person in the near future. And, in that time, the right
candidate will make a difference in your work.
Alisha Frederick is corporate recruiter for the PT Services
Group. Alisha may be contacted at alisha.frederick@innfeedback.com.
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