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Successful Recruiting Strategies

If you ask managers about hiring, they invariably say it is one of the most important parts of their job. But if you ask them where there recruiting strategy is, you'll find it's often at the bottom of their lists.

If you want managers to become passionate about hiring better talent, you have to eliminate the pain. Here are the top 10 painful factors to take the pain out of the recruiting process.

1. Multiple Requisition Approvals
   Why have unnecessary delays? If their budget is approved, managers shouldn't need additional signatures and approvals to make an offer.
2. The Long Delay Between Need and Hire
   Managers don't understand why hiring a candidate requires completing so much paperwork or why it takes so long to prepare an offer letter. When courting top talent, they are often reluctant to enter into the process, because they know their organization will not act quickly enough to be competitive. Remember good talent doesn't stay available long.
3. Resume Overload
   Don't get buried by useless resumes from totally unqualified candidates. Recruiters act as candidate pre-screeners and should thoroughly understand the job requirements and therefore be more precise in the quality and quantity of resumes forwarded to your hiring managers. Once this is done, those stacks will dwindle down into a handful of qualified resumes managers actually look forward to receiving, because they know each resume meets their minimum requirements for the job.
4. Managers Aren't Salespeople
   Most managers don't know how to sell candidates during an interview. We can supply short and simple sales training on the spot, as well as tips and sales techniques that managers can use when making an offer.
5. Interviews Aren't Natural
   An interview's formality makes both the manager and the candidate nervous and uncomfortable. Managers would prefer the freedom to ask more direct, technical questions. Good interviewees are also rarely indicative of being a good employee. Try to prepare your hiring manager for a more professional or specific conversation rather than a general "getting to know you" approach.
6. Fear of Lawsuits
   Don't let your Legal or HR departments prevent managers from being somewhat creative in the hiring process for fear of being sued. Give managers more realistic probability assessments of the legal risks involved, rather than automatically browbeating managers with lawsuit warnings. Establish guidelines but don't tie there hands and the expect a good hire.
7. No Market Research or Competitive Benchmarking
   Give managers information on what candidates expect and what it takes to get them to say, "Yes." This includes comparison information about typical offers candidates may have received from competing firms.
8. Documentation Doldrums
   After the interviews are over and the hiring is completed, managers hate filling out forms that document the hiring and interview process. What is the value of writing all this down when nobody seems to use this information anyway? Make the process as simple and quick as possible.
9. What Works
   Managers are often in the dark about the best recruiting practices other successful managers are using within the firm. Find out what the most effective and ineffective tools, sources and strategies are within your company and share them with your managers.
10. No Control
    Managers often feel like they lose top candidates because the offers approved by HR are not competitive. Stop giving managers outdated salary surveys; instead, give them more control and better data on what it takes to close the top candidates.

• Bonus Tip: A Weak Business Case Impacts Passion

  Managers live in a dollars-and-cents world, but recruiters often fail to quantify the economic impacts of great and poor hiring. By showing managers the impact recruiting has on time to market and productivity, you can rapidly increase their passion for recruiting.

  It's true that many of the issues managers face when recruiting and hiring are outside most individual recruiters' control. Still, it's important to understand their issues and why the process frustrates them. Recruiters and HR need to work with managers to eliminate the roadblocks to making this a passionate activity, and streamline the process so managers make recruiting and retention their top two priorities.

   

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