Solutions to Recruiting’s Top Challenges

April 1, 2014 at 12:00 PM by Kathleen de Lara

recruiting challengesThe following is a guest post from Ben Martinez, HireVue's VP of Human Resources. HireVue provides tailored, personal candidate engagement through social networking, mobile interactions, and video interviewing.

HR and talent players: If you have been in the search game then you can relate to the five basic struggles in recruiting:

  • Ability to find talent
  • A method to organize people into one place for everyone to see who is in your talent pool 
  • An easy way to contact people 
  • Collaborating with hiring team and talent
  • Knowing purpose behind posting a job

Let's break these down:

1. Find talent.

Sad, but true. Can you find the best and brightest brand manager, sales rep or software engineer located in your company's geographic area? Can you search the web using Boolean search or some other method to deliver your business leaders top talent? Look at how you find talent. Repeat what works and kill what does not work. As a recruiter, you might need to just let referrals happen and find a great way to organize the referrals and prospects. Speaking of organizing...

2. Organize candidates into one place for your hiring team to see.

Do you have a pipeline of talent that is easily accessible? Can your hiring managers look at the talent in your pipeline? Can you easily access this talent to check in and see how they are doing? You need a strong bench of candidates who are ready to talk about working at your shop. You need this bench talent to be visible to your organization, not hidden in some old clunky ATS. Seek out technology that makes your talent pipeline easily viewable. Organize with lists on Twitter; some people use tools like LinkedIn projects. Do not hide your talent away on a password-protected ATS that can only be seen by certain individuals involved in the hiring process.

3. So you have found the talent and they are organized nicely for all to see, but how do you contact them without scaring them off?

Be deliberate and contact candidates with intent. Top talent does not like cheesy robotic emails from out-of-touch recruiters. They prefer direct and personal messages. This takes a hunter and farmer approach. Sometimes cranky Nicky needs to step aside for this part of the job. Hunt the top talent and hook them in, then farm them and treat them well with beer, coffee, soda, ice cream, or water and attention, but do not wear out your welcome with them. Use a blend of email, phone, various social media sites (Twitter is good for this) and keep them on the hook. Be prepared to push when it is time to contact them. Fancy pants HR pros call this collaboration.

4. There are various ways to define and do collaboration, but here is what it means in recruiting.

A collaborator of talent is someone who can behave like a maven. They are the ultimate talent agent and will connect talent with the organization or organizations they recruit for. They build high performing teams and assemble and deliver top candidates to hiring managers. They understand what a hiring manager needs before they know what they need. They will guide and steer a candidate to an opportunity that is most meaningful to them. They can use technology (i.e., video, social, etc) to deliver top candidates to hiring managers. Notice we took care of four out of five of a recruiter's struggles without posting the job.

5. Great recruiters focus very little on posting a job.

They know the effort will not be worth the return when they spend their time and energy on creating a job posting. They use job postings to clarify job expectations and to share the job postings with their network. They have a massive following and want a creative or catchy job posting to share. Some use video and photos to enhance a job posting. They know how to "check the box" for compliance on job postings and can move on.

This is what it takes. Sound harder than what you are doing now? If it were easy everyone would be doing it. That is why not everyone is getting top talent. Want a lead on an organization who can help you do this? Check out Entelo — they know a thing or two about helping companies take advantage of technology to find top talent.

Ben-Martinez

Ben Martinez is the VP of Human Resources at HireVue, a talent interaction platform that allows recruiters to source, evaluate, and engage candidates through video, mobile, and social networking interaction and interviews. He’s worked for various HR leadership roles around the U.S. and Mexico for Fortune 500 companies including Pepsi, Sears, and Honeywell. Ben is also the man behind HR Hound, a blog dedicated to his insights on all things HR and talent-related in business and sports.


What he said. If you're interested in learning more about how Entelo can help your team source qualified candidates, let one of our industry professionals take you through a tour. What recruiting challenges are keeping your team from filling open reqs? Let us know in the comments and be sure to check out our latest free eBook in the meantime:

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