The 7 Secrets of World-Class Recruiting Organizations

Over the years, we’ve had a chance to talk to hundreds of executives about how they are recruiting for their companies. We’ve seen companies up close who are clearly setting the bar for talent acquisition. And we’ve seen others that are, well, not doing quite as well. Now, of course we can’t divulge all the information that’s been shared in confidence with us, but what we can do is pass along some really important best practices that separate the winners from the losers in the talent war. So without further delay, here are seven tactics we’ve seen world­class recruiting organizations employ:

Note: this is a truncated version of a lengthier whitepaper, which can be found here.

Aggressively Seek Out Passive Candidates.

We refer to this as being “passive aggressive”. The best recruiting organizations  we’ve talked to are not content to sit back and wait for quality people to find them. They participate in something that we like to call “Proactive Recruiting”. It’s the heat­ seeking missile approach to recruiting.

• How do they kick this process off? Here are a few things we’ve seen:They do whatever they can to determine where the people they are lookingto hire are likely to be. Often this is knowing what company a person might have worked for previously or what school they attended. It might be diving deep on a specific Github project that has a lot of correlation with what their company is building or taking a deep dive into academic publications (as an aside, we’ve seen more people using Academia.edu and ResearchGate as recruiting tools lately). Whatever it is, it’s done with a level of intensity that is second­to­none. They are determined to leave no stone unturned in their search for the best people to fill a position.

They have a systematic “hit list”. Way more sophisticated than the “spray and pray” approach other organizations use. They realize that the universe of the “right” candidates is actually somewhat narrow, so they take the time to research those individuals and reach out using highly customized messages. To hear them talk about their process is akin to sitting in the “war room” on Draft Day for a professional sports franchise.Who’s on the board right now? Who’s looking to move soon? Whose boss just took a new job? Yes, it can be almost as exciting as getting ready to make that first round draft pick. Who said recruiting couldn’t be a blast.

 "Poke" Candidates

Remember poking, that long ­lost remnant of Facebook silliness? The thing about poking was that it was a very lightweight way to suggest interest (albeit of a different variety than recruiting!). So what the heck does it mean to “poke” candidates? We see it happen in a couple of different ways:

• Follow candidates on Twitter. ­ This offers all sorts of benefits relative to the one second it takes to do this. First off, it’s a subtle hint to the candidate that you are interested in them. Because the vast majority of people “accept” all Twitter follow requests (usually automatically given that most people don’t protect their Twitter updates), it’s much more lightweight than sending a LinkedIn connection request. 
• LinkedIn requests. ­ This is a more aggressive tactic and we’d advise to proceed with caution. Sending random LinkedIn connection requests to people you don’t know is not a good idea. But there’s a step that goes beyond what most people do which is important to grok: the contextual connection request. Here is an example:

Perhaps you go to a Meetup and look at the RSVP list ahead of time (you are doing that right?!). There are a couple of engineers on the list that you are looking forward to meeting, but the Meetup is crowded and you don’t get a chance. Guess what? You have a perfect context to send them a request (e.g., “I missed you at the Ruby on Rails Meetup last night but wanted to connect.”). Some will accept and some will decline but at the end of the day you’ll be building your Rolodex and, as with Twitter, all sorts of good things start to happen when you’re connected to a candidate on LinkedIn.