Over the years, we’ve had a chance to talk to hundreds of executives about how they are recruiting for their
Note: this is a truncated version of a lengthier whitepaper, which can be found here.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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