Talent Sourcing in a Candidate’s Market

It’s been quite a few years now since the recruitment equation switched — from employers sitting in the “catbird seat” — to jobseekers taking over that perch. The job market has only continued to tighten with each passing year. Today, it is the companies that need to prove their worth, rather than the other way around.

Talent sourcing at a time when jobs outnumber candidates is an early, critical step in what should be a rigorous, strategic recruitment process. Your process may begin with writing and posting a well-thought-out job description. But praying that your ideal candidate sees your ad won’t help you find the top talent you need today or at any point in the foreseeable future. And yet, a surprising number of organizations still depend almost exclusively on the outdated “post and pray” method to attract candidates. Sourcing is the most critical element of recruitment after employment branding. If your sourcing doesn’t attract top performers, you can’t make a quality hire.

Sourcing is the process of identifying and engaging people with the right qualifications and culture fit for your organization before they become actual job candidates. Successful sourcing in today’s job market recognizes that people are likely talking to many other potential employers and probably have numerous options for employment. So, what can you do to convince them to consider you? The answer is, manage sourcing and the entire recruitment process the same proactive way you manage your sales process — and treat potential candidates like you do customers.

Sourcing is the most critical element of recruitment after employment branding.

Think Like a Sales Rep

Like successful sales representatives, the best talent sourcers have a deep understanding of their organization’s business needs, culture, and employer brand.

They have equal understanding of what’s important to job seekers today, including purpose, inclusiveness, and the flexibility to work from anywhere.

Sourcers are tasked with:

Researching where to find the best job candidates. This includes appropriate job boards, search engines, social media, local technical colleges and universities, networking websites, and professional events, as well as the viability of holding job fairs and other candidate events.

Remember that some of the most effective sources for new talent are well-paying employee referral programs, hiring former employees, and promoting or developing current employees.

Creating a compelling job post. Details matter! The post should have a searchable title and provide an accurate description of the desired skills and experience preferred or required, and character traits you’re looking for.

It should also describe the most compelling aspects of your culture. For example: your mission and values; generosity of compensation and benefits; flexibility for remote and hybrid work; leadership philosophy and style; and diversity, equity, and inclusiveness (DEI) commitment.

Refresh your employee value proposition (EVP) to reflect today’s workplace expectations and feature it prominently.

Making the first contact. Share the ad on job boards, your organization’s website and social media page, social media networks, and in print.

Make sure your website has an irresistible careers page that promotes your organization as a great place to work (and make sure that it’s true). Invite your employees, vendors, and followers to share the post with their networks.

Following up. The first contact is only the beginning, and creates that all-important first impression of your organization. Make it a good one, and amplify it by communicating frequently and respectfully with your potential candidates. Move speedily from post to recruiter. A slow, arduous process risks losing the candidate altogether.

Our tight job market means you have to source in places you might not have looked for candidates in the past: underrepresented groups like people with disabilities; younger and older people; people who have been incarcerated; and people who may not possess the skills now but can be upskilled.

Thinking outside the box can bring new diversity and inclusivity to your workplace, which in itself helps to attract top talent, enhance your brand, and increase your competitive position.

Sourcing and recruiting at its essence, is about connecting people. Rather than praying for the right people, be open-minded, and you’ll find them in ways and places you never imagined.

 

Kathleen Quinn VotawKathleen Quinn Votaw is Founder/CEO and Speaker/Author of TalenTrust and KQV Speaks. Her first book, Solve the People Puzzle: How High-Growth Companies Attract and Retain Top Talent, debuted in February 2016; with the second book, Dare to Care in the Workplace: A Guide to the New Way We Work and related Podcast launched between 2021-2022.
Kathleen and her firm have achieved many recognitions from many well-known organizations, including ColoradoBiz Magazine, Vistage Worldwide, and the coveted Inc. 5000 for two consecutive years. Kathleen is a regularly published columnist and popular speaker on topics related to HR strategies and workplace culture. Reach Kathleen at [email protected] or (303) 838-3334.

What it Truly Means to Put Your Employees First

Multiple studies show that happy employees have more energy, stay on the job longer, and are more productive than unhappy employees. Doing what it takes to keep your employees happy is not only the right thing to do from a human perspective, it also makes good business sense.

The question is, how do you do it?

The simple answer: Commit to putting your people first. This takes an integrated effort incorporating everything related to employees: leadership, culture, and treatment of individuals.

Build trust through empowerment, creating guidelines for things like employee decision-making and working remotely, and always having an employee’s back.

Below, are ways you can build a people-first work environment:

Leadership

People-centered leaders build trusting relationships that enable people to perform at their best, when they:

  • Show empathy
  • Tell the truth, like it is, not as they’d like it to be
  • Explain their why
  • Show high levels of competence and accountability that bring results
  • Build trust through empowerment, creating guidelines for things like employee decision-making and working remotely, and always having employees’ backs
  • Listen attentively to everyone at all levels and welcome diverse opinions and perspectives
  • Encourage innovation, understanding that some ideas win, some fail
  • Cultivate for new talent continuously so they don’t risk hiring people who don’t fit the culture or burning out current employees because positions go unfilled
  • Use freelance workers to assist and support employees when needed
  • Understand it’s okay not to know everything or have all the answers
  • Embrace that they hire humans with all their complexities and relationships
  • Adopt new tools and technology to support employees in creating and improving products and services
  • Manage performance weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even spur of the moment, rather than annually
  • Prioritize safety, health, and wellbeing

 Culture

You’re not only building a company, you’re building a community, centered on:

Health and Wellbeing

Allow people to work where they’re most comfortable and trust that they’ll get the work done. Introduce stress reducing programs. Extend employee sick leave and time off for family care. Connect employees with coworkers who share interests or family situations. Get employee input on when and how they’d like to return to work, and then get feedback on how well it worked.

Prioritize safety, health, and wellbeing.

Purpose and Mission

Communicate strategically to bring purpose to life across the organization, providing clarity, alignment, and motivation for employees to work toward shared objectives. Communicate purpose to support agile teams in dealing with ambiguity. Incorporate mission and purpose in business agility and change initiatives.

Learning, Reflection and Transition

As a team, be curious and open-minded in your observations. Be humble in listening to new ideas and data, willing to constantly innovate. Share and compare what you’ve learned with other teams to maintain a culture of collaboration.

Create a brainstorming room with comfy seating to encourage creativity and connection.

Welcoming Environment

Consider the office surroundings, such as the furniture. Make it ergonomic and comfortable to prevent repetitive stress disorders and lower back pain or other issues. Create a brainstorming room with comfy seating to encourage creativity and connection. Add some greenery to boost the spirit and add art to blank walls and empty spaces. Break up maze-like small spaces into more open work areas.

 Employees

When you commit to being a human-centric leader committed to building a people-centered community where employees feel highly valued, the market will know. And the talent you need will be there for you.

Ways to demonstrate on a personal level, how much you value your people:

Flexibility

Let people choose specific health insurance and wellness benefits, and perks that match their individual needs. Support core values with rewards. For example, if wellness is a value, give gift certificates for athletic gear and apparel, spa treatments, or gym memberships as rewards; organize “office” walks or runs; replace junk food in the breakroom with healthier choices; sponsor employees’ sports teams or their kids’ teams.

Development

Offer professional growth opportunities: mentor programs, paid sabbaticals, tuition reimbursements, travel and fees to conferences, paid professional memberships, and lunch-and-learns are all good options.

Listening

Notice what people say about their hobbies, interests, or specific music, books, or food. When it comes time for a reward, treat them to a concert, event, or restaurant that reflects what they like. Reward them with cooking classes or a gift certificate to a local bookstore. Or buy a special book and gift it along with a personal note.

Recognition and Celebration

Recognition and celebration should be frequent but not necessarily costly. Bring in lunch on Mondays or Fridays. Give people a day off on or around their birthdays, or time off to volunteer where they choose. Recognize family events like marriages, births, and major accomplishments or anniversaries. Send a personal note of recognition or thanks to the home address. Smile in the hallway, say a kind word, lend a sympathetic ear — all, free to give.

When you commit to being a human-centric leader committed to building a people-centered community where employees feel highly valued, the market will know. And the talent you need will be there for you.

 

Kathleen Quinn VotawKathleen Quinn Votaw is Founder/CEO and Speaker/Author of TalenTrust and KQV Speaks. Her first book, Solve the People Puzzle: How High-Growth Companies Attract and Retain Top Talent, debuted in February 2016; with the second book, Dare to Care in the Workplace: A Guide to the New Way We Work and related Podcast launched between 2021-2022.
Kathleen and her firm have achieved many recognitions from many well-known organizations, including ColoradoBiz Magazine, Vistage Worldwide, and the coveted Inc. 5000 for two consecutive years. Kathleen is a regularly published columnist and popular speaker on topics related to HR strategies and workplace culture. Reach Kathleen at [email protected] or (303) 838-3334.

How to stem the tide of turnover

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A “title wave of turnover,” a “turnover tsunami,” call it what you like, but 52 percent of employees plan to leave their jobs in 2021, a 43 percent increase over the two previous years, according to Achievers’ data. Most people quit or stay for reasons related to your workplace environment.

Understanding specifically why they come and go enables you to rethink your people strategies and their possibly unintentional consequences.

After the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic, working longer hours from home, and being disconnected from company culture and values, people are feeling overworked, burned out, and undervalued.

Research by Robert Half finds that 70 percent of employees say they’ve been working on weekends and working more hours than they did before the pandemic, yet 51 percent of them worry that their manager doubts their productivity. Who can blame them for looking for new opportunities in happier, healthier, and more trusting work environments? Employers cannot sit back and passively hope for the best. Listen hard to what your people want today, accept that your workplace will look different; and demonstrate that you value your employees and will fight to retain them.

As employees reconsider and reevaluate their priorities, the top ten reasons they quit haven’t changed dramatically in the last few years. People still want more appreciation and recognition, opportunity to grow and advance, meaningful work, and fair compensation and benefits. What has increased in importance over the pandemic are a desire for better work-life balance, more flexibility, and stronger connection—the kinds of things most companies find hardest to understand and implement.

The global pandemic has changed almost every aspect of work. As employees’ needs change, most companies are struggling to meet them in terms of policies, culture, and benefits. Here are some areas to focus on as you reconsider the effectiveness of your retention strategies.

Don’t Try to Go Back to the Way It Was

It may seem easier to go back to “normal” but it’s neither possible nor desirable. Sadly, this is exactly what’s happening in companies everywhere. Our workplaces are more diverse now than ever in the past, in terms of generations, gender differences, and ethnicities. Cultures have changed, leadership has changed, needs have changed. We have to have faith that we can not only handle it all but will benefit from moving forward.

Listen and Take Meaningful Action

Turnover prevention boils down to understanding what your people need. Employees have complained for decades that leaders are terrible at making needed changes in response to their feedback. Today’s employees won’t put up with lip service. Act on their feedback so they know you are listening and understand that they are appreciated and valued.

Create a Culture of Communication and Recognition

When people feel under appreciated for their contributions, it’s impossible to have a positive employee experience. Increasing recognition, along with prioritizing open and transparent communication, builds the strong connections and trusting relationships that employees want most.

Nurture a Healthy Work-Life Balance

Putting a higher priority on productivity than the well-being of employees leads to disengagement, burnout—and turnover. Focus more on work output than time spent. Give employees manageable workloads and the flexibility to get the job done in a way that fits their life holistically.

Let Go With Gratitude

Letting go of valued employees can be hard for us as leaders, but don’t hang onto people simply to increase your retention level. Sometimes good people no longer fit into your culture or no longer have the needed skills. Maybe you need them to work in the office and they want to continue to work from home.

It’s critical, and beneficial to both you and your employee, when you have an honest conversation about what each of you wants and find a solution. Loss and change are inevitable. Viewing them through a lens of gratitude brings cherished memories that last forever, and opportunity that’s achievable only when you let go.

Changes in the way we do things and think about things are happening in our workplaces faster than ever before, without much time to adjust to them. It’s a mistake to try to cling to the good old days, but totally appropriate to be grateful for them and for the people who created them.

The middle road between business and burnout

Apple has doubled its value since the start of the pandemic, to $2 trillion. Target’s profits surged with online sales that almost tripled as a result of COVID-19. If only these were everyone’s stories!

It may seem counterintuitive during these hard times, but recruiting firms continue to grow as well, and it has much to do with the choices companies are making in opening up to changes in their workforce policies and practices.

In a recent COVID-19 Impact and Recovery Analysis, Business Wire forecasts a $90 billion spend growth for contract or temporary staffing services between 2019 and 2024. Business continuity is people continuity. Consider all your options. Incorporating the “gig economy” is now part of our workplace infrastructure.

This is the era of uncertainty, and nobody knows how long it will last. Some companies will hire and expand, some will contract. But in every case, leaders need plenty of options to withstand the current fluctuations in just about everything related to their businesses. It makes sense that organizations across industries are turning to other-than-full-on headcount to make it through the recovery. They don’t want to burn out their people, especially their star players, but they have work to accomplish and goals to meet. Where is the middle road to success? You’ll find it in the flexibility of temporary and contract workers. Once again, it’s time to rethink how you recruit and retain your people in response to change.

By now, we should all understand that investing in your people first is how to create success. And the definition of “your people” is changing. Employment looks very different than it did in the past.

Increasingly, companies are finding they can do what they need to do with a combination of full-time permanent positions and temporary support by hiring non-employees on an as-needed basis. These can be in the form of independent contractors, freelancers, part-time workers, temporary or on-call workers, interns, and any other type of work arrangement that fits the situation.

By rethinking people strategies, your company gains flexibility and freedom in recruiting, and at the same time provides more of the work-life balance and independence today’s employees want and need, increasing retention.

Rethinking Recruiting Strategies

If you don’t already think of recruiting as an ongoing sales process, it’s long past time to realize that finding the people with the right skills and fit for your organization is critical across economic and market conditions. The pandemic has not fundamentally changed the skills gap. There have always been, and always will be, supply and demand gaps for skills. Additionally, despite the

business challenges of 2020, more than 60 percent of companies see identifying quality hires as their top challenge this year. You may not be hiring at this moment, but never stop recruiting!

In addition to reevaluating your strategies for the type of worker you need at any particular time—full- or part-time, gig or temporary—recruiters should stay on top of new policies and tools that can elevate job offers. For example, working together, businesses and governments have developed “work sharing,” which enables employers to reduce workers’ hours, but not their pay or benefits, with the government picking up part of the cost; “strategic employee sharing” between businesses as their needs fluctuate; and “portable benefits” tied to the person rather than the job. The IRS is also creating new options like leave-sharing plans where employees can deposit into an employer leave bank for other employees affected by COVID.

Continually recruiting and being aware of your options at every level will greatly increase your ability to compete for top talent who can help you manage through our current uncertainties.

Rethinking retention strategies

Work cultures based on head and heart have always increased retention rates. And if there was ever a time to rethink whether your culture incorporates both, it is now. People are hurting. They are depending on leaders to provide some financial and emotional stability—as well as understanding that time with family is critical always, and especially in challenging times. It’s not just healthcare companies that need to be careful they don’t completely burnout their workers, it’s every organization. Let your heart guide you to the many employment options that may make rational sense for your people and your business. Wellbeing is the foundation for high performance and resilience in every type of workplace.

One critical way you can show both head and heart is through frequent, transparent communication. Employees are looking first for accurate information. What does working from home look like? Will I be paid the same amount? What happens if I get sick and will my costs be covered if I do? Can I take time off for a sick family member? When will we return to work? Keep all lines of communication open and adopt new ones. Make the CEO visible through video. Open social networks for personal communications and collaboration. Ramp up the volume and frequency of messages. Listen and tell continuously.

People virtually never complain about over communication. Good communication brings people together and supports change.

Another head & heart interaction is to adapt your benefits to our new reality, even if it’s temporary:

  • Provide sick time and paid family and medical leave to every employee.
  • Be more flexible and make individual, reasonable accommodation.
  • Do the maximum, not the minimum to ensure the safety and wellbeing of employees.
  • Support workers who have been furloughed or laid off by providing things like: continued benefits, severance, job sharing, and education about possible government benefits.

Employees will remember not just what you did for them during the pandemic; they’ll remember how you made them feel.

When employees feel that you are using your head and heart to do all that you can for them, you’ll benefit in so many ways: They’ll tell others what a great company you are, improving your recruitment efforts. They’ll want to work for you longer, saving the costs of rehiring and training. They’ll be more productive, increasing revenues and profits. And, most important, they’ll make you feel good about yourself in meeting the challenges of this moment by traveling the middle road that connects your people and your business.