18 Lean Recruiting Tips & Tricks Recruiting in a World with Limited Resources “Your mission this year, should you choose to accept it, is to hire 800 people with 2 recruiters, a recruiting platform, and a modest budget. This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds. Good luck.” This is a true story. Well, minus the movie Jeremy is not alone. Most recruiting teams Combine that with an increasingly tight drama. are small, nimble, and always strapped talent pool in an economy with nearly full for resources and budget. LinkedIn clearly employment, the market for top candidates That’s what Jeremy Ryder, the Head of quantifies the dynamics around the recruiting is only getting tougher. In fact, according to Recruiting at Trek Bikes, was asked to crunch in their 2017 Global Recruiting Trends the 2017 Recruiter Nation Report, 89% of do by his management team, and he Report from LinkedIn where recruiters said: recruiters think it will get more competitive implemented a highly tuned, simplified over the next year. recruiting process, automated everything • Hire More People: 56% needed to hire that he could, and created a talent machine more people this year than last Oh, and you’re also going to have to that brought in top talent for his both his backfill the people that leave, given the • Without More Recruiters: 61% didn’t corporate and retail positions. pervasive acceptance of job hopping among anticipate any additional recruiting Millennials and others. Instead of being daunted by this goal, he headcount embraced it, and all of the lean recruiting best Bottom line: You need to get smarter about • Without More Budget: 52% reported practices that helped him accomplish what using what you have in this increasingly that their budgets would remain stagnant had seemed impossible. competitive, dynamic, and noisy hunt for qualified talent. That’s what being lean is all about. 800 Hires | 2 Recruiters | 1 Year | Time-to-Hire Let’s get started. Dropped by 20 Days | Agency Fees Dropped $165k 1 Nail the “Free” Lean Recruiting in a world with limited resources means that you need to make sure to cover the bare Recruiting Basics minimum, and these seven things don’t cost a thing—even better, right? Here’s where to focus: 2 1. Create a Recruiting Culture: Since you’re on your own, or have a small Nail the “Free” Lean recruiting team, you need to transform everyone at your company into recruiters. That means getting everyone involved from the moment a Recruiting Basics candidate is welcomed at reception to creating a balanced interview team that covers each aspect of what they are looking for in a teammate. Although most employees are onboard, there are always a few “problem children” that don’t do a good job of selling the company or don’t conduct a positive interview. Identify those folks early in the process (even if they are hiring managers) and coach them with mock interviews. 2. Get Consensus on the Ideal Candidate: This may not sound like a wise use of time when you’re being pressured to get hires in the door quickly, but it’s actually the best use of your time, if you want to successfully hire the right people. Meet with your key stakeholders and/or executives and get into agreement on who your ideal candidate is—both from culture fit and a “skills that you need today and 3 years from now,” perspective. This will help you, and your hiring team, zero in on the right candidates faster. Remember your ideal profile should be a starting point in candidate assessment, not a rigid formula. 3 3. Referrals Are Your Friend: Referral candidates are well known to be higher Nail the “Free” Lean quality, but also stay longer with an average retention rate of 46% versus the 33% retention rate of candidates that come in through your career site, Recruiting Basics according to Undercover Recruiter. Referrals are especially important if you have a small recruiting team because these candidates also have a much lower cost-per-hire. So, make your co-workers your biggest asset and get a program set up, publicize it well, and advertise the financial rewards and time- frames to your employees so they are incented to spread the word about your open positions. Tips to Build a Better Referral Program • Create a public leaderboard to give the program, and your star referrers, company-wide visibility. • Host a sourcing party! Have your employees look through their LinkedIn connections to identify “the best product manager in New York” or “their favorite sales rep in the Minneapolis area”. • Publicize your SLA (service-level agreement) on referrals, so employees know what to expect when they refer a connection. • Announce your hired referrals at department or company-wide meetings. Make it a big deal! 4 4. Clean Up Your Employer Brand: This is one that can be as tiny or huge as you Nail the “Free” Lean make it. As a lean recruiter, it make sense to smart small and take advantage of the free things like LinkedIn and Glassdoor profiles. And, don’t forget about Recruiting Basics writing compelling job descriptions that inspire candidates to apply and a career website that works well on mobile. 5. Make What You Have Work Harder For You: Think about what you’ve done before that’s worked well. If you’ve run Boolean searches that delivered impressive results, bookmark them for reuse. If you’ve got footage of happy employees talking about their work for a corporate video, put it out there on your career page. If you’ve stockpiled past applicants for a rainy day, pull out their resumes, tag them correctly in your CRM, and see where they might fit now. Sometimes reusing and recycling your core assets is the fastest, simplest way to make a big impact. 92% would consider leaving their current jobs in offered another roll with a company that had an excellent corporate reputation.* 5 *CR Survey Report: Corporate Reputation Affects Talent Acquisition 6. Stay Current on What’s Out There: If you know your competitors are using Nail the “Free” Lean certain strategies and having success, give them a try, too! Read up on current trends in sourcing, and see if they make sense for your company. Find out Recruiting Basics the top technologies used by other companies like yours, and consider if they’re right for your needs. You don’t have to come up with brand-new ways to engage with talent. You just need to find quality candidates fast and hire them first. 7. Ask Your Friends in Marketing For Help: Your marketing team comes up with catchy taglines and compelling advertising all day long, so why not enlist their help with your employer brand? They can help you spice up your job descriptions, provide great shots to add to your Glassdoor profile, or give you advice on how to raise awareness about your hardest-to-fill positions. 6 Make Technology The right technology can help lean recruiting teams boost efficiency by delivering more targeted Work Harder for You sourcing, more personalized engagement techniques, and more automated workflows (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). It seems like there’s always a new, cool technology that promises to automate the entire recruiting process and magically surface the perfect candidate among hundreds who have applied. Although artificial intelligence and machine learning is all the rage, the technologies are still in their infancy when it comes to recruiting. So, here are two important pieces of advice: 7 8. Try Before You Buy! Put the technology through the paces to make sure that Make Technology the application lives up to the hype. Push back and lean on vendors to help you show success with quotes and examples from existing customers or an Work Harder for You ROI calculator. 9. Start With What Works: As a busy lean recruiter, you don’t have enough time to let technologies fail you. The good news is that many successful experts have paved the way for you with creative ideas for everything from strategic sourcing to streamlining processes. Your task is to figure out which of those ideas you can put to use quickly and efficiently. We recommend starting with a proven ATS and then slowly add in test programs or other applications. Key Questions to Ask When Evaluating Recruiting Technology 1. What are your core needs in terms of features/functionality? 2. Is the software easy to use? 3. Have customers—that are similar to you—seen success with this tool? 4. What is the ROI of the tool? What KPIs will this tool help you improve? 5. How will this tool improve the candidate experience? 8 Kick Roadblocks Lean recruiting teams must be agile enough to respond to new or changing demands, so you’ll and Time Sucks need to eliminate the obstacles that typically delay to the Curb recruiting processes. The simpler, the better. “Looking back to life before Jobvite, we would spend 70-80 percent of our day screening applicants. Today that has dropped by at least 30 percent. Now I can focus on critical work that can move the needle for Noble, allowing my time to be more strategic and impactful.” Michelle Ybarra, Manager of Selection & Hiring, Noble Network of Charter Schools 9 10. Say Bye-Bye to Your Biggest Bottlenecks: Hiring quickly is imperative in Kick Roadblocks this economy, so you’ve got to address the hold-ups ASAP. Are there hiring managers who won’t respond to your requests? Are you having difficulty and Time Sucks keeping up with communication to candidates? Maybe your bottleneck is simply an over-complicated apply process.