Can’t Find People? They Are Hiding In Plain Sight – 3 Examples

Finding people is a consistent problem we encounter just about every time we ask CEOs or key executives what their biggest issue is when it comes to hiring. If it isn’t in the top three it is always in the top five.

Yet when you ask them what their process is to find top talent most reply in the same way, “We run ads” or “We post it internally.” That is the way 80% of all companies go about finding people.

Below are three real life examples of alternative ways of finding people.

1) In 2007, I was having lunch with a partner from a local CPA firm. During lunch he commented that they had been struggling for six months to find an audit manager. In fact, he commented that they would pay a $10,000 bounty for an employee referral. I didn’t add a zero. So I asked, “How many people have you hired?”  The reply, “None.” They were doing the usual, running ads and asking current employees. That was their process for finding people.

So as the lunch continued, he mentioned to me that they had just brought on a new client and that he had just had lunch with the new CFO at this same restaurant. I immediately asked the partner, “Did you ask the CFO who was the best audit manager at his current company?” or “Who were some of the best audit managers he had worked with in the past?” He had never even thought of this. I suggested that he could contact all of his CFO clients and ask them. After all, it is in the client’s best interest to have good audit managers.

This was such an obvious thing to me and yet he was willing to pay ten grand. For those of you thinking it takes too much time to find good people, I don’t think asking these few questions would have extended the lunch that much.

2) Last year I was conducting one of our in-house workshops for a mid-sized technology company in New York. During the workshop, one of the key executives mentioned how difficult it is to hire technical people. I probed a little further and asked about the type of people they hire. She commented that they want people comfortable with technology. People who understand how networks work, people who diagnose a computer problem when a client calls with a problem, install software, and perform basic repairs that clients need right away if something goes wrong. They were willing to train on their specific systems and software. They just wanted someone that was moderately technical and comfortable with technology.

These people were “extremely” hard to find.

I asked if they ever go to Best Buy and engage the Geek Squad. Have they ever taken in a computer and found someone that provides great customer service and demonstrates that they understand technical issues?

She and her team had never thought about these people. I received an email two months after the workshop letting me know they had hired two people from Best Buy.

3) My best friend manages a store for one of the major retail chains. Every time we play golf, I have to listen to him complain about how hard it is to find people willing to work. He complains that his company works people hard and is demanding. The result is a lot of turnover.

So I asked him how often when he or his team is out shopping and they come across a great person in another retail chain do they engage the person, give them a business card and ask the person to call him, or let the person know that if they ever think about leaving to call him.

I mentioned that I go to a coffee shop most mornings when I’m in town for an hour of work. At this coffee shop, every person is probably in their late teens and early twenties. These people run the coffee shop. They open every morning at 6 AM so they have to get there by 5:30, they are friendly, they know customers by name, the coffee shop is clean and they are great employees. So I asked if he ever asked any of them about potentially coming to work a his store.

In both cases he replied no, and that he doesn’t even encourage his team leaders to be aware of potential employees when they are out shopping.

Qualified people are all around us. As a recruiter, I always have my antenna up. Most CEOs and hiring managers just walk right by these people. Work with  your team and start noticing people hiding in plain sight.

Download our Hiring Process Self Assessment Scorecard and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your hiring system. CLICK HERE to get your assessment.

Get our most popular chapter “Sourcing Top Talent” from our best selling book, “You’re NOT The Person I Hired” which is available for Free to download. CLICK HERE to get the chapter.

Consider joining our LinkedIn group,  Hire and Retain Top Talent. This group is dedicated to discussions and articles to help  you improve your hiring and retention. CLICK HERE to join the group.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

On-line Programs This Week for Hiring Managers – August 24th

If you are a manager or executive, you might be interested in two of the programs Brad and I are hosting this week

Brad I will be hosting our weekly Internet Radio Talk Show today for Hiring Managers and Executives titled “Upgrading Your Team During the Recession” at 11-noon PDT on LA Talk Radio. You can listen in and also pose questions live during the broadcast.

We’ll be taking your emails and live calls to discuss the steps you should be taking right now to upgrade your team so that when you emerge from the recession, you’ll have a powerful team capable of propelling your business or team forward as a strategic advantage.

On Friday, we will be putting on our popular one hour webinar presentation based on our half and full day training program titled “You’re NOT the Person I Hired”. You can register for this webinar by clicking here.

We’ll provide an overview of our award-winning workshop that teaches the Success Factor Methodology. This hiring process has been implemented in thousands of companies around the world with validated success in dramatically raising hiring accuracy and improving the ability to hire top talent at every level.

We hope you’ll join us for one of these programs this week.

Barry

Why is your employee referral program a failure?

Why do most employee referral programs fail to achieve success?

Your employees are your greatest source of outstanding talent!

Why are they not whispering in the ears of their former co-workers, associates, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who can deliver the results you need?

In over 25 years of executive search, hiring and sourcing consulting, and implementing hiring process improvements in thousands of companies, we’ve discovered a few key differences in why some programs work and others fail miserably. Here’s a list of the key reasons employee referral programs fail to live up to their potential:

• Financial incentives don’t work
• Most companies do a terrible job communicating about an opening
• Employees don’t trust their referrals will be handled in a professional manner
• Classic networking methods are not usually applied to employees

Let’s take each one of these in turn and dissect it over our next 4 blog posts.

However, before we jump into how to improve your employee referral program, let’s talk about metrics of success in employee referral programs. Most companies we’ve encountered achieve somewhere between 5% and 20% as a target range on number of candidates hired who came through an employee referral. I’m going to suggest that your target should be 50%.

Over the next 12 months, 50% of all hires should come from employee (modify this to be stakeholder) referrals. Some of my clients that I’ve worked with over the last quarter of century have continually refined their employee/stakeholder referral program to the point where 75% or more of all hires come from a referral.

Employee/Stakeholder Referrals are one of the main elements of our Success Factor Methodology in using Success-based Sourcing Methods. We dig into this subject in much more detail in our award-winning book, You’re NOT the Person I Hired. We’ve posted examples of using Compelling Marketing Statements in your referral program in our FREE Resources (we’ll talk more about creating a compelling reason for employees to make referrals in a subsequent post).

We’ve even created a FREE Assessment to judge the effectiveness of your sourcing methods, including employee referrals. If you would like to take the FREE Assessment, please complete the application form on our website and we’’ll show you how to quickly and inexpensively improve your referral program.

Once you really focus on implementing best practices in employee referrals, you’ll see that your quality of hires goes up, employee satisfaction goes up, employee performance goes up, recruiting costs go down, the costs of bad hires goes down, time to find and select a top performer goes down.

When should be the best time for you to implement best practices in an employee referral program?

What would you consider to be the primary best practice in your company that generates an abundance of employee/stakeholder referrals?

Barry

How is recruiting like a high school sport?

As many of you know I also coach high school girls basketball. I love to use metaphors of basketball to describe hiring, motivation, and performance. High School Basketball season is about to begin again in few weeks and it brings back a painful memory of the last game of our last season.

My team had a great season – however, they are disintegrating before my very eyes in the last season game. It’s almost as if the entire team has forgotten how to play. I’m using every motivation technique I’ve learned in 25 years as a recruiter and performance consultant I can think of to get my girls to play better. Nothing is working.

Then it hits me like a lightening bolt. I sit down on the bench and realize that the team members I have cannot deliver against my expectations. I don’t have the talent to do what needs to be done. What could I have done about my frustration: NOTHING! It’s high school basketball. In most high school districts you cannot recruit. Whoever shows up at your doorstep that year is who you’ve got to work with on your team.

Here’s the hiring manager irony: Why do most companies and hiring managers treat recruiting like it’s a high school sport? They take whoever shows up on their doorstep after a few simple basic tactics of finding candidates (a little bit of networking and an ad posting on one of the major job boards). These tactics fall into the worst of the primary pools of possible candidates. You can read more about the four pools of candidates under our Strategic Sourcing Plan Service.

As a hiring manager, recruiting top talent is not a high school sport. Don’t expect to ever build a top notch team by taking this approach to finding candidates.

If you want to truly build an exceptional team, as a hiring manager you must break the tribal hiring mode of treating finding candidates like it’s a high school sport. Perhaps, it’s time for a Sourcing Check-up on whether your company has a hiring process in place to attract, excite, engage, and motivate top talent to come forward for your open position. Most of the methods that hiring managers use to attract candidates not only brings the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool forward, but also repels and turns off the very best talent.

If you would like to get our FREE Assessment of your sourcing, jump to our FREE Sourcing Assessment Page and we’ll be glad to walk you through how to determine if your hiring process is strong enough to attract outstanding talent at every level in the company.

You can read more about how this tribal hiring process of treating recruiting like it’s a high school sport impacts your overall hiring success by viewing our study, The Top Hiring Mistakes – of which poor sourcing and finding of candidates is a major factor.

Barry