Best Practices are so yesterday! They are sourcing and recruiting techniques designed for a time that has passed.
Next Practices are strategies and tactics for winning the real War for the Best Talent – the one you actually face today and will face tomorrow. They modernize your approach to:
- Job Posting
- Social Recruiting
- Candidate Engagement
- Optimizing the Candidate Experience
- Managing Your Own Recruiting Career
so you maximize your success.
The book is composed of short, straight-to-the-point essays that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes and still transport you to a whole new dimension in the state-of-the art for recruiting and sourcing talent. With titles like Become a Talent Whisperer, Post-Social Recruiting, The Inconvenient Truth of Recruiting and Don’t Post a Job, Advertise Respect, they are sure to entertain and enlighten you.
So, don’t recruit with yesterday’s techniques. Get Next Practices and start recruiting right now with the next generation of recruiting mastery.
The book is available on Amazon. Click here to place your order.
The Truth About Talent
Talented people aren’t job seekers. Ever. They’re career activists. They never look for a job, but they are always searching for a way to advance themselves in their field. And, that’s how you recruit them.
The conventional view of the workforce is that it is composed of just two cohorts: active and passive job seekers. These groups aren’t of equal size, however. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, at any point in time, just 16 percent of the workforce is actively in transition. That means that the passive population accounts for the remaining 84 percent … only it doesn’t.
There is actually a third cohort in the workforce. This group is probably as large as the active job seeker cohort, but is composed of people who behave in exactly the opposite way. They are non-job seekers. They will never voluntarily leave their current employer. They are, in effect, “unrecruitable.”
For most recruiters, therefore, the target demographic is the 68 percent of the workforce who are recruitable passive job seekers. But, here’s the rub: these people aren’t job seekers at all. They don’t think of themselves as job seekers, nor do they act that way. They are, instead, career activists.
Career activists are a cross-generational slice of the American workforce bound together by a common aspirational goal. Whether they are 25, 40 or 55, they all want to be the best they can be in their profession, craft or trade. They want to express and experience their talent on-the-job. And, they proactively seek out employers with the culture and opportunities that enable them to do so.
A Distinction That’s More Than Semantics
Career Activists are seldom recruited with conventional strategies and tactics. As I detail in my book, The Career Activist Republic, these individuals are unlike traditional job seekers. The key to recruiting them, therefore, is to focus on the factors which distinguish them and they alone share. Here are two.
They are almost always employed. The only way to recruit them, therefore, is to convince them to do the one thing humans most hate to do: change. You have to persuade them to go from the devil they know (their current employer, boss and commute) to the devil they don’t know (a new employer, boss and commute).
That can’t be accomplished with a job posting that is a cure for insomnia – a classified ad repurposed online or a position description from the HR Department. It takes an “electronic sales brochure” – a consumer oriented message that sells both the organization as a dream employer and the opening as a dream job.
They listened to their mother. What was the first lesson your mother taught you? “Don’t speak to strangers,” right? Career Activists are risk averse. They have something to lose – their current job. So, they will only consider a career change when it is presented by someone they know and trust.
That’s why so many InMail and email messages go unanswered. They are the product of seeing social recruiting as a “contact sport” – the focus is on the number of followers, friends and connections rather than on the caliber of the interaction with them. A better approach is to fashion social recruiting as a “team sport” and to give top talent the experience of being a member of your team – make them feel as if your employer already cares about and supports their career advancement – even before they have expressed an interest in an opening.
The truth about talent is simple. They’re different. They know it, and they expect employers to know it, as well. Those that do AND demonstrate that’s the case in their recruiting strategy and tactics will have a genuine advantage in the War for the Best Talent.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com
A One-of-a-Kind Recruitment Tool
WEDDLE’s Directory of Employment Web Sites is a one-of-a-kind database of job boards, social media sites, career portals, aggregators, employment-related search engines, job ad distribution companies, recruitment blogs and other recruiter resources. Its 9,000+ entries are organized by occupational field, industry, geographic focus and other specializations (e.g., diversity, veterans).
If you want to:
- Develop a pinpoint targeting strategy for your recruitment advertising,
- Identify the best social media sites for connecting with top talent,
- Improve the quality of the applicants you source online,
- Sell products and services to job boards and other employment Web-sites
- Sell products and services to job boards and other employment Web-sites
then the WEDDLE’s Directory is for you!
2014 User’s Choice Award Winners
If you’re tired of reading the pundits’ picks for the best employment sites on the Web, here’s the alternative you’ve been looking for.
Each year, WEDDLE’s hosts an online poll for job seekers and recruiters to vote for THEIR picks of the best sites. We call it the User’s Choice Awards.
To see the 2014 winners, click here.
To cast your vote for next year’s winners, click here.
The Recruiting Resources You Deserve
The best recruiters use the best resources to get the job done. And, when it comes to reaching top talent online, their choice is clear. It’s WEDDLE’s Books. Get yours today!
WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet. This is the 11th edition of the Guide the American Staffing Association called the “Zagat” of job boards and social media sites.
The Talent Sourcing & Recruitment Handbook. This is Shally Steckerl’s tell-all guide to his sourcing secrets and cybersleuthing for hard-to-find talent.
WEDDLE’s Guide to Association Web Sites. This book details the recruiting resources and capabilities that are available at the Web-sites of over 3,000 professional and technical associations.
Finding Needles in a Haystack. This one-of-a-kind guide lists over 25,000 keywords and keyword phrases, across 5,400 job and position titles in 28 industries and professions.