The Great Resignation:
Hiring Innovators in a Tight Market
The same effort should go into courting new talent, but it usually doesn’t. This makes no sense if you think about it…without employees, you can’t even serve the clients you’re wooing.
Recruitment marketers specialize in talent attraction. You can hire them in-house, or you can outsource the work. Either way, recruitment marketing starts with your employer brand.
How does your company look to candidates who check reviews on Glassdoor and other employer rating sites? How do your employees and leadership teams come across on social media? Does your employee branding convey the commitment to diversity and inclusion you claim to have?
Recruitment marketers work to build your employer brand. They track your reputation, they remedy bad reviews, and they promote your company as a desirable place to work.
Even if you already have a great brand and culture, before a candidate can decide to work for your company, they have to see a job they’re interested in. Recruitment marketers can help here, too. They understand what your ideal employees need and want. And they focus on showing how your company meets those needs and wants.
This starts with your job description.
Write job ads for qualities you need, not skills you can train
Many hiring managers put together a list of required and desired skills so long that a candidate could take the manager’s job if they actually had them all.
These “wish lists” present a few problems. First, women tend not to apply for jobs if they don’t have 100% of the skills listed, even if they’re qualified for the role. And job descriptions tend to use less inclusive language, which turns off females and people of color. This means you’re creating a system that automatically makes your candidate pool less diverse.
Second, if your job description focuses on what the candidate needs to do for you more than what you can do for them, you’re missing the critical people-centered approach we just discussed.
Third, a list of skills focuses on what a candidate can do, not their character and fit with your company. Yes, you can determine that during the interview. But if your skills requirements are too high, you could be tossing excellent candidate applications into the trash before they even get to the interview stage.
Finally—and this is obvious—top talent costs money. Your dream candidate, who meets all your requirements, is in demand. In turn, they can demand a high salary, which is fine if you’re accounting for that. But too many people don’t, and this can easily blow a hiring budget.
That is, unless you rethink your strategy.
Be creative in your hiring strategy
Did our first company really need five highly skilled project managers? That’s going to cost more than it budgeted. Maybe it could get the same results with one exceptional project manager who can train and mentor less experienced team members.
This is the approach the second company took. It recruited a top-tier candidate who could coach others. The salary for this role was $140K. Then it sought four less-experienced PMs. The company vetted for candidates with qualities that predicted success in their roles, who fit the company culture, and who would have a good team dynamic. Because they needed skills training, the company brought them in at $90K each.
