The Candidate Rich Recruiting Firm
There are two essential elements to the recruiting business: Job orders and Candidates. The main reason that recruiting firms exist is to fill job orders with candidates more effectively than their clients can themselves.
The most successful recruiting firms consistently deliver the candidates that their clients need. This is one of the key differentiators that separates highly successful firms from the rest. If you can't do this well, practically nothing else matters.
It isn't easy.
If consistently filling positions with the right candidates was easy, your recruiting clients wouldn't pay you the fees they do! If you often struggle to deliver the right candidates for your job orders, you are not alone.
Getting the Right Candidates - Here are the seven candidate recruiting challenges every recruitment firm faces when trying to fill job orders.
- Everyone has access to the same pool of candidates. This means your clients and other recruiting firms could potentially find the same people as you.
- Most quality candidates are not actively looking for a new job, and it's much more difficult to recruit people who are satisfied where they are at.
- There is often a shortage of suitable candidates relative to the number of job openings they fit. This can create "hyper-competition," leading to poor candidate attitudes and difficulty getting their attention and interest.
- Client requirements can be unique and specific, making it more difficult to identify candidates with the desired skills and experience.
- Clients often want you to screen for intangible qualities that are not on a resume. Recruiters often struggle to make accurate assessments of these intangible qualities.
- Some of the best candidates for a job may not fit "on paper." It's often difficult to get interviews for these candidates while maintaining positive standing with your clients.
- Working with high-demand candidates can be tricky. Multiple offers, bidding wars, counteroffers, ghosting, etc. frequently complicate those situations.
You must overcome the above candidate recruiting challenges to stand out as an exceptional recruiting firm in the eyes of your clients. This requires you to implement recruitment best practices for each step of your recruiting process. Most recruitment firms don't have a well-designed recruiting strategy that they can rely on to consistently fill their searches. This results in wasted time, frustration, inconsistent recruiting outcomes, and lost clients. You can do better than this. You just need to learn how!
Seven issues that must be addressed to excel in candidate recruiting:
- What candidate sourcing steps and tools will your firm use, and in what order will they be used? The steps and tools that you should utilize will vary depending on the backgrounds of the people you recruit.
- What are the recruitment best practices for each step and tool given your audience? Best practices will vary depending on the industry, occupation, and position level.
- What recruiter training will you provide to help your team to apply these best practices, and how will you ensure compliance? Best practices only help if people actually execute them.
- What resources will you provide to help your recruiters avoid wasting time on tasks that should be outsourced to others?
- Will your recruiters be engaged in full desk recruiting, or will they only be candidate-facing? This is a critical issue to consider since few people excel when they have a wide range of duties.
- What metrics will you use to keep people focused on the things that matter most? You want the right metrics and should keep them simple, few in number, and easy to measure.
- What ATS will you use, and how will you optimize its usage? Most ATSs are poorly utilized, and this causes a huge waste of time and effort.
The Practical Reality.
It's easy to get stuck in outdated methods of candidate recruiting. What worked back in the day is likely now ineffective, inefficient, or both. The problem is that the recruiting world has changed significantly and will continue to do so. If your recruiting practices don't keep pace with the times and your competition, you will fall behind.
Recruiting firms that want to deliver outstanding results choose to work with The Recruiter's Coach because we help develop and implement customized recruiting strategies for the specific types of candidates they recruit.
