Interviewing, Hiring And Working With A Headhunter Or Recruiter - Lance Winsaft

CONSIDERING WORKING WITH A RECRUITER By Lance Winsaft

Knowing when the appropriate time is to bring in extra help is key to getting the most bang for your buck.

Having an effective relationship with your recruiter is also very important. Many companies are in different situations and circumstances from a human resources perspective.

On one end of the spectrum, some companies have robust human resources and internal recruiting departments.

On the other end, smaller businesses may have zero recruiting capacity and rely on managers to act as human resources.

Of course you also have everything in between and a headhunter can be useful for any type of situation.

WHY YOU SHOULD HIRE A RECRUITER

There are some particular situations where hiring a recruiter would really be ideal.

One may be if you are a smaller company and you don’t have a centralized human resources department. 

Second, some human resources departments don’t have the capacity or aren’t set up to do recruiting and talent acquisition.

In either of these cases, you are likely either relying on people to find you organically through job postings or boards.

When using things like Indeed or ZipRecruiter, or just relying on people to find your postings, you could be losing a lot of time money.

THE BEST TALENT ACQUISITION STRATEGY FOR YOUR COMPANY

I recommend every company have some type of talent acquisition strategy, whether internal, centralized or external.

If you are truly interested in growing your company and hiring the right talent you cannot simply rely on word-of-mouth through your employees.

It’s critical that you have a proactive outbound talent acquisition strategy.

If you can’t hire full-time HR then you should allocate resources to hiring an external recruiting firm.

It’s going to be more cost effective to move monies being spent on job boards into a budget for recruiter.

SHOULD YOU HIRE OUTSIDE HELP

A good recruiter is going to be wildly more effective than using job boards.

If you’re a larger company with a robust talent acquisition team, you’re likely able to fill requisitions internally.

Even then, it’s smart to have some good recruiters on call if your team gets overloaded.

It’s smart to have some solid backup help to fill critical and more urgent needs.

Even if you’re somewhere in the middle, it’s a good idea to have a good recruiter in your back pocket.

CHOOSING THE BEST RECRUITER FOR YOU

No matter where you stand, you want a good recruiter relationship that you can rely on to produce results.

Choosing the right recruiting company to work with can be tricky.

Most recruiting firms out there in the market are focused heavily on volume rather than quality.

Many recruiters’ strategy is to get as many people in front of you for a particular position and hope that something sticks.

This is a chief complaint from our clients that recruiting companies don’t understand the business or the positions.

It’s important to ask how they go about it and if their focus is more on quality or quantity.

If your recruiter starts sending you a high-volume of low-quality resumes, I would stop working that recruiter. 

You want to find a recruiter that focuses on quality over quantity.

One way to do that is to hire a recruiter if that has experience and specialty in your industry or your field.

Don’t hire a recruiting firm that focuses primarily on technology positions to work on your marketing, or vice versa.

This is one way to support quality over quantity when you’re hiring recruiter is to ask them a lot of questions.

You want to find out what makes them different, what are the differentiators, what kind of support structures do they have, etc.

A one or two person recruiting business is likely going to be extremely overloaded. 

Overloaded recruiters may not be able to provide you with the customer service and support that you need.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Another important thing when you hire a recruiter is that they be in high communication.

You never want to expect anybody to fully understand your business or the positions you need to fill.

Recruiters are exposed to a wide variety of companies and people and often within the same industry.

Make sure you’re giving your recruiter detailed feedback on candidates and information about the positions you’re needing to fill.

Providing as many possible details and being in strong communication with that person will help to give you the best experience.

Recruiters are going to want to move as fast as possible with their candidates because they know candidates are at high demand.

Recruiters also know that you want to move as fast as possible, so you need to let them know what you like and don’t like about a candidate.

The more feedback you can give the recruiter, the more they’re going to be able to hone in on the right person for you. 

IN CONCLUSION

Head hunters are an invaluable asset in today’s competitive job market.

If you are truly interested in hiring top talent, you must have a proactive outbound talent acquisition strategy.

Nobody can rely on organic and downtown acquisition – it simply doesn’t get the best talent.

Whether you’re a big company or small company, having a relationship with a solid recruiter can help when needed.

Be sure that you have high communication with that person and be sure they provide you customer service.

Lastly, be sure that they provide you quality over quantity.

Build the relationship, work together, and you will hire the best talent with a great head hunter!

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How do you know if you’ve found the best talent for the job?

Check out this list: https://bit.ly/2LKq0wi

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Hiring Remote, Partial Remote, and Telecommute Workers - Lance Winsaft

By Lance Winsaft

Today we’re talking about the pros and cons of hiring remote workers or employing remote or telecommute workers.

It’s important to keep in mind that all businesses are different and this may not work for everyone.

Some businesses are prone to work very well with remote workers while others are not designed to have remote teams.

It’s important to pay attention to this because if your business is a good candidate for remote workers, you can greatly benefit.

If your business is not conducive to hiring remote workers this article may not be relevant to you.

If you want to consider this, you’ll need to see what changes you can make to take advantage of remote workers.

REMOTE WORKERS ARE TRENDING

There is currently a large trend for candidates that are interested in the ability to work remote or partially remote.

Many people nowadays are putting much more emphasis on their work-life balance.

Being able to work remote offers people the flexibility to have their work-life schedule be more balanced.

Many people also work better remote then they do in an office environment.

The office environment can often have many distractions with other coworkers or other things going on.

This of course depends on your office culture, office environment and the type of people that you hire.

Many extremely talented people who are at the top of their field are only interested in working with this flexibility.

THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN HIRING REMOTE

Being open to hiring remote workers opens you up to a segment of the market that you may be missing out on.

If you are thinking of hiring remote workers, you have to consider how that will fit into your existing culture.

If your existing culture is one where everyone is in the office and then you hire someone remote, this could cause friction.

You could produce dissension in the ranks of your employees who might feel left out or jealous if the new person gets to work remote but they don’t.

TRANSITIONING TO HAVING REMOTE WORKERS

If you’re considering taking this on, you want to take inventory on whether your current employees can work remote.

Perhaps you make working remote more like a benefit to be attained if someone reaches certain KPI’s or metrics.

Many sales people are extremely effective working remote.

WHICH POSITIONS WORK BEST REMOTELY

If someone travels a lot and they’re mostly on site with clients, there really is no need to have them in office.

 You can benefit greatly from a rockstar sales person being somewhere else in the country.

Customer service folks and account management people also function very well in a remote capacity.

Believe it or not, accounting folks and financial people can also work very well remote.

You might want to think about having your internal financial people working remote as well.

WHO IS THE RIGHT FIT FOR REMOTE WORK

When hiring remote you shoud know if they are the kind of personality that’s productive in a remote function.

There are many people who if left to their own devices will not get the work done that needs to get done.

If you have those kind of people working remote you will see a slump in productivity.

Your people should know that their ability to work remote goes hand-in-hand with the results they are on the hook to produce.

In other words working remote should be slated more like a privilege or a benefit that is earned rather than a “right.”

Another trick to hiring a solid remote employee is hiring someone who has been successful working remote in the past.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

There’s also incorporate partial telecommuting where your team is in the office 3-4 days and remote 1-2 days a week.

This model can provide the best of both worlds for you and your employees.

Then you can accomplish the things you need with the team together and have the balance of working remote some days.

This is a very common model that’s being adopted by many companies and is being extremely successful.

This model works if all of your employees are local as you’ll need them in the office together certain days of the week.

CONCLUSION

Look at remote and telecommute working as a way to tap into a segment of the market with more great talent.

This is a segment of the market that is growing as more and more people are looking for that work-life balance.

More and more people are looking for the ability to have flexibility around their work schedules.

Many of these types of people can be extremely high producers and will produce better with this type of flexibility.

As managers it’s important for us to focus on hiring the right personalities that can work well autonomously.

This can be more productive for managers also, not having to control and micromanage everybody.

You owe it to yourself to explore this a bit further and see if it’s something that can work for your business.

RECRUITING REMOTE WORKERS

If you are going to go after remote workers it may be challenging from a recruiting perspective.

Recruiting firms like us are extremely solid resources for being able to tap into other markets for remote work.

Remember, the challenge will be instead of just recruiting in your city you’re going to be recruiting nationwide.

You may even be just recruiting in certain times zones.

Your pool of people to reach out to is going to increase dramatically.

You will need to have a strategy for how to tap into those markets and find the best talent.

Keep in mind that it will likely take a lot of volume, so leaning on a recruiter can be a very valuable resource for tapping into that market.

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Here are some great tools for increasing your team’s productivity:

https://bit.ly/2Aj4qrY

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Pros And Cons Of Posting On Job Boards - Lance Winsaft

NAVIGATING JOB BOARD OPTIONS By Lance Winsaft

Today we’re talking about posting on job boards and what posting on a job board is worth.

With so many choices available, there are pros and cons to using job boards and I want to go over some of those here in this post.

If you’re looking to hire talent, there are a lot of options to find potential candidates for open positions within your company.

It may seem overwhelming with so many job board options, artificial intelligence software, recruiters, staffing agencies, and more.

ARE JOB BOARDS WORTH IT?

The question is are companies like Monster, Careerbuilder, Zip Recruiter, Indeed, and other job boards worth spending the money on.

It’s very likely if you are looking to fill open positions at your company that you’re in one of a few different positions.

If you don’t have enough outbound recruiting man power you’re likely trying to find ways to passively attract talent to your company.

Job boards like mentioned above can seem like a good option.

Looking into options, you will notice they can be very expensive and it may be challenging to know which option to choose.

PICKING AND CHOOSING FOR YOUR NEEDS

The most important thing to understand is that job boards are good for certain positions only.

Job boards should be used primarily for low level entry level positions.

Ideally, roles that are administrative or don’t require a lot of specialized education or skills are best for job boards.

Job boards lose their effectiveness the more specialized you get with a position, especially with more senior roles.

Once you start to get to the manager, director, VP or above, job boards are going to become increasingly less effective.

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

One way or another, with job boards, you’re going to have to allot time to sift through an abundance of resumes.

Job boards will get you a high quantity of resumes, but the quality of those resumes and candidates is going to be very low.

You will likely reject eight or nine out of every 10 resumes that come through for your position.

You or someone on your staff will need to sift through these initial resumes and weed out the ones that are simply junk.

Many job boards today allow candidates to apply to multiple positions at once.

Therefore candidates are not necessarily looking at job descriptions or job requirements.

Often candidates are just blasting their resume out to as many positions as possible hoping that something will stick.

This shotgun affect makes it a headache for anyone who has to sift through hundreds of resumes to find only a few potentials.

For certain roles this can be good, but for many roles it isn’t worth it.

You may not have the staff or the time to go through all these resumes, therefore this may not be a good option for you.

SIFTING THROUGH THE MESS

The other thing to consider is that for the most part, people who are applying on job boards are not currently working.

Candidates without jobs who are actively looking may not be where the best talent tends to lie.

You may want to consider talent that is not actively and aggressively looking for a new position, or maybe not looking at all.

People working effectively for your competition may have the time to find a new position.

With this in mind, you’re likely not going to be tapping into the passive job market.

So you are limiting yourself greatly to the pool of talent that are the active talent.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some good people out there applying on job boards, but they are the exception to the rule.

IS THE COST WORTH THE PAYOFF?

The other tricky aspect with job boards is that you never can know which is the best one for your market.

Unless you are in an extremely specialized field like healthcare, engineering or software development, you won’t know which job board is best.

In these cases, it’s likely you will need memberships with multiple job boards which can get expensive.

The costs for membership and the time to speak to and sift through the high volume of resumes can be costly.

You’re likely better off hiring an internal headhunter or an external headhunting agency like us to do that work on your behalf.

HIRING A RECRUITER

One thing to keep in mind is to never hire a recruiting company that is going to post on job boards on your behalf.

Those are lazy recruiters and if you’re going to hire a recruiter they should be tapping into the passive market mentioned above.

A recruiter is likely going to be slightly more expensive, but you’re going to get much more bang for your buck.

Also your life is going to be a whole lot easier and your experience hiring will be much more streamlined.

IN CONCLUSION

Job boards can work, but they take a lot of work to manage and can end up being very expensive.

I recommend doing a cost-benefit analysis.

You really want to look and see what you’re going to get with a recruiter versus what you would get with the job boards.

You’ll certainly attract better candidates going with the recruiter.

In any case, find and do what works best for you and your business.

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Considering building an internal HR team? Here are some things to consider:

https://bit.ly/2JR2u3p

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Tips For Headhunting And Recruiting For Your Team - Lance Winsaft

By Lance Winsaft

This week’s blog is about tips for headhunting and recruiting new employees for your team.

Headhunting and active recruiting is distinct from posting on job boards and in taking incoming resumes.

This article is about the best ways and tips for proactively acquiring top talent, otherwise known as headhunting.

Proactively recruiting or head hunting will give you a competitive edge in acquiring top talent and over your competition.

GET CLEAR ABOUT WHAT YOU NEED

First, for any given position that you’re recruiting for, you need to be 100% clear about what you need for that role.

Clarity is the first place to start and is critical because without it you will never be able to find what you want!

You should sit with your team, stakeholders, mentors or outside resources to write up a good job description for the role.

Before writing a description though, be sure that you know what you need for your team.

What type of experience do you need for the open role?

Do you require somebody with management experience? If so, how many years?

Does this person need to have a specific skill set?

Do they need to be skilled in a particular technology?

The list goes on, but be sure you set out all of the important questions you’ll need to ask to create your ideal candidate.

FINDING THE RIGHT CULTURAL FIT FOR YOUR COMPANY

One thing that is also important is getting clear about what the personality for this person should be.

They will need to be able to be a fit in your company culture.

On a separate note, having a defined company culture is the first step to being able to interview for culture.

Interviewing for culture is a separate topic that we will discuss in another blog.

STAYING FLEXIBLE DURING THE PROCESS

Once you get extremely clear on what you need for your next hire, you’ll be set to succeed and able to focus on exactly what you want.

It’s important to note that you should be open to adjusting this along the way.

When you start interviewing people you may realize there are certain things that you really need and certain things that you don’t.

So you won’t be stuck with this description, but you want to have a very solid and precise place to start from.

ADVERTISING FOR YOUR OPEN POSITIONS

You’re going to want to advertise your job in someway, but I don’t recommend posting on a lot of job boards.

As a recruiting strategy, posting on job boards may become a secondary thing that you do.

You need to have a good career portal on your website.

This is a place that you can direct people to apply into your database so that you can process them as a candidate.

This is very important as potential candidates will need a simple process to follow in order for you to move them through quickly.

HAVING A SMOOTH INTERVIEWING PROCESS

The next point is that you want to have a well flushed out and well thought out interview process.

This will easily move potential candidates through your process and leave them with a good experience of your company.

They have a good experience of your company and they will be left with your brand and your culture when moving through your interview cycle.

You don’t want to ever have any candidate have a bad experience moving through your interview cycle.

KNOW YOUR COMPETITION 

Next, you will likely need to do some research as to where your ideal candidate lives.

It’s likely they are with at least some form of your competition.

You may know about some of your competitors, but it’s likely you don’t know a lot about many of them.

The best place to start is making a list of competitive companies or companies where your ideal person might be.

CREATE A STRONG HEADHUNTING STRATEGY

You can leverage resources like LinkedIn, other social media and Google.

Start to hunt these people down and then you will need to do a lot of outbound contact to reach the right people.

Sometimes the toughest part in having a headhunting strategy is the volume that is required.

Many people who start headhunting think they’ll reach out to 10 ideal candidates and that they will get one of them.

Unfortunately, it never works that way.

Most of the rolls we fill for our clients take us contacting 500 to 1,000 people in order to find a suitable candidate.

You need to be prepared to do the volume of outreach, the work and spend the time to find that right person.

WHEN TO HIRE AN OUTSIDE RECRUITER

If this is something that you can’t do, hire someone to do it for you.

You can hire a solid recruiter who knows your business, knows what they’re doing and can do this work on your behalf.

It’s very important to have a streamlined interview process, especially in today’s candidate driven market.

If your interview process is too long or drawn out, you’re likely to lose candidates to other offers or companies that are moving faster.

You’ve also got to make sure that you can compete from a salary perspective.

CONCLUSION

You need to have a good strategy from start to finish in order to have an effective recruiting or headhunting experience.

You need to start with a clear and concise view of what you need and what you will be looking for.

Only then will you be able to hone in on what is needed.

If this step isn’t followed you could waste a lot of time spinning your wheels with people who aren’t what you really need.

Avoid job boards or at least don’t rely solely on them to produce any real result.

Find out where your talent is, do the legwork and research so you know where to get the people that you need for your team.

Likely they are with your competition, so know your competition.

A concise interview process that flows well will leave candidates with a good experience of your company, brand and culture.

Have a process that moves quickly so that you don’t lose candidates to other companies that move faster.

Lastly, be ready and able to spend the time to put in the sheer volume required to head home effectively.

If this all seems like a lot of work, it is!

That’s why headhunting companies like us exist!

If you ever need extra help feel free to contact us.

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Check out this article for some qualities you should look for when seeking new talent for your team: https://read.bi/2N1YvyW