Let’s face it: social media is so deeply integrated into most of our lives now and its importance is only continuing to grow. Just last year, 90% of recruiters reported that they had hired someone they found on LinkedIn. But while we are all aware of the now-standard procedure of searching for someone on social media and either investigating their profile or contacting them to apply for a position, it’s rare that social media is a central element of recruitment and talent pooling. But it should be. 

Why? Because we need to be innovative—we can’t use the same methods for recruitment and expect different results. Two big reasons why you should utilise a social media talent pool process are 1) to increase your reach in a fresh way and 2) to appeal to millennials and Gen Z—they are, after all, the workforce of the future. 

Take TikTok, for example. What started out as an entertainment platform that rose quickly in popularity among millennials and Gen Z has become a powerhouse of opportunities. Last year, they piloted a program called TikTok Careers, born out of a trend where users of the platform had started marketing themselves for jobs through their TikTok pages. And it’s nothing to sniff at: big-name companies such as Chipotle, Target and Spotify have made use of TikTok Careers to hire and talent pool.

Through TikTok, we can see that there are engaging ways to build a talent pool that are also efficient for you because through social media initiatives like this, by and large the candidates will be coming to you, rather than the other way around. 

But that doesn’t mean you have to stick just to TikTok for your organisation, particularly if you feel it’s not the platform that would best fit your target audience. Instead, you can create a social media channel dedicated solely to recruitment. 

What this can look like is a LinkedIn group, Facebook group or Instagram account focused on your organisation’s recruitment and careers, with the goal of talent pooling. You may already post job vacancies and staff success stories on your main social media channels, but having a dedicated social media page just for recruitment and careers can be a massive drawcard as it segments members of your audience into potential candidates for a talent pool, and also helps you avoid oversaturating your main social media channel with employee stories. 

A dedicated social media channel for talent pooling also doubles as excellent employer branding—every post is a chance to showcase your organisation’s culture, benefits and values. Some ideas you could utilise are employee success stories, quotes from happy employees, examples of your organisation values in action at the workplace, and so on. These ideas lend themselves well to a video medium, too, which is proving to be an increasingly popular option for digital consumers. 

Having a community focused on careers and recruitment at your organisation also removes a barrier between you and your prospective talent pool. For example, top talent may already be admiring your brand on a personal level but perhaps haven’t considered that a career with you is a possibility. By creating and nurturing a social channel for recruitment opportunities, you’re putting yourself on the map in neon lights rather than a small signpost.

As you build your audience, you can track what interests your talent pool and open yourself to valuable feedback because your interested candidates have all chosen to be in that group and can contribute in one place.

An added benefit to this strategy is that it’s pretty scalable—in fact, as your company grows, you’ll only have more content to showcase: more employee success stories, role postings and news. Plus, if you have the demand, you can spread your content across more social media platforms so you have multiple talent pool channels in your pocket. 

With only roughly half of talent acquisition teams reporting that they felt they had strong future pipelines, it’s important that we keep pace with trends and try new strategies to keep our talent pools strong—so that even in unstable times, we will be equipped for recruitment success.

Rochelle Auman is the Assistant Editor of Recruitment Marketing Magazine. She has a keen interest in a wide range of fields, having worked across the hospitality, retail, fashion and media industries—to name a few.

Thanks to her experience running a business and managing teams of staff, Rochelle understands the importance of attracting the best talent and retaining them by creating an environment where they feel empowered.

When she is not writing about the recruitment marketing landscape, she likes to disappear for hours at a time to play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or read the latest Sarah J. Maas novel.

The post Is social media the future of talent pooling? appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

During economic downturns, many organisations focus on cutting costs to survive. When there’s no growth, hiring is typically the first thing thrown out the window. Then, after a few months when things turn around and it’s back to business as usual, hiring becomes a number one priority!

Other organisations may experience similar abrupt changes in hiring due to their industry (such as construction, mining or engineering). This can be due to the need to apply for grants, bids or tenders and have a steady flow of talent ready for work that may or may not be secure.

In either case, recruitment stops and starts can be jarring and tricky to manage. Here’s how to build your talent pipeline so you have access to the high-quality candidates you need, when you need them. Don’t get thrown off by recruitment freezes and thaws.

Invest in recruitment technology and talent pooling

A Candidate Management System (CMS) is vital to surviving recruitment stops and starts. Why? In addition to saving you precious time and allowing you to work collaboratively with your hiring managers and recruitment team, a CMS grants you increased visibility and facilitates easy communication with candidates.

Every candidate you’ve attracted to your recruitment campaigns can be viewed and managed in a single location and grouped into talent pools. This allows you to send timely communications, engage with candidates and keep them updated. It also allows you to promote your employer brand by sending targeted recruitment marketing content.

A recruitment system also protects your organisation from other challenges, such as changes in your HR or recruitment team. If a key member of your HR team leaves, candidate contact information and the relationships you’ve built remain intact.

Strengthen your employer brand

Maintaining a strong employer brand is another critical strategy to manage recruitment stops and starts.

Organisations with a strong employer brand see 50% more qualified applicants and are 1–2x faster to hire (LinkedIn, 2020).

Organizations that invest in employer branding are three times more likely to make a quality hire (Brandon Hall, 2020).

Ensure your careers site is attractive, engaging and up to date. Continue to share employer branding targeted with potential candidates content across your key channels. For example, you could encourage candidates in your talent pool to stay in touch with you on social media, and keep these channels updated with fresh, relevant photos and article links.

If your recruitment is stuck in a “freeze”, showcase the other things happening in your organisation.

Use great communication  

For some organisations, you may advertise a role, only to find the role is no longer needed. You may lose a contract, lack the budget or discover the responsibilities can be shared among others. Should you simply close the role and throw your candidates on ice?

No!

The best way to manage tricky situations like this is to thank candidates for their application, provide honest information about what the role is no longer available, and ask to keep in touch with them for future opportunities (if you intend to do so). Helping candidates understand the “why” keeps the door open.

Good communication ties in well with having a Candidate Management System and strong employer brand. There’s no excuse for poor communication with a CMS, as branded templates are easy to create and send. Also, honesty and transparency is the foundation of great employer brands.

If you know you’ll need to create another candidate shortlist again in 2-3 months’ time (when work ramps up again or you win another bid or contract) you’ll have a better chance of winning those high-quality candidates back.

Use situations like this as an opportunity to demonstrate what your organisation stands for, your values and culture. If you’re not honest and transparent, how will candidates trust and perform their best in your organisation?

Whether you’re experiencing the pinch from the economic downturn or are in a unique industry that impacts your hiring process, recruitment stops and starts (freezes and thaws) can be a challenge or an opportunity. Use the right technology – a Candidate Management System is vital! – to provide great communication and manage candidate applications. Incorporate talent pooling and a strong employer brand as part of your long-term strategy.

Holly is a Recruitment Specialist and Leader for global recruitment software and services organisation Scout Talent Group. As a dedicated specialist, her areas of expertise include sales, employer branding, talent acquisition and recruitment software. She has spent the past five years of her professional career focused on business development, and recruitment software and services. She loves having the versatility to tailor different solutions for her clients, particularly in the NFP and community services industries. 

The post Freezes and thaws: How to deal with recruitment stops and starts appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Change is something that everyone had to get used to overnight with the COVID-19 outbreak. It wasn’t something that even the most OCD organisers could plan for (I put myself in that category!).

The market very quickly become ‘candidate strong’ when many people found themselves unexpectedly out of work. This equalled overnight changes to many recruitment strategies. So, when there are many great candidates available, how can you deliver appropriate candidate care and bolster your recruitment strategy for the long term?

Here are 3 ways to take advantage of a strong candidate market, while giving candidates the support they need and deserve.

Honestly showcase of your culture through employer branding

You might think “why would I worry about employer branding now? I have too many candidates and don’t need to market to them”. But that is the wrong attitude to take. When you have so many candidates, you want to make sure you are attracting the RIGHT ones, even just from a pure efficiency of operation perspective.

Attracting the right people means that authentically showcasing your culture is now a must-do. I’m not talking about smoke and mirrors and trying to make out you are the perfect company. I am talking warts and all stuff. The good, the bad and the downright messy. The right candidates appreciate honesty and by knowing what they can expect when working for you, they will decide if you are a right for them also. This is a two-way relationship and should be focused on selecting the right people for your roles. After all, why hire a top candidate who leaves in a few months when they find out that the culture is not a right for them and that you deceived them throughout the hiring process? That doesn’t end well for you or them. I have been on the receiving end of this before and I can tell you the end was not pretty to the point, with me never acknowledging I ever worked for this company.

You have to be honest and keep it real. It’s in your best interests to be talking to the right people and promoting what your culture is really like through your employer branding will save you money in the long term.

Nurture unsuccessful applicants for future roles

The fastest way to lose unsuccessful candidates, who might have been a good fit but weren’t successful on this occasion, is through lack of communication. Too often recruiters use the “I am too busy to reply” excuse, which is not only rude but impacts your personal and business brand. I have refused to work with people who didn’t have the courtesy to respond to me previously (and I’m not alone).

Put a system in place to not only thank them and let them know the status of their application but to also add them to a nurture list for future roles. Nurturing potential clients is as basic in marketing as it should be in recruitment.

It doesn’t need to be a complicated process. A simple process is:

• Add them to targeted or niche list or database (don’t dump them all on one giant list)
• Set up a simple email marketing template to make it easy to share content regularly
• Send them regular emails about your organisation, changes, showcasing company culture and award wins (not just about current roles)
• Stay in touch – this might be every 2 or 3 months but make it regular.

This doesn’t require a lot of time but has huge benefits and means those candidates will talk positively about you and your company. This is about building relationships with people and being human. Anyone can do that with a little effort.

Add personality to your job ads

So many job ads follow a script or template and are quite honestly, boring as hell. Apply the marketing rules to your job ads and make them more engaging to attract top-quality candidates. Don’t be afraid to add personality to your job ads.

Now more than ever, standing out and being authentically you is so important. Remember that old adage of ‘people do business with people they like’? it is very true so why do you want to blend in and follow what everyone else is doing? Blah and boring!!!!

Anyone that has met me knows that I’m not backward in coming forward and I like to sparkle and stand out. I’m certainly not the shy type. For years I’ve refused to have a boring voicemail or out of office message and this is reflected in everything I do.

There are no rules that say you have to follow the same boring script as anyone else. Put some brand personality into them and give me a glimpse of who your organisation really is.

So take advantage of a strong candidate market and deliver appropriate care to your candidates. Now is the time to really be protecting your personal and employer brand. Ensuring you give candidates a great experience with your company will be the difference of not only winning the best talent but keeping them and having them become raving fans of your brand.

Tanya Williams is the pink-loving, sparkly Chief of Everything at Digital Conversations. She wears many hats; entrepreneur, best-selling author, digital trainer, and she is a Social Amplification Specialist with over 20 years’ marketing experience. She works with recruiters to uncover the hidden gold in their existing assets, find ways to leverage every moment of your digital marketing without increasing your marketing budget and amplify your internal champions to increase your visibility. Her goal is to make the hero in your industry sector.  She has a simple, no-tech-talk approach and thrives working with established recruitment companies to tap into the opportunities they might miss, using practical & relevant tactics to drive business outcomes.

The post 3 ways to take advantage of a strong candidate market appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

The big question is – should you pause or pivot your recruitment marketing?

What do I mean by pivot? Pivoting means keeping one foot in contact with the ground and using your other foot to move around to find a new angle or gain an advantage over your defender. 

While you might have seen good examples of recruitment advertising and marketing messages, you will no doubt have seen some bad ones from brands that have ignored the current situation completely.

There have also been brands putting a stop to recruitment, marketing and sales altogether because they don’t want to be seen as opportunistic. But, your messaging should be about selling responsibly. Don’t risk putting your brand reputation in jeopardy by being tone-deaf to internal and external factors. Equally, don’t pause on your activities at the risk of losing out on significant opportunities.

There have been a number of studies going back to the Great Depression that prove the advantages of maintaining or increasing advertising and marketing budgets during a weaker economy. Employers and advertisers that maintained or grew their marketing increased their sales and market share during the recession and afterwards.

Review your recruitment marketing strategy

If you are recruiting, are you using the same templates, or have you added tailored messaging specific to the current situation? What’s changed in your organisation? (Are you onboarding people virtually, do you have delayed start dates?) What is still relevant and what needs to change?

Review your existing plan and take time to consider what needs to change. Do you need to look at new channels? Do you need to amp up your social media marketing to stay visible and communicate updates to your current and future talent? How do your current recruitment marketing messages need to be adjusted to suit the new online environment?

Has your ideal candidate changed?

With a number of new candidates entering the talent market with a variety of skillsets, have you thought about who you’re targeting? Do you need to look at targeting candidates from other industries? Is your core industry struggling, meaning you may face heavy competition in the future when stability returns? And if so, what is the balance between reaching out to candidates in your industry specifically and other industries generally?

For the benefit of our world economy, we need businesses to survive and people to have opportunity. Don’t feel guilty about continuing growing your talent pipeline, especially if you have the potential to support candidates looking for employment. There’s no reason why you can’t reach out to talent in your industry and expand your search to the industries too.  

Also, considering the short-term situation is changing so quickly, being able to pivot is essential. 

Messaging and content

When tailoring your messaging, consider the current “normal”. People are working from home, homeschooling their kids, unable to visit family members. Offices are working remotely, normal socialising is out, and people are bored and looking for entertainment. Combine that with current stressors, there’s a lot of uncertainty. 

So take this into consideration and understand your messaging needs to reflect that. Reassess your content, tone, and positioning. 

Are there any opportunities for you to become a thought leader in your niche or distinguish yourself as an employer of choice when everyone else is pausing? 

Your homework is to action the above points and I’ll return next week to share Part 2 with you. I’ll share more information about deciding if you need to take an acquisition vs retention strategy with your marketing. 

Tanya Williams is the pink-loving, sparkly Chief of Everything at Digital Conversations. She wears many hats; entrepreneur, best-selling author, digital trainer, and she is a Social Amplification Specialist with over 20 years’ marketing experience. She works with recruiters to uncover the hidden gold in their existing assets, find ways to leverage every moment of your digital marketing without increasing your marketing budget and amplify your internal champions to increase your visibility. Her goal is to make the hero in your industry sector.  She has a simple, no-tech-talk approach and thrives working with established recruitment companies to tap into the opportunities they might miss, using practical & relevant tactics to drive business outcomes.

The post It’s time to pivot not pause your recruitment marketing appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Instead of spending the majority of time screening applications from active job seekers, you now need to spend time and money hunting for first-rate talent. Did you know 84% of people would consider leaving their current organisation if an organisation with an excellent reputation offered them a job? Where does your ideal candidate sit in the current market? It’s likely quality applicants don’t have trouble landing a job and are already employed (i.e. they lie within the passive candidate pool).

Passive candidates are currently in a role and are not actively searching job boards. Some of these people could make a great addition to your existing teams… if only you could get your fantastic job opportunity under their nose!

They’re bound to be flattered right? Everyone likes to be approached—who knows, it might even be the highlight of their decade—and they’ll tell all their friends they’ve been headhunted. If everyone was able to do this effectively, Seek might go out of business!

It’s important to be aware that your conversion rate for passive candidates isn’t going to be as high, because with active job seekers, those who are visiting job boards and actively looking for a new position, half the battle is already won in that they are already looking to move. It’s still crucial getting your opportunity in front of passive candidates, particularly in today’s candidate-driven market. Here are some ways to do it.

Optimise your employer brand

You need to ensure every piece of exposure that passive candidates have to you and your organisation is optimised to present your employer brand in the best possible light.

Really put some thought into their recruitment journey from that first point of contact, whether it be a personal message or phone call. Perfect your elevator pitch. Ensure every piece of copy they read, every method by which they apply or submit an application, and then every part of their face-to-face interaction throughout their journey is well-planned, on brand and impressive!  

In recruitment, you are marketing to candidates as much as they’re marketing themselves to you, but marketing your organisation is even more of a necessity if they’re a passive candidate and you’re approaching them.

Use a landing page

In attracting passive candidates, you still need a position description, as you need to be able to direct your candidates somewhere. This could be a copy of your recruitment advertisement on a job board that you’re using to attract active job seekers, or it could be a landing page with a position description. You should also create a good elevator pitch about your opportunity, that is, a really succinct paragraph that outlines the aim of the role and the value proposition to the candidate.

Use LinkedIn

LinkedIn is great because it allows you to search for people who are already a similar role. Identify your talent competitors, search for people in the role you want to fill, and consider a direct approach by sending them a LinkedIn message.

You can also pick up the phone and give them a ring. There’s nothing like a personal phone call. Very few people will be offended by such an approach, and provided you do it with charm and respect, they can only be flattered. Use your elevator pitch in your conversation.

Be aware, if you phone them during business hours, they might not be able to talk then and there. Simply introduce yourself and be clear in your communication. For example, you might like to say something like:

“Hi [name], my name is [name, position title], I’m phoning from [organisation name] about a current role we have available. From your LinkedIn profile, I believe that it suits your skills and interests. I know you might not be a position to talk right now. Is there an alternative time and number I can reach you on, or is now a good time to talk?”  

Create a strong internal referral system

When you’re recruiting for a role, tell everyone in your organisation to promote it to their contacts, friends and family if they think they are a great fit. Imagine how many people you can reach if every person in your organisation taps into their personal networks.

Make it easy for them to do this. Provide them with a few lines of language and a link to your application or landing page. Ask them to post it on LinkedIn or email it. Invite people to phone you or reach you on LinkedIn if they want to learn more about the role.

Promote to your customers

Some industries, for example, retail and hospitality, can promote roles to customers. What’s great about promoting to customers is that they’re already familiar with and enjoy your brand. Advertise in your store and through EDM if you have an email marketing list.

Social media marketing

These days, everyone is on their phones; in fact, more than 60% of people apply for roles on their phones. So it’s great to meet candidates where they’re at and be on the social platforms people are using regularly.

There are multiple types of advertising you can do through social media, particularly on Facebook’s and Instagram’s advertisement network. Use off-page advertising on Facebook to target a wider audience and use detailed targeting to find people based on demographics and activity.

Use messaging and imagery that is appealing to your target audience. This is another strategy where a recruitment specialist with expertise in this area can assist you.

Digital HeadHunting

Digital HeadHunting, when done with expertise, is highly effective. Engaging a recruitment specialist will give you access to a range of recruitment databases that are otherwise both expensive to purchase yourself and time-consuming to search. Also, you also need to be skilled in the parameters you are searching, as you can miss a lot of great talent, which is another great reason to outsource this process. Start by establishing your top criteria and “must-haves” and then your “nice-to-haves”.

Talk to your specialist about your opportunity and ideal candidate, and from this information, they will be able to establish search parameters based on your requirements (for example, by qualifications, industry-type, skills, etc.) and dive into passive candidate pools through targeted database searches to attract top candidates to your organisation and vacancy.

When they locate suitable profiles, the messaging in their first contact is important, as it has a huge impact on your response rate. Messaging must be highly personalised, detailing what it is you saw in their profile that makes them a great match for a position. Show that someone has actually taken the time to read their profile. Keep your communication personal, not just a blanket copy/paste job description. Make it short and sweet and end with a call to action.

Keep candidate care front of mind

Remember, if you’re reaching out to personally contact passive candidates, it can be rude to reach out and have them respond, only for you not to contact them again or give them any feedback. If you’ve reached out to candidates personally, always give them the courtesy of an interview, and provide them with feedback afterwards, even if they haven’t been successful in the role.

Often, if you have communicated with candidates well and they are unsuccessful, they will thank you for the opportunity in connecting with them and conducting an interview. Provided you do your due diligence in candidate care, you will maintain good relationships and bolster your employer brand.

Be mindful about psychological contracts, the mutual understanding between two people at the commencement of an engagement. Establish expectations and responsibilities from the outset, so everyone knows who is responsible for what. The more accurately you can establish mutual understandings, the better your relationships will be.

Passive candidates who have been headhunted may require tailored treatment different to  active job seekers, as it’s all about who initiated the approach. If a candidate was on a career path and not actively looking for a new role, then you have approached them and taken them off that trajectory, you are engaging in a different psychological contract than if they were actively job-seeking and reached out to you. They might have higher expectations!

Recruiting passive candidates requires excellent planning and execution, but you absolutely must do it. Passive candidates are a crucial part of today’s talent pipeline; use these methods it in combination with your comprehensive recruitment strategy to attract both active and passive candidates.

Which of the above passive candidate attraction strategies are you using? Let us know in the comments.

The post From the editor: How to attract passive candidates appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

The unintended consequences of slow to hire

The idea of slow to hire has been around for years. I noticed it gained traction as staffing leaders became increasingly aware of the significant costs of a bad hire. The financial cost alone has been estimated as a five- to six-figure sum. Then there’s the lost time, missed opportunities, wasted effort, and added stress. Because of these costs, it made sense to make hiring decisions carefully.

That was the original intent of being slow to hire—taking the time necessary to make smart hiring decisions.

Unfortunately, the idea of careful hiring took on a life of its own. One or two rounds of interviews with prospective hires expanded to three, four, five, sometimes six separate rounds before making a hiring decision. Then there are additional steps including testing, reference checking, and background checks.

Finally, if all goes well, a job offer is made to the most qualified person. However, if that offer is declined and the second choice candidate has already taken another job (which often happens after a long, drawn-out hiring process) the whole process starts all over again. That adds more time, more effort, more expense, and more interviews, making slow to hire even slower.

Has this cautious approach to hiring worked? Not if you’re a leader with an unfilled job. Certainly not if you’re in HR and can’t find enough qualified people. Definitely not if you’re in staffing or talent acquisition and your best candidate was just hired by a faster competitor. The time it takes to fill just one job has reached an all-time high, and there’s been no improvement in employee turnover.

Because of this misunderstanding about slow to hire, the world has been operating on a faulty premise. People have mistakenly been equating time and effort spent on hiring with making a quality hire. The more take they take, the more energy they expend, the better the hire will be. It’s given them a false sense of control. Taking lots of time to hire doesn’t save companies from bad hires; it only saves people from making a decision they’re afraid may be wrong.

Slow to hire became something unintended. It turned into being slow to fill.

You can break your organisation out of this cycle, while still taking a prudent approach to decision-making. You do that by being slow to hire and fast to fill. Here are 6 steps that will help.

1. Recruit ahead
   Pick one role and start cultivating talent for it right now, even if there are no current openings. It’s not if that job will open, but when. You’re preparing for the when.

2. Build rapport
   Let candidates know you hire differently, getting to know people before jobs open. You’ll typically find that talented people welcome this approach since this gives them an option for their future.

3. Interview actively
   Just as you try on clothes before buying them, you can have people try-on opportunities. Invite people to experience your company and culture. Having them try out sample work lets you both determine if a role in your organisation may be a future fit.

4. Maintain contact
   Touch base with prospective hires at least monthly. Use the few minutes you spend to pass along valuable information, such as marketplace updates or news on a trend you’ve seen. This keeps your relationship top of mind while also making them better off just from having spoken with you.

5. Fill fast
   When a job opens, offer it to the top person with whom you’ve stayed in touch. If they’re unable to say “yes,” offer it to the next best candidate on your list.

6. Repeat
   As you maintain contact with candidates who are ready-to-hire, you can repeat these steps with another role (if you like). And then another. And then another.
   

Smart decision-making and a speedy process can work hand in hand when you’re slow to hire and fast to fill. This balanced approach lets your organisation make prudent hiring decisions while filling jobs the moment they become open.

Scott Wintrip is the author of High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant, named a must-read book by SHRM’s HR Magazine. Over the past 19 years, Scott has led the Wintrip Consulting Group, a global consultancy that has helped more than 22,000 organisations build talent-rich companies that have eliminated their hiring delays forever. For five consecutive years, Staffing Industry Analysts, a Crain Communications company, awarded Scott a place on the “Staffing 100,” a list of the world’s 100 most influential leaders. He’s also a member of the Million Dollar Consultant Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Staffing 100 Hall of Fame.

The post Here’s when it’s okay to be slow to hire appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Many organisations are struggling to fill open positions. It takes them weeks or months to fill just one job. The skills shortage often gets the blame. Because there are more jobs than people to fill them, leaders have come to expect that hiring will be a time-consuming challenge.

Another group of organisations are having a different hiring experience. These organisations fill their open seats with relative ease and speed, even though there aren’t enough qualified people to go around. What makes these organisations different isn’t their reputation, location, work environment, or pay and benefits. It’s how they’ve chosen to address the talent shortage. They’ve overcome three common obstacles that slow down fast hiring.

THE REAL PROBLEM

While the global talent shortage is an ongoing reality, it’s not the real problem. The skills shortage is merely a challenge that can be solved by a better process.

The critical problem—the only one you can control—is having the right kind of hiring process. The right process taps into a sufficient pool of talent and efficiently moves candidates toward hire.

To fill jobs quickly with top talent, your hiring process must overcome these three obstacles.

Obstacle #1: tapping into a candidate pool that’s too small

If you asked employers why they can’t fill jobs, more than a third will tell you they’re not getting enough applicants, or they’re getting no applicants at all. Yet, only 10 per cent of these employers leverage untapped talent pools.

Faster hiring requires mass: you must build a critical mass of candidates to select from. Building mass requires tapping into overlooked pools of people.

To determine if your organisation is tapping into a candidate pool that’s too small, take these three steps.

1.     Review the eight talent streams

There are eight streams of talent. Each stream provides access to unique people. Compare these streams to how your organisation acquires candidates.

2.     Determine which streams lead to successful hires

Review your organisation’s hires over the past six to 12 months. Note which streams these hires came from and which streams didn’t produce any successful hires.

3. Assess which streams are being under-used or overlooked

Every talent stream should be producing candidates, some of whom become quality hires. Those that don’t are under-used or overlooked.

Obstacle #2: employing interviewing methods that are inaccurate and slow

During typical interviews, candidates are on their best behaviour. As a result, interviews are often a poor barometer as to who will fail or succeed in a given role. Some “newer” interview methods, such as behavioural interviewing, have only made the process longer. Hundreds of books and articles have been written on how to beat behavioural interviews. These books and articles demonstrate simple methods for telling interviewers exactly what they want to hear.

Interviews cannot be a conceptual exercise. They must allow you to see proof then-and-there that a candidate can do the job and do it well.

Take time to evaluate the speed and accuracy of your interviewing methods by reviewing each step of the process, evaluating the effectiveness of techniques used by interviewers.

Answer these questions.

•      Does the interviewing technique consistently uncover irrefutable proof about a candidate’s fitness for the job?
•      If “no,” how can we replace or eliminate that technique to get a better result?
•      If “yes,” what can we do to streamline this technique and still get the same consistent irrefutable proof?

Obstacle #3: failing to build and maintain a prospective employee pipeline

When a seat opens suddenly, the amount of activity it generates can feel overwhelming. Without an active talent pipeline, a frantic dance ensues. Managers have to handle extra work as the organisation tries to find suitable candidates. Days later, schedules have to be coordinated for phone screenings and interviews. Work piles up, good candidates take other jobs, and nerves fray.

Maintaining a pipeline of ready-to-hire prospective employees eliminates the dance. When jobs open, there’s no rush, panic, or chaos. Instead, you can hire from your overflowing pipeline.

It’s vital that your organisation assess its pipelining strategies. Starting with the most critical roles in your organisation, answer these questions:

•      For each role, how many people are ready to hire right now?
•      For any roles where there aren’t people ready to hire now, where is the pipelining process failing? For example, are there viable candidates who are stuck at the interview stage? Is there a lack of suitable candidates to interview? Is recruiting failing to generate candidates? Use what you learn to address those process problems.

Speed is no longer a competitive advantage. In today’s fast-paced competitive world, it’s a requirement for doing business and hiring quality employees. The importance of having talented people exactly when they’re needed makes fast and accurate hiring a strategic imperative.

Scott Wintrip is the author of High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant, named a must-read book by SHRM’s HR Magazine. Over the past 19 years, Scott has led the Wintrip Consulting Group, a global consultancy that has helped more than 22,000 organisations build talent-rich companies that have eliminated their hiring delays forever. For five consecutive years, Staffing Industry Analysts, a Crain Communications company, awarded Scott a place on the “Staffing 100,” a list of the world’s 100 most influential leaders. He’s also a member of the Million Dollar Consultant Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Staffing 100 Hall of Fame.

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