Employee Recruiting

Employee recruiting is one of the more critical aspects of running a successful business. As a business owner or manager you need good employees to address your business needs. And yet most everyone treats hiring as a necessary evil only to be done when you absolutely have to.

Adopting a different philosophy about recruiting and hiring employees can give you the edge you need to get the best employees, faster and for less money.

Start by understanding what employee recruiting is all about. Think of recruiting as an on-going process designed to develop a cadre of qualified candidates. There are two key take-aways from this approach.

First, your search for new employees needs to be an on-going process. If you recruit only when you have an open position, you will always be in a reactive mode. The best analogy I can give you is to think of your recruiting just like you do selling. You are always on the lookout for new sales opportunities. The same holds for efforts to hire great people.

Second, you want a choice of qualified candidates. To have qualified candidates you need to understand your needs and what skills and behaviors will be successful in your environment.

Knowing what you are looking for and relentlessly trying to find those people are the keys to successfully recruiting and hiring top employees.

Now that you understand the correct philosophy, your next step is to develop a recruiting strategy. A comprehensive, step-by-step strategy will dictate exactly how you develop the cadre of qualified candidates. How much money to spend, where to look, who should do the recruiting and the success metrics are just a few of the issues covered in a good strategy. See the article on recruiting strategy for a complete discussion of how to build an effective strategy.

One absolute guarantee is that there is no one best source for finding candidates. Successfully attracting the right people involves using multiple sources. There isn't one single source that works all the time. Part of your strategy will be to decide how best to deploy your resources. Classified ads, online postings, headhunters, etc. are all legitimate sources but your specific situation will determine which is best for you. See the article on employee sourcing for a complete discussion of recruiting sources.

That said, you absolutely should consider having an employee referral program. Many studies have shown that candidates referred by your existing employees turn into consistently higher performing employees. Every recruiting strategy should have an employee referral component. See the article on employee referral for a complete discussion of employe referral programs.

Finding and attracting top employees is not free. There are costs in money, time and resources. It is too easy to throw a bunch of much money and time at recruiting without a return. Your first step is to make certain you are both planning for and tracking your expenditures. Employee recruiting metrics include monitoring what you spend and the results each activity delivers. See a full treatment of recruiting economics and metrics in the metrics article.

Finally, there are a number of recruiting services available to help you with your recruiting. These include headhunters, search firms, consultants and various online recruiting services. And, there are many employee recruiting software solutions available to help you get the job done.

It can be confusing. See the article on recruiting services to help you understand the various options that are available to help you.

There is also an article covering online recruiting to help you understand the pros and cons of the various online recruiting resources.

The conclusion is that you cannot leave your employee recruiting to chance. Plan your activities, measure your results and have an on-going strategy to keep your candidate pool full.