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Finding great people for your team is like marriage ‒ a perfect union of work and culture. You want someone with the right personality, but you also need someone with the experience and skills to excel in the role. You want culture fit and competency. You want “the one.” And maybe that’s where many recruiters go wrong: how do we find candidates with that special mix that is just right?
Here are our tips for finding the best talent for your team.
Finding good candidates really starts with a company culture centered around your company values. A candidate can feel a thriving company culture when she walks through the door, when she passes by a team collaborating on a project, or join in on a company gathering. Ultimately an ideal company culture is one that people want to become a part of, grow with, and refer their friends to.
It’s no surprise that two of our company’s core values are “People” and “Moments.”
When you have a culture that is built upon celebrating people’s key moments, accomplishments, and ideas, you cultivate a sense of support, a culture of collaboration, and a collective interest in the company’s mission.
SalesforceIQ: Team Values from SalesforceIQ on Vimeo.
Making it clear that your company invests strongly in taking care of its employees will only make you look attractive in the eyes of job candidates looking for their next role.
“The [SalesforceIQ] culture here is fantastic, I’m actually excited to go to work every morning”
Want to read more about our team culture? Check out this point here and here, or see our reviews on Glassdoor.
Growing at scale demands that you hire more talent than you’ve ever hired before, while at the same time, finding talent that is more diverse than your current employee base.
When done right, diversity isn’t about eliminating talent ‒ it’s about opting in excellence from all types and all backgrounds. Shift your perspective to avoid sticking to past hiring conventions – maybe you don’t need another Top 20 university graduate, but could do well with someone who’s spearheaded their own business.
We often forget that talent can be discovered in the same places and people that were overlooked in past hiring cycles.
While finding the right mix requires empathy, finding the right flow requires good math.
Consider the distribution of your employees, and see where you can bring on team members who offer a different background and fresh perspective to the team.
What percentage of your hires are from referrals, agencies, or directly sourced?
How many are new grads, interns, and experienced hires?
But it doesn’t stop there. Once you have your pool of talent, it’s important to retain the talent that comes your way by tracking conversion rates along your recruiting pipeline.
What’s your conversion rate at each stage from application to offer?
Are there drop off rates that are siphoning talent along the way?
A torrent of talent requires continual monitoring and iteration, and you want to make sure star candidates are prioritized and converted to the final hiring stage. Don’t miss the diamonds in the rough!
When a team faces resourcing challenges, the initial reaction to the building workloads may very well be: hire, hire hire! The heat of this demand means that their initial request to a recruiter is often not the best guide to the talent they need. At first, requests are often:
Short term: Looking for a solution to an immediate need over a long-term one.
Too specific: Asking for a narrow skill or buzzword over the ability to learn and adapt.
A “type”: Matching an archetype, personality, or style of a team member - i.e “I need another Matt”.
Brand-attached: Only looking at talent from a very specific set of companies and universities.
Recruiters can go beyond the superficial by shifting the conversation to the team’s broader needs and deeper descriptions of the talent solution.
What are the team’s annual goals and what talent would support their work strategy?
Where are the resource constraints and where are people shifting in the next six months?
What competencies would create success and what does proficiency in each competency look like?
How can we test for proficiency across the pipeline, from recruiter screen to onsites?
Ask yourself the hard questions, it’ll be worth it, we promise!
Your company is half-way through Q1 and you’re behind on headcount. Time to roll up your sleeves and start running, because you’re behind in the game. How do you deal with ambitious goals and limited time?
Make your recruiting process data-driven
Data is everywhere and that includes your hiring process. Use your data to forecast the resources you’ll need to make headcount and predict when bottlenecks will happen.
How many resume screens, phone interviews, and on-sites have you done for similar roles in the past?
How can you use the “run-rate” of your interview process to forecast the resources you’ll need to meet your hiring goals?
By having data-driven forecasts of how many hands on deck you’ll need at all stages of the hiring process, you can better align your team with marketing goals and have better estimates for your hiring quota. At the end of the day, you can be as data-driven as possible, but you still may miss the mark. So we’ll leave you with a last piece of advice:
Be creative in prioritizing which positions need to be filled immediately. Address your low hanging fruit first, and identify teams that can afford to take their time finding the perfect candidate. It might be difficult with managers knocking at your back door, but being decisive in your hiring decisions will be an invaluable skill.
If you’re looking for the best, then offer the best. We won’t get too existential on you, but think about it this way: your ideal job candidate is looking to fulfill their goals and make a contribution that’s meaningful for them. Find out what they want and why, what they think excellence and challenge looks like and how they are best stretched to their true potential. Now you just have to find a candidate who can make their goals happen at your company, in a role that is meaningful and impactful. That means knowing job expectations is a two way street: Challenge your candidates with a high bar, and meet the challenge for them in return.
Want more tips for growing your business? Download the free e-book for 25 of them!
