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Source Talent Like a Pro:

The 6 Strategies That Top Companies Use to Win

the War for Talent

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Hiring can seem like a mystical art in which talent sourcing sorcerers conjure up the perfect candidates through a series of HR rites and rituals. Though it’s slightly more organized than that, recruiting can be as much of an art as a science. No two companies, positions, or hir-ing environments are alike. While one strategy may be extremely effective for recruiting fi-nancial candidates, a totally different approach may be needed to attract tech talent—even within the same company.

Regardless of what typically works best for your particular organization, it’s wise to have an overarching strategy that combines a number of established tactics. Having the flexibility and agility to move between effective sourcing strategies is paramount when hiring across different departments and during different economic conditions. Unless, of course, you’re a company like Google. Then you can rely on a single time-tested strategy—just be Google. In the interest of saving time you should establish whether you are in fact Google before you continue reading. Go ahead and Google yourself just to make sure.

Not Google? Then, you’re in luck. We’ve laid out a roadmap that highlights the most effec-tive strategies in the industry for sourcing top talent. We begin with the tactics that have proven to be the most efficient, meaning they routinely produce top talent in a highly cost-effective manner. We’ll then explore some lower priced solutions that require a bit of luck, but might be worth trying if cost is an issue. Finally, we’ll move on to some strategies that are highly effective, but may require a higher financial investment.

In most cases, we recommend progressing through these steps one by one, as they can all be effective at producing top talent in the right situation. However, this is meant to be a general game plan, not a bible. If a certain tactic is yielding poor results on a particular candidate search, or has repeatedly proven to be ineffective for your organization in the past, we recommend that you to progress to the next step. If you maintain some flexibility in your overall hiring strategy and use these tools as we’ve laid out, you’re almost certain to get the best candidates at your disposal.

Demystifying the Sorcery of Sourcing

Figure 1:Am I Google?If you look in the mirror and this is not what you see, it’s probably a good idea to continue reading the sourcing tips contained on the following pages.

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1• Fast: Able to accelerate start date and avoid lengthy organizational orientation.

• Vacancy: Leaves an opening at the employees old position.

• Affordable: No cost to promote. Able to recruit a lower salaried position through more affordable means.

• Smaller Talent Pool: Not ideal for rapid growth or very niche positions that require wider searches.

• Cultural Fit: Candidate’s prior experience within the company assures cultural fit.

• Corporate Stagnation: Limits infusion of new ideas and diversity.

• Upward Mobility: Demonstrates opportunities within the organization, providing incentive for other employees.

• Growing Pains: Promoted employee must learn new skills that a lateral hire from outside may already possess.

• Familiarity: Existing internal network and institutional familiarity helps to improve early performance.

• Internal Tension: “Robbing” a department to staff another, or promoting one employee over another can create friction.

If you asked Deepak Chopra how to hire, he’d likely tell you to look deep within. At RecruitiFi, we would consider that some sage advice. Promoting internally is generally the safest and most affordable option when hiring—not to mention the most common. A 2013 survey by CareerXRoads asked employers about 185,450 positions they’d filled in the prior year. Redeployments came in as the top source with 42% of all hires coming from internal promotions.

There are a number of benefits of hiring from within. Internal candidates can often be re-deployed quickly, they’ve already proven to be a good cultural fit, and they have an established network of internal support that can help their transition into a new role.

These factors directly translate to positive performance. According to a study from Matthew Bidwell, an associate professor at the Wharton Business School, internal promotions generally perform better, cost the company less, and are less likely to be fired or leave than external hires. The study found that candidates who were internally promoted performed better on their evaluations over the first two years despite having 18-20% lower salaries. On top of that, external hires are 61% more likely to be fired and 21% more likely to quit.

Pros Cons

If the Cons outweigh the Pros...

#1 Redeployment: Promote from within

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2Regardless of your company’s HR structure, you’re sitting on a tremendous network of effective recruiters—your employees. Why not leverage this network and bring quality candidates your way with very little outreach?

Referrals have always been an effective way to bring in new hires. Existing employees are much more likely to vouch for contacts that will reflect positively on their own reputation. Hence, you’re more likely to find that ideal candidate through a referral than through a random search. That’s typically backed up by superior productivity. Depending on the industry, referred employees are 10-30% less likely to quit and yield a higher profit per employee while having significantly better performance on high-impact metrics like patent creation.

It’s no wonder that referred employees are twice as likely to get interviews at places like the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and anywhere from seven to ten times more likely to be hired overall depending on the industry. Imagine spending a tenth of the time and resources to make all of your future hires. That’s the potential power of your internal referral network.

Until recently, however, the outreach required was extensive and time consuming.Employees needed to engage in the tedious process of individually calling and emailing their contact. With the advent of social networking, internal referrals have become a more viable sourcing technique. The increased connectivity of networks like Facebook and LinkedIn allows employees to quickly reach out to hundreds, even thousands of their personal contacts in seconds.

#2 Referrals: Ask Around

Enterprise Deloitte Ernst & Young‘10 vs. ‘12 ‘10 vs. ‘12 ‘10 vs. ‘12

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• Fast: Employees only suggest candidates that reflect positively on them, so they can usually be fast tracked through the process.

• Lack Diversity: 61.3% of employees refer a candidate of the same sex, and 71.5% suggest one of the same ethnicity.

• Coporate Fit: Pre-vetted by existing employee for applicable skills, work ethic, and cultural fit.

• Confidentiality: Job search cannot be run confidentially. Especially sensitive if the goal is to replace and existing employee.

• Affordable: Usally just a small referral bonus to existing employee.

• Distracting: Searching for new referrals can be a distraction for existing employees.

• Morale Boost: Bonuses are excellent for building morale for existing employees.

• Unfocused Search: Difficult to get entire employee network to focus on new hires.

Pros Cons

If the Cons outweigh the Pros...

Even with the increased power of this sourcing method, Employee Referral Programs can be disorganized, distracting for employees, and difficult to track and reward. Their increased popularity, however, has prompted a number of centralized systems to hit the market. Many Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have built in referral tracking and third party applications like Zalp and Jibe’s “Get Referred” platform allow you to more effectively organize your internal referral efforts.

Capitalizing on the potential that has been opened by technology, companies like Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and Enterprise have aggressively targeted the growth of their employee referral programs. They’ve set lofty goals for increasing the percentages of new hires made through referrals and backed that up by offering new prizes like iPads and big-screen TVs in addition to traditional cash bonuses.

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3Despite being pronounced dead more times than disco, the job boards have persistently reinvented themselves to remain a relevant, albeit diminished, factor in the hiring process. What was once a thriving empire in the early 2000s is now a fragmented industry dominated as much by a crowd of niche sites and aggregators as it is by the once dominant general job boards.

Great variations in size, popularity, and industry focus lead to a wide range of costs. Posts vary from free sites to $25 for major cities on Craigslist and up to $750 or more for some of the niche technology sites—all of which are relatively affordable when compared to other recruiting methods.

This low initial cost, however, comes with a hidden cost stemming from the job boards’ major flaw: lack of quality control. The public nature of these posts leaves a very low barrier of entry for anyone, qualified or unqualified, to get their resumes into your inbox. With the larger, general job boards this translates into a virtual flood of unsuitable applicants to sift through. So, in order to consider using a job board, you must first assess which asset you’re more willing to spend: time or money. In the end, time is money, so you’re going to pay for it one way or another.

Over the years, niche job sites like Dice, eFinancialCareers, and OneWire have emerged in an attempt to provide a lower volume, more targeted sampling of resumes. However, advertising your position on a smaller site comes with the exact opposite risk. There’s a chance that you’ll get too few resumes to choose from. And with all the out of pocket costs coming up front, there’s always the gamble that your post could come up empty handed.Ultimately, your ideal candidate might not even be on a job board. Passive candidates—those that are currently employed and not actively seeking new employment—are not likely to be looking at job boards. If they’re actively employed in a similar role elsewhere, you may not be able to attract that perfect candidate with the ideal skill set, no matter how much you post.

#3 Job Boards: They’re not dead...yet

Figure 2: Monster StockOnce a major player in the recruiting world, competition and an ideological shift within the industry has seen Monster’s stock plummet in recent years.

Monster Worldwide, Inc.Stock Price 1997 to Present

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• Affordable: Relatively low cost to post. Lowest overall cost if successful.

• Not Confidential: Hard to post if you’re trying to replace an existing employee

• Fast: Quick and easy to post. Resumes start to come in almost immediately.

• Hassle: Open to public, which can lead to constant follow up by candidates and repeated solicitation by recruiters.

• High Volume: Post your job to a general job and let the flood gates open.

• High Volume: Sifting through a mass of applicants can be overwhelming, and the time spent greatly brings up overall cost.

• Integration: Many job boards have built-in posting mechanisms within major ATSs.

• Poor Value: High quality passive candidates are not typically available.

Pros Cons

If the Cons outweigh the Pros...

The top job board at the moment is one that has strayed from the traditional posting model. The job aggregator, Indeed, allows you to advertise jobs through a pay-per-click model or just hope that their job scraping software finds the job on your company website and posts it for free. While it seems complicated, they’ve applied the Google model to job boards. They aggregate jobs from around the web for easy searches and sell advertised positions at the top of the list. And they’re very good at it, accounting for as many job placements as the next three biggest job boards combined. Others like SimplyHired and JuJu, with a slightly varied but similar business model, are also making their mark in a newer segment within the job board market.

Despite potential drawbacks, job boards still account for about 18% of all hires. While they don’t command the market share that they used to, they remain a popular staple of the recruiting process. If you’re lucky enough to find that diamond in the rough, they can be one of the most affordable ways to source for new hires, despite the hidden labor costs. While we don’t recommend them as an all-encompassing strategy, their affordability makes them an option to consider. Your prior experience with job boards is the best gauge of success in the future, but it’s wise to have a backup plan in place.

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4This is the place the pros turn for talent. LinkedIn can be an extremely powerful tool in an experienced hand. With amazing search technology and a reach that covers a good portion of the western working world, professional recruiters have turned much of their sourcing efforts to pinpointing the perfect candidate on the web’s largest professional network.

Due to it’s vast reach and the longterm nature of its profiles, LinkedIn is also the best way to effectively source passive candidates. Unlike job boards and other methods, candidates on LinkedIn aren’t necessarily actively seeking new employment. At least, they don’t know they are until you make them a better offer. It only makes sense that if you’re looking for candidates with the perfect skillset, poaching the already polished talent from your direct competittors is a good place to start.

LinkedIn’s greatest strengths, however, are also their greatest weaknesses. With 300 million people, you have every possible player you need for your team. The downside--there’s 300 million people to sort through! Even a few hundred from the job boards can be mindnumbing. Unless you’re an expert at sourcing, it can be difficult and time consuming to find the right candidates. You’ll almost certainly need a heftily upgraded account that allows for more refined searches.

When you do find the perfect candidate, keep in mind that there’s a very high probability they’re already actively employed. Convincing them to switch teams can be a tall order.

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Figure 3: LinkedInPerhaps the single biggest game-changer in the industry, LinkedIn announced that they had surpassed 300 million users in April of 2014.

#4 LinkedIn: 300 Million People Can’t Be Wrong

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• All Encompassing: Everyone’s on it. You’re on it, I’m on it, your future talent is on it--whether they’re looking for a job or not .

• Time Consuming: Learning to use LinkedIn is easy. Learning to use it like a professional recruiter is no small task.

• Up to Date: Profiles are typically updated with a candidate’s most recent experience

• Global Talent Pool: The sheer volume available can be overwhelming

• Photos: Having a face to put to a name helps hiring managers see applicants as people rather than just resumes

• Passive Candidates: Many candidates are actively emloyed and not currently searching, leading to few positive responses

• Search: Solid search technology allows you to get very granular on the type of candidate you’re sourcing

• Pro-Candidate: Passive candidates can negotiate from a position of power. You need them more than they need you.

• Reference Checks: Allows you to easily find common connections for candid reference checks

• Quickly Escalating Cost: The free version won’t be very useful, but the corporate recruiter plan costs over $10,000/year.

Pros Cons

When you come across your purple squirrel, make sure to utilize common connections within your organization. If your candidate has a common friend or a business associate, this connection can turn into your best recruiter. It also doesn’t hurt to have a candid reference.

So, if you have the time, the level of access, and the wherewithal to do so, we encourage you to search on LinkedIn. Your perfect candidate is out there, but finding them is only half the battle. Convincing them to join your team is an art in and of itself. For an extra edge, see our blog post: Writing the Perfect InMail.

If the Cons outweigh the Pros...

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5At this point, you’ve been flooded with a sea of unqualified resumes from the job boards. You have neither the time, nor the experience to source like a professional recruiter on LinkedIn. While you’d love to hand the reins over to an executive search firm, you have neither the time to wait for results, nor the approval to spend up to 33% of the candidate’s first year salary. That’s where RecruitiFi comes in with the best of all worlds.

RecruitiFi is an entirely new category of search that utilizes crowdsourcing and gamification technologies to produce top-quality candidates significantly quicker and at less than half the cost of traditional recruiting (14% of first year salary). While crowdsourcing and gamification have become the basis of powerful, results-driven models across many industries, RecruitiFi

is the first to bring those concepts to the recruiting space, solving several of the industry’s biggest problems in the process.

This new crowdsourced approach to recruiting allows employers to confidentially post their open position to up to 250 expert agency recruiters. By casting a wide, but focused net, RecruitiFi creates something that no other recruiting method can duplicate—a serendipitous match. The application is as quick and easy as posting to a job board, while leveraging the power, reach, and value of expert agency recruiters. These experts provide the human touch, which is invaluable to finding and hiring the right talent.

Imagine walking into a room with one expert recruiter and asking if they have a potential CFO candidate. They probably don’t, but for a premium fee, they’ll go right out and start looking. Several weeks later, you might have three or four candidates to choose from. Now imagine asking that

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RECRUITiFi

#5 RecruitiFi: A new category of search

Internal Referrals

Figure 4: LinkedInRecruitiFi stacks up favorably against the competition. Top technology and expert recruiter submissions allow for a high-speed, high-quality, highly cost-efficient solution.

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• Quality: You’ll never beat the quality of working with professional recruiters and highly engaged candidates

• Cost: While 14% is an amazing fee for expert recruiting, if you can hire a referral for almost no cost, it should be considered

• Speed: Crowdsourcing tech allows for serendipitous matches and faster results.

• No Haggling: If you like fee or contract negotiations, you’ll have to get your fix elsewhere

• Affordable: At a flat 14% fee, it’s less than half the cost of traditional recruiting and competitive with other methods when time, value, and cost are all considered.

• Infatuation: You might like it so much, you’ll want to tell the world about it. The problem is that you only know a few hundred people.

• Complete Info: Resume, LinkedIn link, a note from the recruiter, and everything else you need to make a rapid hiring decision

• Less Back and Forth: No calling and emailing with recruiters. So, if you’re lonely, this is not for you.

• Simplicity: Sleek workflow gives you the reach of thousands of recruiters through a single platform and without the hassle.

• Augments: New supplemental channel to source talent that does not interfere with your current systems or practices.

same question in a lecture hall filled with 250 expert recruiters. All of a sudden, you’d start to see some very excited hands raising. When you expand the recruiter pool from one to 250 within a specific area of expertise, there’s a great chance that a number of these recruiters have recently done a search for a candidate at a similar company. On average, about 10% of these recruiters return with top-quality candidates, ready and waiting to be evaluated within the first few days.

By gamifying the recruiting process and associating point totals and rankings based on prior performance, RecruitiFi unifies a fragmented marketplace. This takes all of the guesswork out of selecting recruiters, allowing employers to quickly assess the top performers through quantitative metrics for the first time in the industry.

And with a sleek centralized platform providing transparency on both ends, there’s no unnecessary communications back and forth. Recruiters are unable to directly contact the hiring managers, nor do they need to, with all the info they need right on their dashboard. Candidates also use this same elegant interface to confirm their interest in the open position prior to being submitted.

Unlike the job boards that give you too many unqualified candidates, or an executive search firm that will give you a few qualified ones at a high fee, RecruitiFi gives you the perfect amount of fully qualified candidates at just the right price.

Pros Cons

If the Cons outweigh the Pros...

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6• Quality: We’ll say it again. It’s hard to beat the quality when you’re working with a top expert agency recruiter.

• Cost: At 25% to 33% of first year salary, agency recruiting is by far the most costly method

• Throrough: Candidates are so thoroughly vetted, the recruiting process basically replaces the first few rounds of interviews.

• Managing: While top recruiters behave properly, many recruiters can become a distraction, requiring close management.

• Relationships: Over time, recruiters will learn your company culture and provide great results with limited info

• Time Intensive: Retaining a single firm could take weeks or months to yeild effective results

• Good Fit: Finding the right recruiter for your company can be as difficult as finding a candidate. The wrong recruiter will bring the wrong candidates.

When it comes to recruiting, there’s no question that a top executive search firm is the gold standard. It’s not a coincidence that firms like Heidrick & Struggles are publicly traded entities that have dominated the recruiting world for over 60 years.

Expert recruiters have the professional connections to fill top roles, the sourcing ability to find talent that eludes you, and the salesmanship to convince even the most content passive candidates to consider new offers. Their knowledge of the market and experience in thoroughly vetting candidates generally produces a handful of highly polished applicants. Prior to being submitted they’ve already been interviewed and reference checked by the recruiters, so by the time you’re getting them, it’s really like the second or third round of interviews.

At the end of the day, a lot of work goes into recruiting, and there’s no question who’s paying for it. Employers can routinely pay up to 33% of first year salary (sometimes higher in special cases). This generally comes with hefty guarantees and high expectations, but there are no long-term guarantees. Times are changing, and with the Gen-X and Gen-Y workforce, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see 40-year careers at a single company ever again. It’s increasingly rare to see 4-year stints in one position. While 33% may have been a drop in the bucket when amortized over 40 years, it’s a significantly riskier proposition when you’re talking two or three.

There will always be a place in the world for top recruiting agencies. CEOs and other top performers don’t grown on trees. When the position at hand is critically vital to the success of your organization, executive search firms are always an option to consider. Just know that if you want to play, you’ll have to pay.

Pros Cons

#6 Agency Recruiting: Good but pricey

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The bad news about filling highly skilled tech positions is that it remains a very challenging endeavor. Talent with certain specific skillsets--like a senior Ruby developer--won’t stay on the market long, comes at a premium price, and generally has a multitude of job opportunities thrust at them weekly. They’re the prettiest girl at the dance, and their dancecard is likely to be full before you work up the courage to ask them.

The good news is that there are a number of interesting new solutions on the market that may be able to help. Hired and InterviewJet both operate under a similar principal. They accept applications from top tech talent, who they vet and showcase for select employers for a limited period of time. Essentially, these companies act as tech recruiters and offer an auction-style marketplaces with their talent.

They’re both too new to really have much public data. And while HR departments may be slow to adopt novel ideas, the tech talent they’re looking for is generally the first demographic of early adopters. So, if you’ve tried elsewhere for that nearly impossible to fill backend developer position, it might be worth giving these guys a look.

*Bonus: If you’re in Tech, you’re in luck...kinda

Whenever you’re hiring, there are a handful of strategies that should be used in conjunction with your other efforts. These are quick, free, and easy ways to improve your results.

#1 Post the job to your online job board. Depending on your company’s branding, this might be the only thing you need to do for entry and mid-level positions. Why spend time and money searchng for candidates if you’re already getting quality candidates to fall in your lap?

Plus, if you’re a prominant company, there’s a good chance that job aggregators like Indeed and SimplyHired will “scrape” your job (meaning they’ll copy the details from your website and post on their own for a much borader audience). You can sit and hope this will happen, or you can expedite the process by pushing the job to the aggregators through an XML feed on your ATS.

#2 LinkedIn referencing. Even if you’re not directly sourcing on LinkedIn or posting on their job boards, it’s one of the most vital tools in your hiring toolbelt. Serving as more of a longform resume, it’s a great way to get more details about your candidate. If you’re lucky, you might even find common connections that you can speak to as impromptu references.

#3 Google/Facebook/Twitter. What people do in their own time is their own business. But when they’re foolish enough to post their exploits publicly, that becomes an issue. Not only does it reflect their own poor decision making, it will reflect poorly on your business. Do you want someone who casts you in a negative light?

**Double Bonus: Ubiquitous Strategies

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Building a recruiting strategy is a lot like cutting into an onion. When done properly, it should be a well thought out process, and the end product should consist of many layers. However, if you slice right into it without a plan, it will make you cry every time. You can save yourself the tears in the future by considering each of the recruiting methods that we’ve put forth in this reference.

After all, every position has slightly different recruiting needs. Attacking these different problems with the same solution is irrational and ineffective. Companies with the most effective recruiting strategies have recognized this and diversified their techniques. Over time, you might find that some methods work better for your particular company or depart-ment, but it’s wise to maintain flexibility in your recruiting policy. Having a solid, but agile plan will produce better talent at a lower overall cost.

Good luck and happy recruiting!

No More Tears...

RecruitiFi is a revolutionary new category of recruiting solution that utilizes the power of crowdsourcing to make talent acquisition more efficient and more affordable. The intuitive application enables employers to leverage the skills of thousands of third party, expert agency recruiters in a scaled, economic manner.

Based out of its New York offices, RecruitiFi has a talented team with diverse backgrounds in recruiting, technology, marketing, and finance. They enjoy long walks on the beach, recruiting technology, and a good slice of pizza. Unfortunately, there are very few serviceable beaches near the city, and their favorite pizza place recently closed, so they end up devoting most of their time to getting their clients top-quality hires, while opening up new revenue streams for recruiters. If you venture to the East Village, you’ll probably find them helping old ladies cross the street or tending to the community gardens.

www.RecruitiFi.com

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