Pipeline recruitment

Over the years we have seen a lot of companies struggle when they have a need to recruit for a critical role. It takes a tremendous effort to find, engage, nurture and attract top talent. This is the complete opposite of the traditional process of filling jobs.

In the top talent model of recruitment, you will fish deeply in the right ponds for the best candidates, using creative and current methods such as social media recruiting, one degree of separation, stakeholder referrals and compelling marketing statements. In the niche or geography you’re recruiting in, you’ll have beaten the bushes and attracted a strong number of passive candidates currently employed and successful. These candidates stay with you for years and are major impact players.

In the filling jobs model of hiring, you will run an advertisement that really is not an advertisement, but rather a job description masquerading as an advertisement. You will then wait two to three weeks while every toxic, dysfunctional, average, mediocre, unemployed non-performer responds to your ad.

Since none of these candidates can remotely come close to meeting your expectations, you compromise and pick from the best of the worst, or, as one of our clients put it not too long ago, the “cream of the crap”. A large percentage of these candidates barely survive a three-to-six-month probation period, and typically are the group that leads to recruitment being only 50% successful in most companies.

You’ll probably respond by saying: “Sometimes we recruit good people from ads.” We believe that advertising is a great low-cost/low-time investment approach to recruiting. Unfortunately, when you invest very little money and very little time in trying to recruit top talent, your results are indicative of your investment.

Sometimes, you do get lucky in finding a good candidate. Here’s our basic question: Are you willing to stake the success of your business on luck through advertising? Stop putting all your eggs in the advertising basket to find good candidates.

We would like to suggest that a better approach to recruiting might be, as Seth Godin recommends, a pipeline list of people. Create a just-in-time recruitment process in which you keep lists of great candidates for the various roles on your team. Most successful managers and executives do this.

Of course, this requires most companies to change a few things in their expectations of managers and executives.

Those changes might include:

• holding managers and executives accountable for recruiting top talent
• holding managers and executives accountable for hitting strong results
• teaching managers and executives how to network effectively for top talent – both online and offline
• installing tracking tools to manage the candidate lists (e.g. salesforce.com)
• implementing a process for drip-nurturing to sustain top-of-mind awareness with the potential candidates.

Do you have a recruitment pipeline in place? For more advice on recruiting top talent, contact me by email or call me on +44 (0)20 7099 2621.

Terry Irwin is a management consultant with international experience in strategy development, business turnarounds, talent management, venture capital, M&As and project management. He is a founder director of TCii Strategic and Management Consultants and has helped a broad portfolio of international clients to achieve profitable, sustainable business growth.

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