How to find the best people

Sharon Davies explains disruptive recruitment. Putting the right messages in front of the right people at the right time, and finding great people faster.

Here’s a quick question: how important to the goals of your business are the people you employ?

Here’s another: If you get the best people, will your business perform better?

And one last question: Are you looking for the best people in the right places?

For most – dare I say, every – business owner, the answer to the first question is obvious. The reason you employ anyone is because of the skills and capabilities they bring to the office, without which the business doesn’t operate very well, or indeed, at all.

To the second question, better people generally do mean a higher-performing company. This is why you select the best candidate from the applications you receive when advertising a ‘situation vacant’.

The third question is where things start getting a little trickier. If your answer is ‘on a job board’, or ‘Trade Me’, that might be OK. 

But it’s probably not.

Adapt to a changing world (where people aren’t necessarily looking)

We live in a world today which, driven by a technological shift so powerful that its being called ‘the fourth industrial revolution’, is changing rapidly.

Finding the best candidates in this world is itself a shifting target. That target first moved some time ago, with the place to find people going from the classifieds in the Sunday newspapers, to online job boards.

It hasn’t stopped there. The shift has continued, to the extent that being on an online board might still be necessary, but it most definitely is not sufficient. After all, if that’s where you are looking for your next great hire, your next great hire must be on that job board too. If the people you are looking for are actively looking for positions, a match-up is possible. 

But there is more to it than that.

A good number of the people you would want to join your company aren’t looking at all. They stopped browsing the classifieds years ago and they don’t go to the job boards (which, let’s face it, are just an electronic version of the classifieds) because they are reasonably happy in their current position. This also means that while they are probably on Trade Me all the time, like the rest of New Zealand, they’re not there to look for employment opportunities.

But that doesn’t mean if the right position came along, they wouldn’t be interested in changing jobs. Far from it.

Your ad, where they are

Where are these candidates to be found? Like the rest of the world, they are online. They are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat. They are reading the news, listening to music, checking the weather, watching YouTube and doing any one of the multitude of activities on which we spend time on the Internet.

Your ‘situations vacant’ alert should be there too.

But, while it is possible with programmatic advertising to contextually deliver an advert to specific individuals who suit the profile of the person (or persons) you wish to get on board, that’s just the start of capturing the candidate’s attention.

Now that you’re in the right place, your ad should be designed to speak their language, appeal to their instincts and communicate the reason why joining your company is a good career move.

Do all of that well, and the net for your company’s talent search is cast far wider than before.

“When your target candidate logs on to Facebook, does a Google search or watches a YouTube video, your advert should pop up, with a message that catches his or her attention and encourages action – whether that person is currently looking for a job, or not.”

How does that work?

If your recruiting has always centred on classifieds and job boards, going online can seem a little daunting. Like any other specialist function, the right expertise will make all the difference. 

Look for a recruitment company which combines an understanding of the job market today, in which more people than ever before are seeking that elusive work/life balance, and which has an understanding of the impact of technology on society.

A demonstrable ability to create impactful adverts and – this is the crucial part – place them in those places where your ideal candidates are spending their time, is essential. When your target candidate logs on to Facebook, does a Google search or watches a YouTube video, your advert should pop up, with a message that catches his or her attention and encourages action – whether that person is currently looking for a job, or not.

Recruitment has always represented a substantial cost; with programmatic advertising which accurately puts the right messages in front of the right people at the right time, you can find great people faster. 

What’s more, you can do it while cutting the cost of hiring substantially at the same time.