8 Ideas for Creative Hiring
If you want to hire top talents you need to look beyond traditional hiring practices. It’s time to get creative! In this blog post I would like to suggest some more unusual ways of attracting top candidates.
1) Invite your candidates for a discussion event prior to the interview. Look how they interact with each other, observe them and pay attention to their opinions, their knowledge and the way of communicating. It will help you to distinguish the passive ones from the leaders and team players. The company “I Love Rewards Inc” invited once 1200 applicants in a discussion session and only 400 turned up. What does that show us? That the remaining 800 did not even take the first step!
2) Remember that you are not hiring a CV but a candidate. Find out what personality the jobseeker has, apart from the skills, educational background, experiences and qualifications that you already know about. What are the person’s interests, hobbies and motivations? Try to look beyond his job skills and listen and look attentively what makes him “tick”. It might help you to find the perfect match for your company more easily. You could do this by asking them to submit a very short answer to this question in video format before you let them know whether they would get an interview invitation or not.
3) The office is not the only place you can find your dream hires. Look out for unusual places or events. Meetup, for example, is a forum in which people of various interests can meet and follow up in person. It would give you the advantage to get easily in touch with like-minded people (in a less recruitment related environment) who are passionate and have a certain knowledge about a particular topic, for example technology. The company “Quicken Loans” once sent out their employees to restaurants and retail stores to engage with their staff and offer interview opportunities to those who really excelled in their jobs.
4) You might have rejected candidates in the past for various reasons. Don’t completely discard them, have a look again at their CVs and see whether they might be suitable for current positions. Often there might be candidates among them who are definitely worth being re-considered and given a second chance.
5) Think about the places where you can find your target group, for example online forums. If you are looking for an Android developer, do a google search and enter “android developer forum”. Participate in various discussions and let all people involved know that you are hiring. You could also add a note saying that if they can refer someone suitable for a particular position, they would get an incentive for their efforts.
6) Include a short note of job positions you are trying to fill at the end of every email you are sending out. It helps to spread the word and someone might definitely know a candidate who is looking for a job or who is not happy in his current job and would consider to change job.
7) Invite candidates to a tour at the company’s premises, meeting other staff members, clients and get an idea about the corporate culture. Observe how enthusiastic they look and sound, how familiar they seem to be with the tools people use in doing their job, what questions they ask, how they interact with other employees onsite and how well they would fit inside the company.
8) Change the format of your job ads. Create a corporate recruiting video, it makes you stand out from the crowd. It gives a candidate an additional insight into the company, the corporate culture, staff members and the specifications of the job vacancy that you are trying to fill. You can add this video link also on various online job sites. It is still considered as rare but big companies tried this approach and it showed to be effective. A video can get the message across better than any written job ad. Have a look at one example of the company HUMANA at the following link:
http://youtu.be/Raw8ywHBULA
Every company is different and what works for one company does not necessarily work for another one. A Hiring Manager should therefore see it as a challenge to experiment and see what works for his company and what doesn’t.
Karin Schroeck-Singh
Karin Schroeck-Singh is a passionate Public Speaker, eBook Author, and a freelancing Online Content Producer. She has an MBA from the University of Leicester (UK) and gained 18 years of international work experience in Italy, the UK and India.