Imagine you’re a hiring manager and you have a critical opening that you want to fill with a “Rock Star.” Eager to begin, you stick with the tried and true recruiting strategies focusing on those actively looking for jobs.

The first step in the hiring process, is to put up a posting on all the major job boards.

As a result, you quickly get a lot of applicants, but the majority of these resumes are under-qualified.  The candidates who look like they could do the work rule themselves out for various reasons.  Those reasons vary from being out of salary range, culture fit, “job hopper”, unexplained gap in work history, or worse, laid off for disciplinary reasons.

Given the failure to find your “Rock Star” with that approach, next on the list of recruiting strategies is to contact a recruiting firm that specializes in your industry. 

The firm sends 10+ resumes and you decide to interview the three best candidates.  After a little back and forth, you realize the firm only forwarded candidates that have resume lines matching the position’s title. In other words, no one spoke to the candidates about the job before they were submitted. What does that mean for you?

While sending candidate resumes to clients prior to speaking with them directly is the most common of recruiting strategies, it can be problematic. 

Typically, the process looks something like this. First, the client shows interest in a candidate. Then, the recruiter will try to “pitch” the opportunity and convince the candidate to go on the interview.  It can be a successful strategy, but the odds are long that it works out consistently where both the candidate and client are happy long term. Especially in this economy, active job seekers are having no trouble finding jobs they want. By the time the recruiter reaches out, it’s likely they are signing the offer letter from your competitor.

At HTI, instead of doing all of that, we recruit top candidates in a different way.  We recruit and screen candidates long before we ever place them at one of our clients.  Placements are usually made six months to a year after we initially speak to the candidate.By targeting passive candidates that are currently employed elsewhere we are able to capitalize on the workforce and staff hard to fill positions in engineering and manufacturing.

How It Works

• Recruiters focus on what we call “verticals” or categories, and recruit candidates that fit the vertical.
  1. Technical/Engineering
  2. Technical/Non-Engineering
  3. Commercial
  4. Admin/Support
  5. Maintenance Technicians
  6. Machinists
  7. Quality Technicians
• Recruiters perform an “intake interview” to outline the candidate’s ideal position. There’s an emphasis on identifying what is missing in their current role and what is essential in their next career move.
• HTI tells the candidate “when a position comes open that fits exactly what you’re looking for we’ll give you call”.

This hiring approach ensures that every candidate we submit to our clients is

1. Screened
2. Able to perform job duties
3. Within salary requirements
4. 100% interested in the position
5. Willing and able to interview for the job
6. Extremely likely to accept an offer if they fit the company’s culture

 

This recruiting strategy improves the time to fill, increases long term job satisfaction, and consistently places passive, high-quality professional candidates.