December 4, 2009

You laid off a bunch of people this year. You’d love to staff back up, but you believe you can’t even think about that … not until the business improves. The truth is, you’re wrong. Now – instead of when you’re under pressure to hire – is the best time to identify and build relationships with talent. That’s the bright side, right?

Business expert, headhunter and founder of AskTheHeadHunter.com, Nick Corcodilos stresses that in order to effectively recruit great employees, you need to make a connection with them long before you actually need them. You need to seek out those interested in what your company offers and build relationships with those that have common interests and goals when neither you nor they are desperate. The following tips can help you attract and maintain relationships with key talent now. 

Commit to quality leadership, from the ground, up. It might seem stunningly obvious, but ensuring your company is attractive to strong candidates is job number one—and no small task at that. Mike Myatt, chief strategy officer of coaching and personal branding firm N2Growth, recommends taking a look at your company values and making sure everything you do upholds them. If you succeed at this, your organization will become a leader in its community and you will be able to attract great talent with very little effort. Strong executive leadership will attract quality employees on all levels that are committed to working hard and helping create great products and services that will contribute to a very strong company identity.

Align their goals with yours. When all is said and done, great potential hires are not out looking to satisfy the needs of their potential employers. They are focused on their own career tracks and feeling satisfied and fulfilled in their daily work lives. To get the best of the crop, you’ll need to tap into their career patterns and aspirations and articulate how that positioning lines up with your own.

Enter their world. When you are building relationships with job candidates, you may think of it as them ingratiating themselves with you. With top talent, you need to think of it as you ingratiating yourself with them. To really get their interest and commitment, you need to get to know them in their native habitat – on the street, at their jobs and when they are talking to their peers. Find out where they hang out and what they talk about so you can understand what makes them tick, speak their language and help them get to know your company. 

Train, motivate and mentor potential employees … before they even work for you. Myatt also says that a potential employee of your company needs to want to work for you more than you want them to work for you. A lot of business owners spend too much time and energy selling their company and still don’t end up getting any interest. To maximize time spent recruiting potential employees and leave more time to focus on your business, you need to talk to the right people and make sure those people really understand the key components of your company. If you’ve built a quality business, you won’t have to give huge, expensive incentives to the talented people you want to hire when you are ready to hire them. Even more importantly, Myatt believes that once you recruit someone perfect, you won’t keep them for very long unless you are willing and able to train, motivate and mentor that individual. You need to spend time really courting potential employees using regular, meaningful contact and give them important information about your company’s mission and its present and future goals so they will be able to thrive in your company environment. This open communication is what creates long-term loyalty.

You may not be able to imagine a time when you will be able to hire new employees to continue to grow your company, but you need to believe that many of your competitors have already started the process of building relationships.  Consider pre-poaching as a must for any business that wants to get to the best talent …before someone else does.