Thursday, April 30, 2015

How to Find Employees- a thought leadership blog series from John Wentworth #1 HARD WORK IS THE KEY


   
#1: Hard Work is the Key
Finding qualified, interested and affordable candidates is not about technology or magic. It's primarily about hard work. We think that finding candidates is 85% hard work and 15% understanding the organization of a professional community.

Every professional community is organized in a way that can be figured out.

Certain companies are big and are leaders. We regularly do searches in which a great employee from a big company realizes they would be happier if they were a bigger fish in a smaller pond. This is not always just ego; often it has to do with their ability to make a high-impact contribution.

Other companies are not leaders. Some of their top employees may long to be at the top. Often they can be enticed to move to a better or more prestigious company. The hard part is this: do they really have what the leader wants?

The leadership of professional organizations, particularly leadership of local chapters, is often for us a great source of great referrals. The person giving the referral will likely be a seasoned professional who can tell competence from lack of competence.

There are vendors whose salespeople know a lot of people. If you are looking for one of the people they know, and they know that person is not happy with his/her current job, you may get an excellent referral. From the salesperson's point of view: do a favor for the candidate now, make a sale to the candidate later.
There are conferences. A clever internet researcher can find the speakers' lists and sometimes the attendee list. The speakers may be great referral sources and the attendees may be referral sources or candidates themselves. Some recruiters will just attend the conference.

There are blogs and shared sites where technical people offer suggestions to hard problems. If they give good advice, they may be an excellent employee and worth contacting. We have filled untold numbers of IT jobs in this way.

You can do more traditional recruiting, run ads, post jobs, or pull resumes off of Monster, all shotgun approaches that will get you a lot of chaff you have to wade through and, often, minus the best candidates. Not always, but usually, precisely targeted recruiting works better. 

But you need to know how the community is organized so you know what to do, where to look and whom to call or email. A former employee used to tell me: you should be able to find anyone in two phone calls; the first call just has to be to the right person.

Smart hard work is the key. Not magic or packaged tricks.

If you are interested in how Wentworth can find people you cannot find, or teach your employees how to do it, please call me at 310 732 2301.

Thanks so much.

John
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John Wentworth | President | 310 732 2301 | johnwentworth@wentco.com
The Wentworth Company, Inc. / Wentworth Recruiting | www.wentco.com