Talent-Driven Recruitment – If you want to attract and hire a great person, you need to offer a great job

Performance-based Hiring boils down to common sense and these four recruiting rules:

*If you want to attract and hire a great person, you need to offer a great job. That’s why recruitment advertising should emphasize what the person will be doing, not the skills needed to do it. There’s not a single top-talent person in the world who gets excited by a laundry list of “must-have skills.”

*The best people need to be attracted in, not weeded out. There is no law that job descriptions need to be boring nor that they should list every skill and competency. Instead, emphasize what the person will be doing and how this work ties in to an important project or is part of the company’s overall strategy or mission. As a top labor attorney at Littler told me, “Performance objectives are more objective than a list of skills subjectively determined.”

*A series of give-and-take exploratory interviews should be conducted during the hiring process. Forget the 30-minute series of panel interviews and the 90-minute inquisition shoved into one day. Instead, use a consultative recruiting process spread out over a few weeks to first engage the person and determine his or her interest and to demonstrate that your job offers a possible upward career move. Use subsequent interviews to share more insight about the job. During these more formal interviews, dig deep into all of the person’s major accomplishments related to the real-job needs to determine fit, motivation and ability. Top-tier candidates respect hiring managers who can describe the job as a series of performance objectives and who expect the candidate to prove that he or she is capable of handling them.

*Negotiate a 30 percent nonmonetary increase to make it worthwhile for a candidate to accept your job offer. A career move is represented by the difference between what the person is doing now and what the person could be doing at your company. If there is not at least a 30 percent difference, you won’t be attracting many top-tier candidates. The 30 percent nonmonetary increase can be a combination of a bigger and more impactful job role, faster learning opportunity and increased job growth, and a richer mix of more satisfying work.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  Implementing a Talent-Driven Recruiting Function