What the Web Says to Your Recruits

Any candidate that is worth considering should be Googling your company. What will they run into? (You better run that query right now yourself to find out.)

• Is your company the first link (below the sponsors) when the query is run? If not, why not? If the candidate is a top performer then she or he is in high demand and will want to go to a company that is legitimate. Not being the first link when your own company name is Googled starts to raise some questions that you will not be given the opportunity to answer.
• What are 3rd party sites (e.g. blogs) saying about you? If a potential customer has ever asked about you in an industry-related weblog then your potential hires are going to see what people have said about your company. It may not be fair if competitors have posted some of the answers, but that is the reality you are faced with. Dig at least ten search results pages deep and click through each link to see what threaded discussions include your name and how this reflects on your company. If you find dirt, you should create a plan to tackle that dirt. You might also want to create a strategy to mitigate future dirt.
• What are your employees writing about you? These are the search results that potential employees are going to give the most credence to. If you have poor management in place you will definitely want to scour the web for opinions on those people. If you are serious about attracting the absolute best people to work at your company or on your team... manage the bad leaders out or help them improve IMMEDIATELY.
• Many people indicate who their employer is on their social networking page (e.g. LinkedIn or FaceBook). What type of people they are in the outside world may become transparent on those pages and affect how a candidate views your entire workforce. Again, it is just a reality that people have lives away from work and are allowed to do all sorts of fascinating things and have all sorts of unique interests, just hope that those things are all legal and not too divisive.
• Finally, has any unscrupulous blogger or webmaster included your company's name on a webpage that is just looking for some easy money via pay-per-click advertising? I have worked for companies that found their name on pages that were covered with links to all sorts of explicit materials. Set up a Google daily news alert with your company's name to see where your name pops up and report those sorts of false pages immediately. I have always found that Blogger.com and other are very quick to take those pages down.

There are obvious steps that you can take to present the benefits of working for your company. Have a great website with at least one page devoted to educating potential employees about some of those benefits. Give candidates a sense of 'a day in the life' of an employee in the job that they are interested in. Make the first two steps in the application process extremely easy and intuitive. Treat each candidate as if they are a potentially lucrative customer. Be polite, responsive, and appreciative of the applicant's time. Encourage employees who love working for you to spread the word. Be vigilant and act on negative press immediately.

Why Can't I Find Top Performers?

Top performers have lots of options.
There are very few really great employees.
Top performers are not looking for a new job (unless they are starting their own company).
Top performers want to be with winning companies and surrounded by other top performers and supported by great leaders. Is that your reputation?

Who owns finding new hires?

I work for Silver Hill Financial (http://www.silverhillfinancial.com), which is part of Bayview Lending Group. Bayview's HR team has a recruiting team. That team is a shared resource for the other two companies within BLG and other Bayview companies as well. Whenever a manager identifies the need for a new position or needs to replace an employee they seek approval from the company's leader and then call the recruiting team and ask for a search. However, most of the time that manager (as a leader of a specialized function) is probably better suited to find a pool of qualified candidates with experience in that function. Once they grasp this reality they often share the locations where the qualified candidates may be found and then ask for a search. However, this same manager is probably also the best person to reach out to their peers and network in order to attract the right candidates from the same locations that they just sent to the recruiting team. In fact, once a small group of suitable candidates have been recruited to apply this same manager is also probably the best person to interview the candidates in order to determine whether the candidates have the specialized knowledge and experience for the opening.

So, what value does the recruiting team add? They are experts in how to put this process together effectively - from sourcing to attracting to selecting. The members of the recruiting team help the manager figure out what he/she really needs. They help the manager realize which sources the manager's industry provides that probably include people that are interested in new opportunities. They help the manager position the opening and the company in a very attractive way in order to attract the best candidates. They even pay for ads and job postings as needed. Finally, they run all of the candidates through the initial screens before presenting a small group of potentially qualified candidates to the manager. They also offer to help the manager develop effective interview questions and other steps in the process.

Managers should NOT delegate all of the steps to anyone. They must take ownership in the sourcing, attracting, and selection of their team members. Otherwise, they cannot complain about what they end up with. They need to exercise their right to lead.