3 tips to ensure you source the best performers

Most organisations would agree that their greatest asset is their people.  So if you can source the best performers, then that gives you a tremendous competitive advantage in the market.  Yet most senior leaders find recruitment a challenge, thus continuing to buy into the misnomer that there’s a “war for talent”, good people are hard to find and having confidence that a new hire will perform well is at best a “lottery”.

The reality is that there are some companies who are great at hiring, whilst most lack the knowledge and skills to consistently and proactively secure top talent.  As an executive recruiter of over 20 years and having placed at least 1500 senior executives and board directors in my career, here are three tips for greatly improving your sourcing abilities.

1. Understand explicitly what success looks like for the role you wish to recruit
   Most position descriptions are fairly generic and only offer a broad description of the role expectations.  However, every time you are recruiting a new role for your business, the key deliverables for the role will differ significantly based on the history of the role and the reason for the vacancy. Ask yourself, “what would this person need to deliver in the first three months, six months, twelve months and beyond, for me to be delighted with their performance?” Write down at least four or five key deliverables for each time period.  If there are multiple stakeholders involved, make sure everyone gets to contribute to this document (we call it a Performance Profile) to ensure everyone is on the same page.

   You want to hire someone who has “done it before, done it well, and is motivated to do it again”.  Especially if you are delegating the candidate sourcing to internal or external recruiters, you need to tell them explicitly what you want.

2. You must headhunt to secure the best candidates
   Good employees are not actively looking for a new job.  They are in a role they enjoy, working for a boss they like, and being relatively well paid.  They are generally not looking at job advertisements or replying to LinkedIn inmails.  They are what we call passive candidates.  If you want to attract these people, you must headhunt them.  This means calling them in their workplace and engaging them in a conversation about your opportunity. Headhunting can be challenging if you are using an internal recruiter for your vacancy for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, they cannot do it confidentially, as they need to disclose who their employer is.  You may be looking to replace a poor performer, or you don’t want your competitors to know you are targeting their people.  Therefore confidentiality is a big issue.

   Secondly, your internal recruiters may be working on many vacancies at one time.  Headhunting is very time consuming, plus most recruiters don’t like to do it.  They may send a few LinkedIn inmails and pray for the best, but this is really no better than putting up an advertisement.

   Engaging an external headhunting company used to be very expensive, however there are high-quality, niche firms that now offer very competitive rates.  I would encourage you to partner with one of these, especially for senior or hard-to-fill roles.

3. Constantly be in the market engaging with top talent
   Organisations often wait until a vacancy becomes available before going to the market.  What if your leaders were consistently and proactively engaging with passive candidates in order to build a bench of talent for when the role requires filling?  LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for identifying these people, however another great way is to be regularly asking your customers, suppliers and other key people of influence in your market who the best people are. Make it a part of your leaders’ KPIs as to how frequently they are having meetings with passive candidates and the results achieved.  As the old saying goes, “what gets measured gets done”.

Of course, there is much more to be said about how to attract, and retain, top performers.  If you truly wish to win the war for talent then upskilling your hiring managers and recruitment teams will go a long way to creating and sustaining a tremendous competitive advantage.  Through implementing these three basic strategies as a start, I’m sure you will start to reap tremendous rewards.

Written by Richard Triggs.

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