'Always be Recruiting' Strategy for Business Growth

Are you truly prepared for your company's growth? The 'Always be Recruiting' strategy may sound like the perfect solution to your scaling needs, but be warned, implementing it thoughtlessly could result in more harm than good. In this insightful discussion, we - your hosts, Max and Mike - break down the positives and pitfalls of this approach, offering you a nuanced understanding of how to leverage it effectively without hampering your talent acquisition process.

The secret to success is not just about having an open role and collecting candidates, it's about cultivating relationships between your recruiters and hiring managers and having a clear understanding of what recruiting means within your organization. We offer tactics on how you can ensure everyone in your company contributes to talent acquisition, indirectly recruiting by maintaining a positive candidate experience. Let's navigate together the complex process of recruiting, the importance of always being responsive and creating an environment that encourages top talent to not only come to you but to stay. Tune in, and let's redefine what 'Always be Recruiting' means for your company.

We love to hear your hiring experience, whether you're a hiring manager with 100s of hires, about to make your first hire, or an applicant that has a story to tell. Share your stories with Max & Mike at hiringexperiencepod@gmail.com

This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not to be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

This is the Hiring Experience the podcast that helps you break down the art and science of hiring. Hosted by Max and Mike friends, founders and creators of rapid hiring, on a mission to bring an end to the resume, bringing you tactical advice to help you attract, select and retain the best talent. This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Max: 0:37

Okay. So when you start looking for more candidates and your company is growing at any kind of regular pace, knowing that you may not need a role filled right now but likely will in the future, eventually you'll likely come across a concept that is known as always be recruiting, that has been popularized and taken in many directions, some that are helpful and some that are harmful to not only your company but also to the candidate experience. We want to highlight some of the good elements of this whole approach, but also some of them that are probably harming your ability to find good talent if you take it to the extreme.

Mike: 1:34

Yeah. So there's a couple aspects of always be recruiting that stand out to me. I think what you need to do is define what recruiting means within your organization. First of all, and to us, recruiting kind of the baseline and the base level of it is making relationships between your recruiters and your hiring managers. So when I think of always be recruiting, I think that it doesn't necessarily mean always have an open role and keep that open role perpetually and always be collecting candidates and all those types of things like that's not what that means to me. I think that in taking in that context, you end up with a poor candidate experience because you have people that apply for your role that never hear back and things like that. You might not actually be hiring, but you have your roles distributed.

Max: 2:25

No, but they're going to hire the right candidate when they come in. That's why we leave it open forever and ever.

Mike: 2:33

Yeah. So I think obviously you do need to distribute your roles when you're hiring. You need to be proactive in when that might be and be able to determine that. But I think that on the other side of these arguments, you always need to be building relationships with the other people in your team that are going to be involved in this process. That's part of always be recruiting. You always need to be responsive that's part of it as well.

Mike: 3:01

Where you might not be actively looking for roles, but if roles or if candidates are coming through the pipeline, always be responsive. As part of always be recruiting, you always need to be tracking your success and your missed opportunities. That way you can learn and have new ways to elevate that as you proceed. What that means to me is making sure that you hone in on what the process is. You continue building what that process is within your team and you're always improving it. And externally, everyone knows you Post your role or how we distribute that, and then you know do your recruitment process from there and hiring right, like Mike said, like starting to understand what recruiting means at your company, and Not only that, but like who is responsible for it.

Max: 3:50

Do you have recruiters in-house? Are they, are they talent acquisition people? Or are you simply thinking we've got a person that we send job descriptions to and then they send it out to the world for us? And it's actually your managers and your VPs and your team leads that are responsible for actually hiring those positions? And Are your recruiters supposed to be vetting them, etc. And part of that. All of that comes back to this if you're always recruiting, you need to understand who is responsible for what, and they also need to have a deep understanding of the position in what it is you're looking for, because otherwise you're not sure whether or not you're missing out on people or they are screening people out because they misunderstand what you're looking for, and so, therefore, you could be harming your recruiting efforts there as well, and a big part of it, like Mike said, is like we want to Focus only on filling roles when we want, need them or we anticipate a need for them in the future.

Max: 4:59

This always be recruiting can be taken to the extreme of where we leave all positions open all the time on Job boards or on our careers page Whether we need that person or not, because they think, well, it's the best the candidate applies, we're gonna take them in.

Max: 5:15

It's the reality is you're probably not, because you're gonna miss them. You're gonna miss them or You're gonna look and be the top player that comes through. You're not gonna want to pay what they would want to come through at a time when you don't actually need them, and so now you're putting yourself in a worse financial position Because you think you should always be recruiting every top candidate that comes through the door. It really is about always understanding what it is you're recruiting for and Taking it from there. Another aspect of it that we talked to people about is that, in the mindset of what it means to be recruiting is that everyone in your company Can be an external recruiter in one fashion or another, whether or not it's to their immediate peer group or just to the world in general. When they interact with clients and customers and people, they are out there recruiting in a very indirect way, yet they need to be empowered to do that as well when you are looking for someone out there.

Mike: 6:25

Yeah, and I think that needs to be taken in a bit of context. Like you know, there's the salesman Always be selling type thing, which I don't necessarily agree with either. I think always be trying to help your prospect, always be trying to be of some type of assist and as a result, I think that makes the best salespeople. I think you can apply that to the recruitment Atmosphere as well, where if you're always trying to provide the most helpful information or the best candidate experience or what have you, then that will result in the most success in the recruiting realm. I don't think it's always about, you know, trying to actively Recruit when you're not or trying to actively sell when you're not, things like that.

Max: 7:10

Right, you end up ghosting recruiters, applicants and responses, and then it just it continually will harm your brand as you move forward, because those people are not going to return Unless you keep them engaged or just treat them well While they've. They thought they were in the recruiting process, even though you weren't actively recruiting that role at the time.

Speaker 1: 7:34

Thank you for listening to the hiring experience. We hope you enjoyed this episode and learned something new about the art and science of Hiring. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. This helps others discover the show. Share with a friend, colleague or anyone going through the hiring experience right now. Share your hiring experience with us at hiring experience pod at gmailcom.