What are the Best Recruiting Techniques ?

Question :
Please let me know according to you what are the best recruiting techniques to be adopted in the pursuit of talent acquisition.

Answer :
There are no golden principles which guarantee the candidate joining the company after picking up the offer. However i found the following article pretty interesting and may help you out in doing your best !

The Best of Lou Adler's Recruiting Rules

By Lou Adler, October 1, 2008

I’ve discovered a few critical recruiting principles over the past 30 years placing hundreds of top performers in staff, management, and executive positions. For marketing purposes, I call these Lou’s Recruiting Rules. If you learn and implement these twelve techniques from now on, on every search, you’ll call them lifesavers. Here’s my list of rules that will take you to the upper echelon of recruiters anywhere in the world:

1. Maintain Applicant Control.
Stay the buyer from first contact to offer extension and acceptance. When you start selling, you lose. This is the essence of applicant control. Most recruiters don’t have a clue as to what this means. They talk too much, don’t know how to use questions to uncover the candidate’s motivating needs, they over-sell, and they under-listen. This might be okay for placing average candidates, but it won’t work for top performers. For these people changing jobs requires a series of give-and-take information exchanges. Applicant control starts by using the first call to ask if the person would be open to talk about a possible career opportunity. Use the subsequent phone screen and follow-up interviews to look for voids and gaps in the candidate’s background. This provides you the insight needed to position your job as something worth pursuing. If it is, the candidate will begin to sell you, attempting to prove she’s competent. This is applicant control. You lose this tremendous advantage once you start selling. You’ll need to attend one of our recruiter training programs to understand how to establish and maintain applicant control regardless of the situation, but these articles will get you started.

2. Sell the Next Step, Not the Job.
Don’t start your initial discussion with a complete description of the job and why it’s wonderful. This is an unsophisticated sales tactics. As a result, most top candidates will say they’re not interested. Instead, ask the candidate if she’d be interested in talking a few minutes about a possible career opportunity. Be vague about the title and get the candidate to describe a little of her background. Withholding information is a good way to maintain applicant control and keep the process moving along. Next, after giving the candidate a 30-second impactful overview of the job, ask her if she’d be interested in a more detailed 30-minute discussion. If this conversation goes well, suggest an interview with the hiring manager to learn even more about the job and the team. Keep the process moving along this way, getting concessions at each step with an offer to provide more information to address any concerns the candidate might have. You’ll increase your end-to-end placement rate (# of people initially contacted to make one placement) by 50-100% by parsing out critical nuggets of information rather than providing it all at once. (Specific “how to” details are covered in Recruiter Boot Camp.)

3. Define the Job, Not the Person.
Traditional job descriptions that emphasize skills, experiences, background, and academics are not job descriptions, they’re people descriptions. A job description describes in some detail exactly what a person will be doing, not the skills a person needs to have. We call this type of job description a performance profile. It lists the primary 6-8 performance objectives the person is expected to achieve during the first year. Clarifying expectations upfront has been shown to increase on-the-job performance and reduce turnover. “Job shock” is a common problem when a person discovers that the work required to be performed is not the work described or promised. It’s caused by not defining the performance expectations upfront, assuming everyone knows them.

4. Don’t Use Wal-Mart Advertising to Attract Tiffany Customers.
Boring advertising only attracts average candidates. The best candidates with multiple opportunities won’t apply to a job that leads off with a list of skills, some pie-in-the-sky overview of your glorious company, or a req number. Instead, have a unique title and describe some of the important projects the candidate would be focusing on. Rather than a long list of skills and “must-haves,” describe how these skills will be used on the job. For example, “Use your BSME and advanced powertrain design skills to lead the development of our new 100mpg electric car,” instead of “Must have a BSME and 5-10 years transmission and powertrain experience.” (Send in a creative ad to enter our 2008 Outrageous Ad Writing Content. Here are the rules and some background information.)

5. Be Found.
Ads must be found using Google or a job board aggregator like SimplyHired. This requires some search engine optimization and reverse engineering to get to the top of the job listing. If your ad isn’t found, it won’t really matter how compelling it is. Reverse engineering is the process of finding your ad using terms a typical candidate would input on either Google or SimplyHired (e.g., jobs software sales Chicago). Even better, if you combine all similar jobs in a talent hub, you’ll be more easily found, you’ll reduce your advertising expenses, and you’ll attract more top performers. (Attend our Sourcing Summits for more on how to use search engine marketing to optimize your recruitment advertising and how to use talent hubs.)

6. Follow the 80/20 Rule when Recruiting Passive Candidates.
Referred and pre-qualified candidates are 25 TIMES MORE VALUABLE than a name or resume you found using some clever Boolean search string. First, consider that the callback rate of a referred person is at least 2-3 times greater than a cold call. Second, recognize that the likelihood that a cold-called candidate is qualified, appropriate, and interested in your job is at best a one-in-ten shot. The secret for success in recruiting passive candidates is to spend 80% of your time calling pre-qualified people who have been referred to you by another strong person. If you spend more than 20% of your time cold calling, you’re wasting it. By calling pre-qualified referred candidates, you only have to make 10 or so calls to get 2-3 sendouts vs. 50 or more cold calls. Of course, for this process to work you’ll need to obtain 2-3 great referrals on every call you make. (You’ll want to attend our Advanced Sourcing and Recruiting course to master this critical skill. In the interim here are some articles on how to improve your networking efforts right away.)

7. Measure 1st Impression at the End of the Interview.
More hiring mistakes take place in the first 30 minutes of the interview than at any other time. This is a result of overvaluing your first impression, which is often made in 5 minutes or less. People who make good first impressions tend to be asked easier questions, with the interviewer looking for facts to prove the candidate is qualified. People with weaker first impressions are initially assumed to be incompetent or a bad fit, with the interviewer asking tougher questions looking for facts to prove the candidate is not qualified. It’s always best to wait 30 minutes before making any yes/no assessments, using this time to collect objective evidence. Then at the 30-minute mark, or later, ask yourself if the candidate’s first impression will help or hinder on-the-job performance. When first impression is assessed this way, you’ll discover that many people with a great first impression aren’t top performers, and many of those who initially appeared somewhat weak, were really just a bit nervous. (Here are some other ideas on how to reduce the impact of first impressions on assessment accuracy.)

8. Use the One-Question Performance-based Interview to Recruit and Close.
Here’s a kick in the head: the primary purpose of the interview is to look for voids and gaps in the candidate’s background, and you can do it with just one question! Done properly, not only will you more accurately assess competency, but you’ll also create interest on the part of the candidate if she sees your job opening as a stretch move. This will help reduce compensation needs, minimize the risk of a counter-offer, and allow you to maintain applicant control. (Read this article for the quick version on how to do this.) A big plus: you’ll have all of the evidence you’ll need to overwhelm a hiring manager who thinks your candidate doesn’t have the right stuff. (To become a top recruiter you’ll need to send your hiring managers to our special training course just for them.)

9. No 2s!
Our 10-Factor Candidate Assessment Scorecard guides the interviewer through ten great predictors of on-the-job performance using a 1-5 ranking system. A Level 2 is someone who is competent to do the work, but not motivated. If you go out of your way to not hire Level 2s you’ll only be hiring people who are both competent and motivated to do the work required. “No 2s” is the best kept secret for not hiring underperformers. To pull this off you need to prepare a performance profile and look for examples of where the candidate has a proven track record of doing this work well and if she is still motivated to do so. If you’re going to use behavioral interviewing, make sure the example chosen to demonstrate motivation is comparable to real job needs.

10. No No’s!
When a candidate says “Not interested” when first contacted, it’s usually caused by a lack of information, the recruiter over-selling the job, or lack of time. Overcoming these problems is pretty easy – don’t pay attention, and diplomatically persist. Alternatively, never ask a question that can be answered by “Not interested” or “No.” This is a part of the applicant control Rule 1 described above. If you somehow got a “No,” you can still recover by suggesting to the candidate that maybe you rushed things a bit, and then rephrase your opening remarks to something like this: “Would it make sense to talk 5-10 minutes on the chance the job I’m handling represents a significant career move?” Don’t be surprised if at least 75% say yes. You’ll need to become a Certified Performance-based Hiring recruiter to master this.

11. Get 100% Acceptance Before Making Any Offer.
You should never make an offer formal until the candidate has told you with 100% certainty that she’ll accept it on the spot. When candidates tell you they have to think about it, or accept it and later renege, it’s generally due to an unsophisticated, rush-to-close process behind it all. While you want candidates to think about every term and condition in an offer, it’s best to do this before you finalize it. You do this by testing every aspect of the offer before making it formal. For example, start the testing process by asking the candidate if she wants to be on the short list. Then ask how this job compares to others she’s considering. Test the comp range, benefits, and other aspects of the offer the same way. The form of this test goes something like, “If we could offer you this, do you want to be considered a finalist?” If you gain approval, test the start date by asking when she could start if the offer was finalized in the next few days. Then, before you make the offer final, ask if she’ll sign it within 24 hours and stop considering other opportunities. If the answer is no, don’t make the offer. Of course, if you want to know what to do if the candidate says no anywhere along the way, you’ll need to attend Recruiter Boot Camp Online. Here are some articles on negotiating offers to get you started.

12. Move Slowly, as Fast as Possible.
Top performers need to time to evaluate any new job, primarily to consider the strategic impact of the move in comparison to the tactical issues. For example, top people might be willing to give up compensation for a faster growth path, but this won’t be done instantly. It takes at least a day or two to ponder these trade-offs. While the recruiter needs to push the process along, you risk losing the deal if you push too hard. If you maintain applicant control, create a sense of urgency, and add in some competition, you can accelerate the decision making, but be careful not to break the space-time continuum. Using a solution selling process is the key to uncovering needs, addressing concerns, comparing options, and closing the deal. Our recruiter training programs have embedded this concept into every step. Here’s an article that highlights how to pull this off.

Recruiting the best is a science, not an art. It can be a logical, commonsense business process that can be learned, applied, and scaled throughout a company. You’ll be half-way there if you follow these 12 rules from now on, on every search. You’ll be 100% there if you get everyone else in your company to follow them, too.

Source : http://www.adlerconcepts.com/
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