Recruiting For the Future Workplace Today

You have heard about it and CEO’s are kept awake at night worrying about it. The war for talent for the future workplace today.

Questions like:

Where do we find high performing talent who can fit into our culture and hit the ground running?

How do we align our need for talent with our willingness to teach and train new hires?

How can we leverage our on boarding process to ensure that when we find good people  they stick around for at least a year or two?

These questions are a great starting point for outcome based recruitment and there are additional questions that can help to shed light on what needs to be done to improve the recruitment process.

Recruiting needs to become an ‘all employee’ focus and become part of the culture and strategic goals of the company.

The questions above are great starting points and the quality of the questions need to shift in order to find creative solutions.

Questions such as:

Which industries do we know already have the talent we are looking for?

Who in our company are our top performers and who do they know?

What are the latest recruiting practices in industries other than our own ?

Innovative companies have focused recruiter positions within the organization where their full time focus is to be on the hunt for talent. Zappos has eliminated the job posting process within the company and instead encourages everyone to post on the internal social media outlets and then the recruiter is tasked with matching talent with jobs. This works to the advantage of both the applicant and the company as the recruiter is also on the lookout for promotion opportunities within the company from the existing talent pool- this increases retention. For external recruiting Zappos relies on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all things social to reach out to and find talent.

In the IT industry recruiters use puzzles and games that once solved an individual gets a link to apply to the job. A Silicon Valley start-up Quixey was looking for qualified engineers, they created a monthly challenge offering cash prizes for winners.  The engineers were given three practice problems to solve, and if they get them right, they were given a 60-second computer programming problem to solve and then a link to apply.

Employer referral programs can produce high performers, high retention rates, and if managed correctly, they are faster, and typically less expensive than all other programs. Referrals are  not new -the results that they create have intensified with the growth and usage of social media. The impact of social media has been so strong that that the referral hire target for top companies is  50 percent of all hires. The most effective programs will adopt specialized types of referrals including assigned referrals, proactive referrals, college referrals, and non-employee referrals.  The 2015 strategic referral goal focus would be best to  focus on building a recruiting culture where every employee is a 24/7 talent recruiter.

The future workplace needs to have the top talent today- recruiting and on boarding are critical elements to competitive advantage.