by Richard Triggs | Oct 16, 2024 | Blogs
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.
- 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 for CEOWORLD Magazine, click below for original article.
3 tips to ensure you source the best performers – CEOWORLD magazine
by Richard Triggs | Oct 1, 2024 | Blogs
**BY **Richard Triggs written for Fast Company
As an executive recruiter with over 20 years of experience, I have interviewed at least 10,000 candidates. A big part of my success as a recruiter is being highly skilled at interviewing and teaching my clients how to interview excellently. A lot of time, effort, and money goes into a recruitment process, so it would be a terrible shame if great candidates don’t take your role because their interview gets mishandled.
Many line managers and HR professionals think they are great at interviewing because they have done it hundreds of times. Yet if you struggle to attract and hire the best talent, I’d recommend reconsidering and adopting a proven interviewing strategy.
My team and I have used Lou Adler’s Performance-based Hiring interviewing style for over 15 years. For people who interview regularly, I highly recommend reading his book Hire with Your Head to do a deep dive into interviewing excellence.
Here are some tips you can implement easily and immediately, to vastly improve your interviewing skills.
Be clear on the exact key deliverables for which you are hiring
Ideally, this should be done before you even go to market. You want to hire someone who has “done it before, done it well, and is motivated to do it again.” What does success look like in the role? What are the specific, quantifiable key deliverables you want in the first three, six, and 12 months of employment?
Use these key deliverables as the foundation for your advertising, headhunting, and other sourcing strategies to ensure you are shortlisting and then interviewing only the best talent based on these desired outcomes.
Ask the candidate to speak about a recent key achievement
People love to do what they are good at and love to talk about it with pride. So by asking the candidate to describe a recent key achievement that they are most proud of, you can quickly determine whether what they love to do matches with what you want them to do. Ask lots of follow-up questions to really probe the candidate about this specific key achievement and what makes it so special for them.
For example, let’s say that you are looking for a sales manager who can assess within the first three months how to reduce the cost of goods sold by 25% to remain competitive with the market.
If your interviewee talks about launching a new product into a new market and achieving a 10% market share within 12 months, they may be a great sales manager, but probably not right for your current requirements.
Ask an additional question
Following on from the example above, if their key achievement does not align with your requirements, then ask a question along the lines of: “What we really need this person to deliver immediately is a strategy to reduce our cost of goods sold by 25%. Can you speak about a relevant key achievement that demonstrates your ability to do this?”
You will quickly be able to determine from their response whether they have the relevant experience to deliver your requirements. Remember, you want to hire someone who has “done it before, done it well, and is motivated to do it again.” Too often, companies hire great people, only to find that they are misaligned with what is actually required.
If your candidate’s experience does not exactly match your required key deliverables, look for key achievements and transferrable skills that most closely reflect what you want them to do. As long as the gap is not too significant, you may be confident that with the appropriate training and support, they will succeed in the role.
These simple interviewing techniques will go a long way toward ensuring that you not only hire the best talent but also that you will retain them in the longer term. People love to do what they are good at and generally will remain longer in roles that allow them to do this.
Original article >> Essential tips to level up interviewing skills – Fast Company
by Richard Triggs | Sep 24, 2024 | Blogs
By Kace O’Neill | September 17, 2024|5 minute read
When it comes to recruitment, it’s essential to prioritise a comprehensive strategy. Relying on ad response and other avenues may no longer cut it.
HR Leader recently spoke to Richard Triggs, founder of Arete Executive and author of Winning the War for Talent, about how Aussie businesses should navigate their recruitment strategies in 2024 as the competition for talent between employers becomes tougher and tougher.
“[A] factor to consider is how you are positioning yourself as an employer of choice and your leaders as leaders of choice. This is critically important, and yet, once again, most organisations don’t have a comprehensive strategy for doing this,” Triggs said.
A comprehensive strategy is something that Triggs regularly referred to throughout his interview, constantly stating how crucial it is for employers to have one in place. This is especially true for employers who have in-house recruitment rather than hiring external recruitment strategies.
As the competition for talent continues to rise, employers can’t afford to be one-dimensional. Triggs pointed to an example from his experience where a recruitment team solely fixated on ads and failed to deliver quality candidates for their organisation.
“Having a comprehensive recruitment strategy for each individual role will dramatically increase speed and quality of hire. As an example, we were engaged to recruit a senior HR executive for a global mining company, based in regional Australia,” Triggs said.
“They had been looking without success for approximately eight months. Their in-house recruitment specialist had been relying on ad and LinkedIn inmail responses and literally had not delivered a single quality candidate for months. The line manager was getting increasingly agitated, having to carry this plus their own workload. The opportunity cost was significant.”
“We were engaged, and through running a comprehensive headhunting and referral strategy, we were able to deliver a very strong shortlist within 10 working days, and the role was filled within a month.”
Triggs believed that what his team implemented wasn’t “rocket science”; instead, they had a cohesive plan and were able to capitalise on their plan in a short time frame.
“None of what we did was rocket science; it just required a comprehensive plan, specialist expertise, and the time available to make the calls necessary to attract and engage with the right talent,” Triggs said.
This isn’t something new that has arisen, according to Triggs. He explained that headhunting should be a focal point in recruitment practices rather than becoming fixated on ad responses.
“In my opinion, this is not a shift. Headhunting has always delivered better results than ad response. Retained search professionals always deliver a better result than time-poor, poorly trained in-house recruiters. What has changed is that technology, including LinkedIn Recruiter and other tools, has made headhunting much easier and cheaper than ever before,” Triggs said.
“There are specialist companies that offer much more affordable solutions than were previously available. As an employer, every vacancy should be assessed on the likelihood that an advertising campaign will deliver the desired result.”
“When there is a lack of confidence, or the role has been in the market for a couple of weeks with no quality applicants, then partner with an affordable, reliable search provider to access those passive candidates you desire.”
by Richard Triggs | Sep 13, 2024 | Blogs
By Kace O’Neill | September 13, 2024|6 minute read
Which way for businesses: In-house recruiters or external agencies? – HR Leader
Which Way For Businesses In House Recruiters Or External Agencies
As the war for talent rages on, businesses are forced to make a decision: do they use external recruitment agencies? Or, instead, grow and build in-house recruitment teams to do the job?
Recruitment, recruitment, recruitment. With talent pools tightening and retention strategies constantly evolving, recruitment is a mainstay for an Australian organisation attempting to grow its business outcomes in what has been a volatile economic climate.
HR Leader recently spoke to Richard Triggs, founder of Arete Executive and author of Winning the War for Talent, about how Aussie businesses should navigate the decision of either relying on in-house recruiters or reaching out to external recruitment agencies.
“Over the last 10 years or so, we have seen a significant increase in organisations building their own recruitment teams rather than relying on external recruitment agencies. Especially utilising LinkedIn Recruiter licenses, there is a widely held belief that in-house recruiters can do as good a job as external recruiters for a fraction of the cost,” said Triggs.
Although the trend of Australian organisations building their own recruitment teams has grown substantially over the last decade, the process isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Instead, it can present common problems that leave managers shaking their heads at the shortlisted candidates. “In many instances, line managers continue to be disappointed with the quality and quantity of candidates presented on shortlists. Why is this so? The primary reason is that there continues to be too high a reliance on advertisements to generate candidates or sending LinkedIn inmails (which largely has the same issues as running advertisements),” said Triggs.
“Great candidates are typically in jobs that they enjoy, they have a good relationship with their boss and peers, and they are relatively well paid. As such, they are not proactively looking for a new job. They are not looking at job ads and are not typically replying to LinkedIn inmails.”
“Passive” candidates is how Triggs describes these workers; it’s a term that has been mentioned frequently on HR Leader. Acquiring the attention of these “passive candidates” requires a constant recruitment campaign, said Triggs. “If you want to attract these ‘passive’ candidates, you need a comprehensive recruitment campaign that should include a strong focus on generating referrals (something most companies put very little attention on), and more importantly, you need to headhunt, especially for senior leadership and/or mission-critical vacancies.”
External agencies often have the resources and protection to produce these comprehensive recruitment campaigns, whereas in-house teams can run into some obstacles.
“Unfortunately, in-house recruiters have some major obstacles to headhunting. Firstly, they can’t maintain the confidentiality of their employer as they need to disclose who they work for,” said Triggs.
“Secondly, because most in-house recruiters are working on a large volume and diversity of vacancies (in many instances 30-plus roles, from receptionist to C-suite), they don’t have the time to headhunt.”
“Finally, most recruiters (in-house and third party) don’t want to headhunt, and lack the training to do so effectively even if they want to.”
Overall, Triggs expresses the common pitfalls that in-house recruiters can fall into and some of the glaring obstacles that they must avoid due to the position in which they reside.
“If your in-house recruiters only rely on advertising, then at a minimum, they MUST put their name and phone number on the advertisement, so that candidates can ring and ask questions. Most ads are just a regurgitation of the position description, offering very limited detail. Quality applicants will want to know more before applying, especially if they currently work for a competitor,” said Triggs.
“If there is no one to ring, they simply won’t apply. Yet I would say that 95 per cent of advertisements run by in-house recruiters have no name or phone number. Think of how this limits your ability to attract top talent? Think of how this affects your employer of choice brand? If your recruiters aren’t putting their name and phone number on the ad, then they are in the wrong job.”
by Richard Triggs | Sep 11, 2024 | Blogs, Uncategorized
Over my 20-plus years as an executive recruiter, it has been interesting to watch the evolution of the debate around diversity in the workplace, especially at a senior executive level. What was once regarded as ‘nice to have’ has now become in many instances mandatory. On multiple occasions, we have been engaged by ASX100 companies specifically to headhunt women for key appointments to meet a gender diversity target.
Now diversity extends far beyond just gender to include sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, people with disabilities, and increasingly people from an Indigenous background (especially at board level). I’m certainly a big advocate for diversity and highly encourage our clients to step beyond their traditional avatar of what makes a good employee. It’s also essential that there is a commonsense approach to ensuring that even when hiring for diversity, the appointed candidate is equally well credentialed based on merit. These people definitely exist. The challenge becomes how to find and attract these people to your organisation. Here’s a real-world example:
A few years ago I was at a gender diversity debate dinner, one of only a handful of men in a room surrounded by at least 150 women. It would be fair to say there was a lot of heated commentary about the ‘patriarchy’, the ‘glass ceiling for women’ and similar statements. So I decided to do a bit of an investigation. In the previous month, we had recruited four C-suite roles (CEO, CFO, COO and the like), three of which were for not-for-profits. In every instance, the client had specifically said that they would love to employ a woman.
Across the four roles, we had 800 unique applicants to our advertisements. What percentage of these do you think were women? Seven per cent! Fortunately, we are headhunters, so we are not reliant on ad response to fill our vacancies. If women truly want these opportunities yet aren’t applying, what’s going on? This is definitely a generalisation, but often if a female candidate reads an advertisement that calls for ten criteria and she believes she only has seven or eight, she often won’t feel it’s worth applying as she is underqualified. On the other hand, if a man reads the same advertisement and believes he only has three, he’ll think he’s absolutely the best candidate for the job! (Once again, yes, I know I’m generalising; however, it is a common scenario.)
What’s the answer? If you legitimately want to hire for diversity, you need to accept that you are very unlikely to get the right quality and quantity of candidates from advertising alone (whether you’re seeking gender diversity or otherwise). You need to headhunt these people because they are generally in higher demand, not actively looking, and may be less likely to apply (as mentioned above). Hiring for diversity is an excellent thing. Hiring exceptionally talented people who have proven key achievements and transferable skills is also a great thing. Don’t fall into the trap of hiring people purely to achieve a diversity target.
Employ the best person, who also happens to bring diversity to your team. Hiring policies that include both attributes, versus one or the other, is where the gold lies. Do this consistently and you will have an amazing business.
Published Bsale Magazine | Expert Advice and Insights on Business Sales
Author: Richard Triggs
www.areteexecutive.com.au
Author of* *Winning the War for Talent.
