When It Comes to Talent,
Innovate, Don’t Inundate

Recruiters advised to be creative and more personable when approaching
passive candidates online

It’s no secret. If you’re a recruiter, finding
talent is hard.

Even though the ratio of unemployed people to
recruiters is 202 to 1, said Steve Levy, principal of Recruiting Inferno
Consulting in New York City, finding that elusive “purple
squirrel"—what recruiters consider the flawless job candidate—remains
difficult. And it is especially hard if you’re stalking passive candidates’
online profiles and then bombarding them with interview requests.

"People don’t like recruiters,” Levy
told attendees at Recruit DC, an annual recruiting conference held in Bethesda,
Md in late November. He said it’s imperative that recruiters rely on more than
just posting positions on job boards and repeatedly blitzing passive candidates
with job offers on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

“If you type ‘recruiters are’ and don’t
hit the return key in Google, what auto populates are the words stupid,
worthless, evil, dumb and rude,” he said.

“The three most important recruiting
tools are the phone, the handshake and your brain,” he said. Innovation is
important when it comes to sourcing and approaching candidates, yet “we
limit ourselves by what we did yesterday. We think, ‘It worked last year. It
will work again today.’ ”

Levy said recruiters devote a lot of their
time to sifting through social media profiles looking for good candidates, but
that may not be the way to find what they are looking for. Around the world,
people are spending less time and sharing less original content on social
media. For example, “Facebook has been struggling to reverse a 21 percent
decline in ‘original sharing,’ or personal updates, from its 1.6 billion
monthly active users," Forbes reported recently.

And experts say many in-demand
candidates—especially those in the tech industries—have abandoned LinkedIn
because of recruiters inundating them with pitches.

That’s a concern for recruiters, especially
since 95 percent of them use LinkedIn to find talent, according to the Society
for Human Resource Management. And recruiters are going to be busy next year:
Levy said that "72 percent of CEOs are concerned about the availability of
key skills and 48 percent are planning to increase head count in 2017.”

Levy had some unorthodox suggestions for
recruiters, including new ways of communicating with and finding talent. Levy
suggested that recruiters be personable when reaching out to potential
candidates—especially those who are likely to be inundated with requests from
recruiters. Try sending e-mails, text messages or InMails (e-mails on LinkedIn)
using almost the same types of one-liners one might use when connecting on a
dating site, such as:

• Is your name Wi-Fi? Cause I’m feeling a connection
      coming on …
• Is your name Waldo? Because someone like you is hard to
      find.
• Are you a magician? Because whenever I read your tweets
      about cybersecurity, everyone else disappears!
• Life without you at my company would be like a broken
      pencil … pointless.
• On a scale of 1 to 10, you’re a 9. I’m the 1 recruiter
      you need.

“Be creative and experiment,” he
said. “Ask your current employees how they would respond to requests like
these,” but above all else, be original and innovate.

Levy said recruiters should also expand their
search beyond the typical social media sites or job boards. A site like the
conference directory website lanyrd.com can be used as a search engine to find
people. Type in a word like “cybersecurity” and sourcers can find
people listed as speakers on that topic who may be experts in their fields.
After finding their names, go to their Twitter handles to assess their
expertise, Levy said.

He also suggested that recruiters create lists
of people to follow on Twitter as a way to let them know you are interested in
them without sending dozens of messages.

Levy also said that recruiters sourcing talent can use Riffle by
CrowdRiff, which displays the most active hashtags for an account, so they can
pick up key words and topics the candidate is talking about and then
personalize their interactions.

Article source: http://bit.ly/2hmButo

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