A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 2: How to Become a Talent Magnet
A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 2: How to Become a Talent Magnet
Lessons from Moves, Viral Nation, Tailscale, Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik, Vena, Gadget, TalentMinded, The People People Group, and more
I write a bi-weekly column on leadership, management, and the future of work. In each case, I’ll tackle the questions on the minds of first-time managers, experienced managers, and even executives. I’ll leverage my own experience as a tech leader as well as my network to answer these questions in the most comprehensive, actionable, and accessible way.
Welcome to Part 2 of 4 in a series designed to help you build a more comprehensive approach to hiring. While Part 1 was focused on ensuring you’ve built the right foundation before you start hiring, Part 2 is all about how to build a strong talent pipeline.
Here’s a quick recap of how this guide is organized:
Part 2: Recruit. How to Become a Talent Magnet (← This Post)
There are really two open secrets when it comes to recruiting the very best talent. The first is to really know what you’re looking for in the first place, which is covered in extensive detail in Part 1, but the second is that recruiting is a 24/7/365 initiative that starts the day you start your company or the day you join a new one.
If you’re only starting to recruit once your job description is posted, you’re already well behind. What’s more, your competition has already been talking to (and perhaps signed) the very candidates you want to bring on.
To truly attract the very best (rather than it be just a slogan at your company) you need to build a thorough, systematic, and always-on approach to building your recruitment engine.
The below is an effort to help you to help you answer the question of how to build a recruitment engine that helps you find your who.
Before we dive in, I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations: Sarah Sheikh (Business Operations and People Lead at Moves), Leah Hilts (People & Talent Manager at ThoughtExchange), Kassy Kropka (Director, Global Talent Acquisition at Viral Nation), Jane Maguire (Head of Talent at Gadget), Martin Hauck (Founder, The People People Group), Kathryn Cant, Kim Benedict (Co-Founder & CEO, TalentMinded), William Laporte (Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik), Amanda Nagy (Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale)
What does success look like?
The world of recruitment is no stranger to cliches. When speaking about the talent they’re looking to attract, companies will often refer to things like “A Players” or “Top Talent” yet these catchphrases are very hard to quantify and in most cases are extremely subjective.
If you’re serious about hiring the very best, you need to take the time and define what that means at your company and build in some form of feedback loop to make sure that you’re making the necessary adjustments to your process along the way.
When there’s no objective metric of success, it becomes about personal opinions and not only does this not scale but it creates a toxic culture that promotes favouritism over objective contributions.
The way success is defined at your company will depend on many factors and will be particularly influenced by priorities. For instance, if you’re in a period where you’re looking to fill many roles in a short amount of time, Time to Fill may well matter most. Alternatively, if you’re looking to do more with less, Cost per hire may well be the right metric to work back from.
However, I believe one of the strongest metrics you should consider prioritizing is the retention rate of your hires. While other metrics are important (e.g. Time to fill, Cost per hire etc) the most important measure of success in recruitment is ultimately whether or not the people you are spending all this time recruiting are staying. If they’re not staying, this becomes the most important thing to understand and address before bringing on more people.
To understand what’s going on at a more granular level, you should also consider splitting out the retention rate by cohorts and by time (30 days, 60 days post-hire etc). For instance, I’ve seen situations where the reported 12-month retention rate looks strong overall, but when you look closer there’s a huge drop in the first 30 days.
In cases like this, this often points to issues around either candidate selection or less-than-stellar onboarding.
Whether people stay or go is the ultimate test of whether you’re recruiting great talent. If they leave soon after joining did you ever actually recruit them in the first place?
Sidenote: It’s worth calling out a big assumption here. If you look at retention as the key metric, you’re assuming that you want to retain everyone at your company. If you have a high-functioning performance management process, this should be the case. Often companies will make a distinction between “regrettable” and “non-regrettable” departures and exclude “non-regrettables” from their calculations. Don’t do this. Every hire (regrettable or not) was a decision you made and if you’re exiting a lot of non-regrettables the question becomes why were they hired and why have they stayed. It makes more sense to look at voluntary departures and non-voluntary departures (i.e. they were terminated).
Invest in the right, high-impact channels
The important thing to remember when building your recruitment strategy is that there’s no silver bullet. While many companies will tout the strength of their referral programs, the average company only sources ~22% of their hires from referrals and the very best only manage ~55%.
In other words, you’ll have to make investments in a number of other channels. This isn’t a bad thing given if you consistently sourced from the same place you’d likely be building a relatively homogenous team and we know diverse teams perform better.
To understand where to consider making these investments, it’s helpful to understand where companies are on average sourcing the largest number of hires at their company. This is not because you should necessarily emulate what other companies are doing, but to build a better awareness of what others are doing (and not doing).
While this will depend on the size of the company, one of the largest and most recent studies asked HR decision-makers what sources rank in their top 3 for hiring sources:
Job boards (47%)
Referrals (45%)
Internal Mobility (42%)
Social Media (39%)
Career Website (36%)
In other words, 47% of respondents had job boards in their top 3 channels, 42% had referrals, and 39% had social media.
Major Job Boards
While the results are somewhat surprising given job boards are not what most people consider to be a great (or unique) source of talent, it does point to the importance and effectiveness of job boards in driving a significant amount of awareness and volume.
The combination of sheer volume these boards drive combined with a customer base of active job seekers means they play an important role when it comes to hiring.
However, the way I would look at job boards is as being an important part of your recruiting spend mix - even a necessary part - but not one that’s going to distinguish you long-term. What’s more, if you overly rely on this source your hires will skew heavily towards active job seekers as opposed to passive ones.
Given the major job boards are already well-known and the tactics for employing them are well-understood, I won’t spend much time on it here. What is important is the role niche job boards can play in growing your talent pipeline and diversifying your pool of candidates, which is covered a little further down.
Referrals
What’s interesting about the data above is not just what it tells you, but what it also doesn’t tell you. While the major job boards may be the ones driving much of the volume in terms of hires, if you were to look at it from a return on investment standpoint it’s not even close. It’s referrals.
When you hire a referral, they perform better on almost every conceivable metric that you as a leader might care about:
They are more likely to accept an offer
They cost less to source
They stay longer
They perform better
The question then becomes how do you build a great program? If it’s not obvious, it really starts with a great culture. While we’ll cover a number of different tactical things you can do as a company to grow your referral program it really begins and ends with a place people love to work. Without that, you’ll have very little to work with.
In terms of how to tactically build a referral program, there are definitely some basics you’ll have to cover first:
Define the program: This should cover all the basic questions of how the program works. For example, are all roles eligible? What are the incentives for successful referrals and how when are those incentives triggered?
Communicate the program: There should be an easy place internally to find out about the program and should be regularly communicated through official channels (e.g. All hands, Team Meetings etc) as well as through Team Leads.
Design the right incentives: For many companies, this is as simple as a cash reward for every successful referral who gets hired. You could have a standing amount (e.g. $3,000) but there’s often a case to tier the amounts depending on the difficulty of the hire (e.g. Technical Talent, Senior Leaders).
However, to truly stand out you have to operationalize this within teams and then scale it. It’s not enough to just mention the referral program once a month at the company All-hands.
One of the most effective ways I’ve done this in the past is to make it part of my team’s OKRs. In other words, their success was tied to our ability to recruit referrals from our networks. The way we did this was to have a spreadsheet of the top 5 people we’ve worked with (or would like to work with) and track when was the last time we checked in with them.
The goal was to have a list of 2 to 3 people that we’d been in touch with within the last 3 months that we would drop everything we were doing to hire. This helped us recruit not just for new roles, but also for back-fills on the team. I would regularly check in on this list during 1-on-1s and we’d add new people as we went.
In my view, this is a mandatory requirement for senior leaders and I’ll often ask in interviews the specific names of people that they would want to potentially recruit if they joined and when was the last time they spoke with them.
I once left a meeting where I’d accepted a job offer and one of the key requirements was going to be building out a team quickly. I had already sent a text to the first person I had in mind for one of the roles before I had even left the building. They joined and we thrived.
As important as referrals are, they won’t always help you build a diverse team and we already know it can’t be your only source of hires either.
Sourcing
Sourcing is an often misunderstood and underutilised channel. Yet, when done well it can become one of the best ways to build a differentiated, diverse, and cost-effective recruitment strategy.
You’ll find that sourcing often gets mixed up or confused with many other strategies, including referrals and larger umbrella buckets like “Social Media”.
When I refer to Sourcing, I mean the process of proactively searching, identifying, and directly contacting candidates rather than simply waiting for them to see your job description and apply.
You can “source” in a variety of ways, including using social platforms like Linkedin or Twitter as well as through more industry-specific platforms like Stackoverflow or Behance.
What’s important is it’s a group of people you would never have reached if you’d relied purely on referrals or job boards and it puts you in control of the criteria you’re looking for.
Whether you have a Sourcing team (lucky you!) or you’re doing the sourcing yourself, it takes a long time to build a funnel this way but it’s absolutely worth it. If you don’t give it enough time, you’ll never see the results and you’ll conclude (too early) that it’s not effective. This is why the minute you have alignment on the role, a clear job description, and the approved budget you should start sourcing candidates immediately.
One of the best hires I’ve made in the last 5 years came through Sourcing, but we almost missed her because she took 3 weeks (!) to respond to our initial outreach. It turns out our initial outreach went to an old email that she didn’t check as often, but we are only days away from making a different hire.
The biggest change in sourcing as a strategy is the role AI is now making. For instance, you can now define the key attributes of a role you’re looking for and AI-powered tools will scour the internet and come back with hard-to-find profiles based on even very specific searches. What’s more, it will improve its ability to find candidates as you tell it more about what you’ve liked or not liked based on its past suggestions.
While there’s been an explosion of these tools in the last few years, here are a few that are particularly recommended by those I’ve spoken with:
Internal Mobility
While often overlooked, you should have a formal internal mobility program as part of any high-impact recruitment strategy. It does not have to be an overly complicated one, especially if you’re a smaller company and the need for speed is at a premium, but you need to provide guidance (either way) on how your program works. This has the added benefit of also encouraging internal mobility in the first place.
There are a number of critical advantages to promoting internal mobility:
Talent retention: An internal mobility program helps retain talent by helping to show employees a variety of career options at the same company.
Skills development: It spurs continuous learning and helps build new capabilities.
Knowledge retention: It’s often very hard to quantify, but when employees leave they leave with valuable institutional knowledge. If it's time for a change, much better that an employee makes the change internally and the organization retain that knowledge.
Onboarding speed: The ramp time for new employees (across most functions) can be close to ~ 3 months, but internal mobility means this number is significantly lower.
Reduce “single points” of failure: This is similar to knowledge retention but with an added caveat. When you have the same people in the same roles for long and extended periods of time you can create (unwittingly) single points of failure. In other words, there’s only one person who’s held that role and knows how to do everything. When you move people across the organization you not only retain the knowledge but you now have two people (or more) who know how to fulfil that role.
A mistake I often encounter is for companies to assume they don’t need an internal mobility program and that it's only relevant to much larger (mid-market or enterprise) companies. The way to think about it is that if you are moving someone internally (either laterally or upward) more than once a quarter you already have a program, it just might be a very informal one.
If you don’t formalize your internal mobility program not only will you not take advantage of the benefits it provides to your recruitment strategy, but you’ll also start to see a number of unhealthy issues start to manifest internally:
Employee frustration: If you don’t provide lateral or upward mobility your team will become frustrated with a lack of opportunities. If you do provide some, but it’s not clear, they will also become frustrated because of a lack of perceived fairness and transparency around what it takes to successfully move through the organization.
Perceived “poaching” of employees: If left up to teams and hiring managers, they will make the best case to have the best employees move to their teams. This can create all sorts of issues internally from an overly competitive atmosphere to “brain drain” from certain areas of the company if you’re not careful.
Administrative pain: Without a clear policy, it will become a heavy burden on your HR team to manage all of the questions and internal moves that will inevitably start to happen.
To capitalise on the opportunity that internal mobility provides, make sure you can help employees answer the following basic questions:
How will internal job opportunities be communicated?
How will internal talent be evaluated?
Will any preference be given to internal vs external talent?
This will help give you a running start and ensure you make an internal mobility program a key piece of your recruitment strategy.
Social Media
I think of many of the Social Media platforms as an inbound marketing channel for recruitment. This is a different tactic than leveraging social platforms for sourcing, rather, it’s a way to connect with an audience on their preferred platform to tell your company’s unique story and to build your own organic audience.
As you can imagine, this is a great way to build a very potent audience of passive job seekers as your focus is less transactional (e.g. “Apply for X role”) and more conversational (e.g. “Look what we love to do on a Thursday with the team”).
“I use our company Linkedin page with recruitment in mind and post twice a week, every week, even when we’re not hiring. This builds a picture of our culture and what we value and helps people better understand whether they’ll thrive here”.
~ Sarah Sheikh, Business Operations and People Lead at Moves
The important thing here is to ensure you pick the right platforms to invest in based on your audience and content and that they work together. Many companies feel the pressure to be on every platform, but if you don’t have the ability to post regular and relevant content then it’s unlikely to be worth it.
What’s more, while it will depend on your own employer brand and target audience, keep in mind that not all social platforms are created equal.
LinkedIn continues to dominate the social platforms when it comes to recruitment. So while leveraging others can help you differentiate yourself, a massive amount of your energy will need to continue to be focused on it to make the kind of impact you’d like.
Targeted Job Boards
While major job boards form part of almost every company’s basic strategy, you have a clear opportunity to really distinguish yourself by investing in targeted communities through niche job boards.
This can be leveraged as a way to reach communities with particular skill sets (e.g. Engineers, Designers, Marketers) but it’s also a particularly effective way to build a more diverse workforce. The reality is you may already have a lot of Engineers or Designers on your team (maybe even your Founders are) but this may be less true when it comes to other aspects of your team (e.g. Diversity and Inclusion).
There are so many great communities that focus specifically on building diverse and inclusive audiences and by partnering with them you can start to address gaps in your recruitment strategy that are holding you back from building the absolute best team you can build.
While the below is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s a live file that’s being constantly updated. A big thanks to the person-centric communities at Rands Leadership and The People People Group who helped me get this list started:
Review or download this resource
Campus Programs
The last channel we’ll tackle is campus programs. While you’ll need to understand whether a university recruitment program makes sense to invest in for your company, they are not just for high-volume recruitment nor are they just for larger companies.
A campus program is a great way to build a long-term high-quality and cost-effective talent pipeline. It’s also a great way to diversify your workforce because many campus programs help you reach students from a variety of backgrounds.
While many aspects of campus recruitment are relatively standardized (e.g. Co-op programs, Career Fairs) and I won’t repeat here, there are a number of creative ways you should consider to ensure you’re getting the most out of your program, including:
Hosting Networking Events: There are often opportunities to host networking events on-campus and these are a good way to meet a lot of candidates in a short amount of time. These can be formal (i.e. through the university) or informal (i.e. organized off campus), but they tend to be a better and more personal way to talk to candidates about your company than a career fair.
Building relationships with Alumni Offices: By building better bridges with the Alumni team you’ll begin to understand less obvious ways of working with them. In my experience, they’re constantly looking at ways to engage their alumni (even the most recent graduates) and will be open to working with you on your goals.
Sponsoring Events: This is another tried and true method and can extend from hackathons to mixers.
Engage Clubs & Societies: There’s likely a club or society that targets the very audience you’re looking to engage. It can be a fun and informal way of building up a relationship with soon-to-be graduates and much less transactional than a career fair.
One important thing to note when considering campus recruitment is how to resource it. When the program gets big enough based on your hiring needs, it makes sense to have one or multiple people on your team focused on it.
However, given the cyclical nature of campus recruitment, you won’t typically need a full-time hire to focus on it.
Build a comprehensive destination for careers
Now that you have all this high-signal interest in working at your company, you need to make sure that you have a place where you can direct all these potential candidates. It’s important that you paint a clear and compelling picture of what it means to work at your company - the majority of career pages rarely address this in a way that entices the right people to apply.
My contrarian take at this point is to resist the temptation to paint an overly rosy picture of your company. It’s actually a great opportunity to discourage people as much as it is to encourage people to apply. That’s because not everyone will thrive in your culture and there’s no sense in glossing over those details to convince someone to join just to have them disappointed.
Stripe is actually a great example of this. If you visit their careers page, you’ll notice several sections where they specifically call out the things they haven’t figured out yet and where they’re struggling. They’re actively discouraging you from applying!
Except, what they’re actually doing is discouraging those who they think won’t work out long-term from applying.
It just doesn’t work when you over-promise and under-deliver. For instance, if you’re a remote work-friendly culture by all means sing that from the rooftops. If it’s more of a recruiting slogan and something that - in practical terms - is not all that encouraged, then say that instead.
I heard from someone recently who had accepted a senior-level role at a company that touted a fully remote workplace, but once they accepted this same company then requested mandatory attendance for a week of onboarding and asked them to attend a number of other follow-up in-person team meetings within months of joining.
It’s absolutely within the company’s right to ask and require that, but it’s not consistent if you’ve just sold the candidate on your fully remote workplace. This individual in question has now gone back and declined their offer. What a waste of time and resources.
You should think of your careers page as your front door, it should set the right expectations about what candidates will find once they pass through. The reality is they’ll find out one way or another and the right people long-term will thrive but your job is to make sure they get there in the first place!
A note about sources
As part of this research, I spoke to some phenomenal leaders in this space (mentioned above) but also reviewed a number of books and articles that I want to highlight below.
Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson
High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 by Elad Gill
🚀 Scaling a company is hard. I help high-growth companies build their people, teams, and systems to achieve extraordinary results. 🚀