How To Recruit Top Performers For Your Clients

Your client demands the best talent in the market, but it can be hard to keep on delivering if your candidate pool isn’t overflowing with high performers, or if the high performers you do represent aren’t particularly attracted by the roles your client is offering.

Some recruiters give up at this point, hoping that a combination of luck and law of averages will apply: that is, if they throw enough mediocre candidates at the client, one will eventually stick.

But that’s not you; is it? You’re not that type of recruiter, and you don’t want to be driven to lowering your standards no matter how tough it can be to find the talent your client seeks.

Ultimately, you know that placing average candidates with your important clients only diminishes your value in the client’s mind—and that’s no way to build your personal brand in this business (or your billing numbers).

Luckily, there are solid strategies you can put in place to recruit top performers for your clients—in any market.

The four stages of recruiting top performers

1. The Homework Stage: Researching the client, the role, and the company culture.

Often, in the rapid search for candidates to fill the role, recruiters overlook the vital step that sets the stage for success: doing your homework. This step requires that you really dig into what the client is looking for so that you can find the right candidate to match their expectations.

a) Set expectations: This is also the perfect time to gently inform the client if they’re failing to meet salary and benefit benchmarks that will attract the top talent they’re asking for.

b) Ask questions: What kind of person do they see succeeding in the role? Who hasn’t worked out in the past? What kind of culture do the company and the team have? (Don’t just take the client’s word for this, do a bit of digging to find out what employees, past employees and other recruiters in your network have to say.)

c) Nail that job description: Most importantly of all, research the nitty-gritty of the job description, for without a specific one, you, the client, and the candidate are all just dancing in the dark, hoping to bump into the perfect partner by chance!

2. The Attraction Stage: Attracting top talent to your list.

This, quite obviously, is an ongoing process, and you definitely shouldn’t be waiting until your client has a vacancy before trying to attract high performers to your database. Having said that, it’s never too late to do a massive networking drive to quickly boost the vitality of your talent pool.

a) Network the traditional way. Get out to conferences, to young professionals meetings. Map everyone of interest you meet.

b) Create a social media voice worth listening to. You’re already posting your jobs on social media, but do you have an engaging presence? Do you post interesting industry stories, and have a friendly and approachable online personality? This strategy drives followers, and the more followers, the bigger your talent map becomes.

c) Call your clients and ask for referrals. Research your client’s network to see where talent might be hiding in related industries, and add them to your map.

d) Reach out to your passive candidates with this new opportunity.

3. The ‘Getting to Know Each Other’ Stage: Researching the candidate.

You’ve found some high performers that you’re considering putting forward, but you don’t actually know yet if they’ll be high performers for your client. It’s time to do some more homework, keeping in mind everything you learnt from the client in stage one.

a) Consider their social media accounts, particularly facebook and LinkedIn, so that you can get a fuller picture of their aspirations and work background, their skill-set and even their personality. All this information will come in handy in the next stage of marketing the job to them. (It’s also worth checking out their connections while you’re there so you can build up your talent map.)

b) Ask the candidate seeking questions about what motivates them, what kind of role excites them, and what kind of culture they seek. Interview them thoroughly about their experience, keeping to the maxim of ‘the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour’.

(Make it clear that you’re not interrogating them, but want to find them a job that fits their career goals!) Find out their minimum salary expectations, and what kind of benefits and incentives get their interest.

c) Check their references, and check them with genuine curiosity. There’s no point just doing cursory ‘rubber stamp’ type checks, as the candidate will have prepped the referee for a call. Ask delving questions about their attitude, personality, and performance—or pay the consequences.

4. The Matchmaking Stage: Marketing the Role to the Candidate, and the Candidate to Client

This is where your earlier research about the candidate comes in. How will you know how to market the job to them, if you don’t know what motivates them or what kind of culture they’re seeking?

The great recruiters know that it’s not as simple as advertising a vacancy and watching the top talent roll up. They understand that there’s a magic in attracting top candidates to your network, and then persuading them that the opportunity you have is the one they really want. When you have them fully interested in the role, it’s then time to create the same buzz about the candidate to the client- making them feel like the candidate you’re offering is the one they want. This, at its heart, is marketing- and it’s a really undervalued skill in the recruitment business.

These five steps boil down to 3 key skills every top recruiter needs: Research, networking and marketing. Develop these three skills to your maximum ability and you’ll soon find that sourcing high performers is just a problem that other recruiters face.

Until next time,

Cheryl