Recruiting effectiveness is a competitive advantage. Maybe it’ll be your competitive advantage over your competitors. Maybe it’ll be their competitive advantage over you. Up to you.

And in a tight labor market like this, the field of competitors is spread — the best are further ahead than even the next best.

In this season of The Great Resignation, some employers are finding it hard to find and keep mission-critical talent. Some are having no trouble at all.

Take the Lead

Kimberly Wilson (The CEO of TLR Search) and I want you to have that advantage, so we got together to compile and share 8 ways you can upgrade the way you’re thinking about recruiting to put you ahead of the field.

Those 8 ways are listed here. And we flesh them out in this video for greater clarity and to provide some tactical examples of how you can put these suggestions into action.

Recruiting Strategy Upgrades

There’s stuff to do to power-up your recruiting efforts. All of it starts with adapting your thinking.

1. Remember that recruiting is a human interaction that leads to a long-term relationship. It is not a transaction. Even at the posting stage and the resume writing stage — when no humans interact directly at all — you are still making an impression on the individual humans applying for your job.
2. Instead of thinking of recruiting as n HR function, consider recruiting a team-leader’s function. HR should and will support your efforts, even take some tasks off your plate. And the implications of success and failure are yours to bear. So must be the lead in the efforts to recruit.
3. Ask candidates about their needs, hopes, expectations, and aspirations. You will be evaluating candidates for their ability to meet your needs. They’ll be doing the same. And only if you know about their needs specifically will you be able to effectively demonstrate your ability to meet them.
4. Many think of recruiting as essentially a marketing problem. While it is that, for the best recruiters, it is primarily a networking problem. Who do you know? And who do the people you know know? Keep your eyes out for the kinds of people you’d like on your team. You can find them everywhere.
5. Accept, acknowledge, and understand your biases. The sooner and the more you understand your biases (for example, the bias to hire people who are like us), the better you will be at attracting the talent you need, retaining the talent you value, and choosing the talent best suited to the job you’re filling.
6. Don’t wait to recruit until you have an open job to fill. Get to know and stay in touch with people you’d like to work with someday, so you can reach out to pre-vetted talent who’s already vetted you as well. “Dig your well before you’re thirsty.” Don’t get caught flat footed, starting from scratch when you need someone yesterday.
7. Visualize the job, the work, and most importantly the challenges and accomplishments you’ll need from the post you’re filling. In doing that, you’ll visualize also the person who would successfully fill it. It’s not enough to simply write a job description. Get your imagination in on the job.
8. Understand that money is not as powerful a recruiting force as you may think it is. Money is rather a proxy in the mind of the candidate for quality of life. If you can’t compete on salary, there are other motivators you can employ. If your able to box-out other employers with a high salary, don’t rest on that. At the end of the day, your candidates want an enjoyable life worth living, and they’ll go with the employer they believe can help deliver that.

On Your Marks, Get Set, Go!

Get out there and start working your network. Gather a collection of outstanding humans. Develop relationships with them that are long-standing and mutually beneficial. And then, when you’ve got a role to fill, dip into your well-prepared pool.

You’re going to leave those other employers in the dust.