By: Matt Doucette, Director, Monster Global Talent Acquisition
Large organizations are often tasked with making thousands of hires a year and often require a team of recruiters.
Fortunately, smaller companies can make use of some of the same tools these recruiters use to find talent.
In fact, some of the best “recruiters” I have dealt with in my decade-long recruiting career have also been the hiring manager. Yes, you read that correctly. Hiring managers can find their own candidates.
That’s not surprising. After all, successful recruiting still comes down to one thing: differentiating need from want. It takes time to separate the “nice to haves” from the “must haves,” but it’s time well spent. Doing so will help you construct a solid job description and enable you to actively search for resumes that match your requirements.
But before you sprint out and purchase a bunch of job postings and a resume license, let’s walk through the differentiation process. It comes down to three components:
1) The Mission
Defining the mission will help you create a persona of the hire you need. Ask yourself:
- What is the essence of the role?
- What is the gap we need to fill?
- What will our new hire contribute?
The mission allows you to articulate to yourself (as well as to the market) the reason you need to hire.
2) Job Outcomes
Outcomes help you understand and market what the new hire will need to do:
- What metrics and KPIs will define success for the role?
- How will those be defined in the first 30 days on the job? The first 90 days?
- What company goals will the role support?
3) Job Competencies
Competencies are about more than job skills. Behaviorally, it’s best to look at your organization to understand the type of personalities and behaviors you need on your team, as well as the behaviors you need in this role.
Take an objective look at your company culture. Then ask yourself what you’re trying to build, your values and vision -- and how you see this person fitting in.
Next, differentiate the job’s “must haves” from the “nice to haves” skills. Focus on the former in your resume review; the “nice to have” skills can be explored in the interview.
OK -- that’s it! You’ve now defined the job’s mission, outcomes and competencies. Now you can incorporate your findings into the job ad and in your resume search parameters.
Writing the Job Description
Rather than organize the job description as bullet points, write a readable job ad that sells a product. In this case, the product includes:
- Your organization
- The mission of the position
- What a successful employee will look like in 3 to 6 months
- What the culture is
- What kind of behavior you are looking for
OK -- you can include a few bullet points about the core competencies. But try to keep your bullet points and requirements to a minimum!
Keywords are equally important. Look at the keywords that larger company ads use in similar jobs. Incorporate these keywords into your description to help your job rank in search and reach your target audience.
Match Must Haves with Resumes
Now, for the second part of your recruiting punch – resume search. Rather than wait for the right candidates to apply to your job, you can proactively search for candidates who match the job by using resume search. The key is using semantic search technology.
Once the domain of big companies, semantic search has changing “search” into “match.” It’s advanced to the point where anyone can use it to find the right candidate. Semantic search now gives everyone the ability to enter their terminology to search resumes based on specific and self-selected keywords and industry criteria, such as location, skills, education, and diversity, to name just a few.
Now, go forth and empower your recruiting!
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