Tom's Talent Blog

It’s a candidate’s market. Recruiters know it, and candidates certainly know it. So why don’t more of today’s recruiting strategies reflect it?  In an effort to empower recruiters with strategies they can apply in a candidate’s market, here are three tactics to deploy right now.

When I started in the staffing business more than 20 years ago, every Monday morning my colleagues and I would get out the classified ads in the newspaper and start calling all of the companies that posted jobs to see if we could help them fill their positions. In some cases, we had a specific candidate we were presenting to them—this was an early iteration of what we now call skill marketing. Of course, every other staffing company used this same strategy, so I can imagine Mondays weren’t much fun for the people posting those jobs.

Today, skill marketing is still an important revenue driver for many staffing companies. And with talent at such a premium now, marketing hard-to-find, in-demand candidates can be more effective than ever.

Recruiters who hold on to traditional sourcing strategies risk getting outplayed by competitors who reach out beyond their markets and databases.

Imagine you need to collect a gallon of water. You place a bucket under the faucet and turn it on full blast—but unfortunately, over time, your water pressure has decreased to a mere trickle.

Rather than wait for the bucket to fill, you decide to collect the water using smaller containers, so you can use the water more quickly—and then you decide to use a ladle to help get the water into your makeshift pipeline. Oh, and did I mention your ladle is full of holes? The task quickly becomes a lesson in futility—one that is inefficient, unsustainable, and destined to fail.

Of course, I’m not talking about collecting water, but rather describing how many staffing firms recruit. 

We're excited to announce our new partnership with Moore Essentials to help you find prospects and candidates from the 2 BILLION people on Facebook.  We have dozens of training sessions on staffing sales and recruiting, focusing mostly on sourcing through LinkedIn. Now the experts at Moore Essentials can show you how to source from Facebook!

Referrals are extremely valuable for building candidate pools, but we rarely actively do it. Generally we are passive about referrals. A candidate or recent placement may happen to recommend a friend or neighbor, but not because we solicited the referral. If you proactively seek referrals you can reap the benefits. Here’s why you want referrals and how to get them.

Every new year, industry content will come out with multiple articles of the ‘New’ and ‘Game-changing’ insight and suggestions on how to become more successful in your business. This is no different for the staffing industry, with articles touting various ways to improve on recruiting. As an industry, we have started to move away from some of the most critical yet basic recruiting methods. Here are just a few of my suggestions on how to keep yourself on top of the game: