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Finding top talent has never been an easy endeavor and it has become one of the most critical pain points for companies that are dealing with high turnover rates or that simply cannot find the right match for their teams in skills, attitude, and company culture. No wonder why recruitment is a billion-dollar industry!
With this market size, it is not just recruitment or staffing agencies who take part in this industry, it’s software companies, training platforms, and even and other industries that are developing tools and technologies to find the best candidates for each job opening.
Although as a recruiter you must definitely use social networks and new technologies to source candidates in your day-to-day, by fully relying on technology to do the hard work, you risk forgetting about your best tool: your intuition.
The art of recruiting is not just about finding candidates1 but also connecting with them and recognizing top talent beyond a resume. Most people don’t know how to promote themselves, even if they are the MVP of their industry. With that in mind, here are some key features that will help you hone your intuition to recognize top players.
At gpac, we identify the most talented professionals or high performers in the job market as alpha candidates. The alpha candidate is a prospect who:
Although good candidates can lack one or two of these features from time to time, the last is the one that turns a good candidate into an alpha. From a recruiter’s or employer’s point of view, you should not prioritize candidates who have all the previous features if they aren’t up for taking a new job.
Identifying who’s ready to take the leap or finding their true potential beyond their resume is a skill you can only perfect by putting in the work every day. For instance, some applicants may stretch their competencies or embellish their tasks at previous jobs on their resumes.
That doesn’t mean you have to know every detail about the software or skills required in a certain industry. What you can do is, once you are in touch with them, ask them how they would perform a particular task or to explain their process for delivering a project. This way you can unveil if they are overstating their job skills or not.
You also need to verify the achievements and experience they have listed, and for that you need to contact their references. Always ask for professional references, meaning previous employers or colleagues, not friends or family. If the candidate has weak references who won’t answer the phone or are reluctant to speak on their behalf, or if they have no references at all, that’s a big red flag. No software can do this for you, so embrace your intuition when checking on the sources.
You need to pay attention to details while you guide your alpha candidates through their hiring process. If the candidates are serious about what they are stating, they will come through with what they promise, and so must you.
Any platform, from LinkedIn to Indeed, will help you find candidates with the information you enter. This means most of the applicants you will come across will be active candidates. Using your intuition to find qualified candidates that might not be actively looking but want to make the career change, is vital to stand out from the rest of the recruiters out there.
After all, recruiting is and will always be about the connections between people. Your intuition is unique, and no software can replace it. So, train it, embrace it, and use it to find top talent!
WHAT DO YOU NEED TO FIND?
