Every company wants to hire the best people, but most haven’t figured out how to do this consistently and across the board. Here’s a short checklist of prerequisites. Rank yourself on a 1–5 scale to see where you stand, with a five being the best and a one worse than pretty bad. If you don’t score at least 35–40 on this ten–factor survey, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Ten Prerequisites for Hiring Top Talent

1. A focus on finding careers for top people, rather than finding candidates to fill open jobs. If your job descriptions emphasize skills and experiences you get one point. If they clearly describe outstanding career opportunities in compelling fashion, you deserve all five points.
2. Strong hiring managers. If your hiring managers don’t have a track record of hiring and developing top talent, you get one point. If they do, you get all five.
3. Strong recruiters. If your recruiters can’t find top people, don’t know how to position your jobs as careers, can’t get 2–3 top referrals per call, and make lots of excuses why they can’t find anyone any good, you get one point. If they have a track record of consistently finding and closing top people for any type of position you get all five.
4. Active candidates sourcing that consistently yields A–level talent. It doesn’t really matter how you do this, if it works. You get five points if it does, and one if it doesn’t. Generally speaking though, most companies are moving to a hub–and–spoke sourcing process designed to find the best people as soon as they enter the market.
5. A passive candidate sourcing approach that consistently yields A–level talent. Recruiters need to be able to uncover top people who aren’t looking, get them excited, keep them interested and get them hired, on every search. If they can do this while partnering with their hiring manager clients, you deserve all five points. If this process is not existent, inconsistent or inefficient you get one point.
6. A proprietary pool of high quality prospects. Building an ever–growing and private pipeline of strong people nurtured by a robust CRM and driven by a proactive ERP is one leg of the low cost, just–in–time, high talent sourcing model of the future. If you’re not doing this, or don’t know what this means, you get one point. If you’re doing this, whether you know what it means or not, you get all five points.
7. Using technology to maximize productivity. If your recruiters complain that your technology (ATS, career site, posting methodology, sourcing tools, etc.) slows them down, either get rid of your recruiters or upgrade your technology. Regardless, you only get one point for either cause. On the other hand, if all of your recruiters who learn to use your technology almost rave about it and enjoy working with it and are more productive, give yourself all five points.
8. A recruiting and hiring process designed around the needs of A–level talent. Top people don’t select one job over another the same way as the less–talented. If you provide an information exchange process that allows top people to gather the information needed to progress step–by–step to gather this information, you get all five points. Of course, if most drop out along the way, you lose these points. If you force people to decide too soon and/or expect them to be excited before they’ve learned about your career opportunities, you get one point.
9. An assessment process that accurately predicts on–the–job performance. If you can’t accurately assess top talent, it doesn’t matter how good your sourcing is. If most of your new hires ace their performance reviews and you’re not surprised, give yourself all five points. If you’re surprised about a new hire’s performance review results, whether they do well or not, give yourself one point.
10. You hire every top person you want at a fair compensation. Finding and assessing top people are the first two steps involved in hiring them. If all of the top people you see and decide to hire, accept your offers based on career opportunities rather than compensation, you ace this final piece of the puzzle. However, if you have to struggle to close, lose too many good people along the way, or you pay too much or they reject your offers too often, give yourself a token one point.

Hiring A–level talent requires the proper alignment of all your processes. A misstep along the way, or a bad ad, or a weak recruiter, or a weak hiring manager, or any of the above, can spoil a company’s best made plans and lofty goals. Bottom line, it takes a well–oiled system that’s frequently overhauled, regularly fine–tuned and constantly monitored for performance. Contact me, if you’d like to figure out how to do this, especially if your score is too low to tell anyone about.

Company Background
Asigra is a technology company deploying a backup and recovery software platform to an international prospect base across every size and vertical. Since 1986, Asigra’s solution has centralized and unified the data management challenges surrounding multi–site backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Asigra has licensed over 100,000 software installations worldwide.

Challenge
Every single existing business needs to backup their data. How could Asigra effectively reach the right people at the right buying time? Asigra has adapted their sales strategies over the years from word of mouth referrals, to event driven attendee lists, to inbound web inquiries, to hiring sales reps. Each methodology had its unique advantages and disadvantages with throttled results.

Having used traditional business databases in the past, Asigra sales reps were still tethered to the time wasting tasks of browsing the internet to find accurate, up–to–date information in order to target the right people with the right frame of reference to engage in meaningful introductory conversations.

Read more for Broadlook’s solution.

Are You Leveraging “Sphere of Influence” Yet?

Over the last two months, we have started to expose the key concepts of Sphere of Influence selling. A key underpinning to the strategy is to have multiple, current points of contact.

There are a number of sources that people try to use to execute SOI. Before you approach any company, make sure your source includes peer level contacts with names, phone numbers, and e–mail addressed. If you are interested on how you can leverage SOI, join us on July 23rd. To register for this free event, click here.

Broadlook News
Sponsored Free Webinars:

Sphere of Influence Selling; Strategies that can advance your sales 9 out of 10 times – Webinar, July 23rd at 3 PM CT

Using Broadlook to Put Your Passive Candidate Sourcing Efforts on Steroids with Lou Adler – Webinar, July 30th at 12 PM CT

Product Updates
Don’t Leave the Office Without It

If you are one of the many mobile warriors out there, you receive hundreds of e–mails and see contact information you need every hour of their working day. Until now, if you had an iPhone, you could either manually cut and paste the information into your Contacts, or lose the information.

Now you don’t have to miss out. You can have that vital information at your fingertips. Broadlook is proud to announce Contact Capture for iPhone, the first in the line of mobile applications. To learn more, go to contactcapture.com or click here to access the App store and see Contact Capture Plus for the iPhone for yourself.

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