To find the best employees for your agency, you need to start before there are vacancies to fill.
Building a high-functioning team must be near the top of the priority list for every organization, and employers no longer have the upper hand when hiring. Talented employees have their choice of opportunities. Employers must be aggressive and treat recruiting as a meaningful and sustainable strategy for success.
In the public sector, the Competitive Service Act of 2015, enacted in March 2016, is meant to streamline the recruiting process by allowing agencies to share information on applicants and potentially fill positions more quickly with the most qualified candidates. But recruitment isn't just about filling positions when they become vacant. Government recruiters need to think ahead.
Get Proactive
Talented employees are the backbone and strength of every department and division within an agency; thus, we must spend time investing in the proactive components of recruiting. Creating a predictive model for when you're going to need to fill vacancies and having a strategy on how to fill them will reduce the number of days the vacancy is empty, limit the costs associated with recruitment, and control drops in productivity. Let's take a journey on how to make such proactive recruiting the wave of the future for your organization.
The actual recruitment process has remained static across decades and includes:
- evaluating the culture and fit of the organization
- considering the costs of recruitment
- analyzing the requirements of a job
- attracting employees to that job
- screening and selecting applicants
- hiring the best possible applicant
- integrating the new employee to the organization.
Although this process remains in place, all of these components have evolved. To get the best and brightest for your agency, you must conform to a more sophisticated way of recruiting.
Your recruiting process begins long before there is a job opening. It starts with a true assessment and evaluation of the environment and culture that you are building for your existing employees. How welcoming is the workplace to your current employees each day? These men and women and their vast networks can become your greatest recruiters.
Assess Your Needs
As employees leave out the back door (voluntarily or involuntarily), organizations must consider the cost of bringing another qualified individual through the front door. There are direct and indirect costs associated with recruitment. Targeted job boards, trade associations, specialized recruiters, or temporary agencies that assist with recruitment have direct costs, whereas lost productivity and potential morale issues as remaining employees are asked to do more are indirect costs.
The Center for American Progress estimates that replacing an employee costs approximately 20 percent of that employee's salary. If your small agency of 100 people loses 5 percent of your workforce annually (five people), which is under the norm for government attrition, you'll spend the average or equivalent of one person's entire salary to replace them all. The quicker you fill a vacant position, the less of this cost you'll have to pay.
A recruiter must spend time with the hiring managers to ensure that everyone has a clear picture of what the desired candidates looks like. What skill sets are needed on day one from the prospective candidate, and which skills are organizational norms that can be taught through training and development? This meeting also should include a review of the job description to ensure that it encompasses all of the components of the job.
Finally, discuss where to post the job. We must meet people where they are. Leverage relationships with trade associations that align with the field to which you are recruiting. (Finding a plumber is more likely on a plumbing association or union site than on an electrician website.) Although this may seem basic and rudimentary, it is often overlooked. Popular job sites such as Monster, Indeed, and LinkedIn are a one-stop shop for all jobs and can be limiting in creating a targeted approach for a specified skill set.
Four Steps to Active Recruitment
Prepare yourself today to recruit tomorrow by thinking through these steps.
Determine Present and Future Needs
The key is to build your candidate pool before you need it. Waiting for a vacancy to occur creates the reactionary approach that many organizations fall under. Budgetary or personnel number constraints may prevent you from hiring ahead, but you can certainly predict some future areas of need by evaluating the tenure and ages of staff in your organization. How many are nearing retirement age or have 20-plus years with the agency and may be in a position to move on? Consider whether there any incentives coming in the next 18-24 months (such as early retirement bonuses) that may create a mass exodus.
As you evaluate the need, you also must look at the multiple generations in the workforce. There are different triggers of success for each identified band of employees. Previous generations may have seen it as perfectly normal, understood, and accepted that young, new employees start at the bottom and work their way up in a very rigid hierarchical structure. That is not always the sentiment of new employees. You must plan accordingly.
Identify Available Resources
Join professional trade associations and groups that align with your industry and specialized workforce. Create master lists of industry leaders and other potential employees from customers, colleagues, co-workers, and friends.
Invest in your employees and pay for their participation and networking in industry groups, conferences, and trade shows. Create a listing of employees' areas of study and any collegiate allegiances (where they graduated from or potentially a family member attends or attended). This can be used for recruitment purposes later.
Develop Candidate Pools
Start internally with your existing employees. Build a personalized recruitment section or board for them to learn of openings, and give potential internal candidates an interview. It's a chance for you to know them better and for them to learn more about agency goals and needs. Sometimes, a good fit is found between your needs and theirs.
If no internal candidate exists and your search reaches externally, reach out first to passive job seekers. All good recruiters should have a pool of warm candidates they can contact when a vacancy occurs. These are a group of people that you've interacted with and cultivated relationships with over a period of time. The better the cultivation, the more applicants you may have to choose from during your next vacancy announcement.
No matter if the new hire is internal or external, always hire for strengths. Don't expect to develop weak areas of performance, habits, and talents. Build on what is great about your new employee in the first place.
Establish Criteria for Success
Organizations often measure success as a filled job, but recruiting success is so much more than that. Success does include finding the right talent, at the right time, at the right price, but it doesn't end at the fulfillment of a vacancy. It extends well into the new hire's employment. When determining your success, you must answer these questions:
- How was the employee onboarding process?
- Was the new employee assigned a mentor to help with navigating the organization?
- How soon is the new employee contributing to the overall work?
- How is the new employee adding value to the culture?
- Has your new employee made it past the first 90 days, six months, or year?
Recruiters also must understand internal relationship building and evaluate the process with the respective hiring managers and other internal constituents. What are more qualitative measures of success for each of these stakeholders?
The Recommendation
Organizations need talented individuals and should never stop recruiting. Never settle in the competition for talent. Recruiters should be working relentlessly to find top performers who fully embrace their organization's mission and vision.
Invite your entire agency to assist in the hiring process by investing in their networking circles. This outreach will enable you to reach candidates that you may not have had access to previously. Remember that candidates evolve as does your business, and an individual who may not be the best fit now may be the perfect person down the road. Be on constant lookout for talent and go get it!
Applicant Rules of the Road
These quick tips turn our focus to the applicants. Following these simple pointers can lead to success on your next job search.
- Research the company and position. Apply to those organizations and agencies that align with your values and positions for which you are currently qualified as well as those where you see potential for success. This will cut down on wasting your time as well as the company's.
- Recruiters are not career counselors. Don't expect internal recruiters to look at your resume and immediately understand where you would fit into their organization.
- Tailor your resume. Provide a resume that outlines your capabilities and experience in doing the job for which you are applying.
- Remove your physical mailing address if you're relocating. Most companies will contact you via email or phone, and you don't want your current address to limit your options.
- Create a professional email address. An address like [email protected] will ensure that an employer is not distracted by your use of slang or improper references to non-work related concerns.
- Improve your social media footprint. Potential employers will research you and view your public social media accounts. Review them all and ensure they paint an employable picture. If they include anything you wouldn't want a prospective employer to know, make them private today!
- Dress to impress. If you are granted an interview or face-to-face encounter, dress and groom yourself in a manner that speaks more to your professionalism than your individualism. (There'll be time to display that later.)
Listen to the Public Manager podcast for an interview with Timothy D. Howell.
ATD Resources
"Recruit Talent Using a Marketing Mindset" (TD Magazine Article)
Success for Hire: Simple Strategies to Find and Keep Outstanding Employees (ATD Book)
Succession Planning Basics (ATD Book)
