7 creative ways to innovate your talent acquisition: Innovation attracts the innovative!

For years, companies have struggled to capture market share through economization and downsizing, while growth had seemed to take a backseat. Smart companies know that innovation and technology is what drives growth in the new economy. Integral to this initiative, Human Resource executives are now being recognized as some of the most important strategic leaders in organizations seeking growth through innovation.

For a company to benefit from innovation, all internal practices must reflect the same level of strategic direction, including Human Resource Management, and, especially in the sourcing and recruitment of new talent into the company. Innovative HR departments are continuously brainstorming new and creative ways to reach out to more of the right people in the right way. Accomplishing this takes more than clever automation of existing practices, but innovative new practices, and the ability to automate them.

‘That’s nice’, you say, ‘But who has time’? You do, if you want to help take your company, and your role, to the next level in really understanding your business, your customers, and most importantly, your employees.

If you’re crushed for time, and thinking strategically is only something you tend to do on weekends, consider this; small steps in the right direction will help make you more effective, make your job easier, and help your company by improving its hiring success ratio, increasing the value of its workforce, and improving overall employee satisfaction by giving you more time to devote to.

Here are seven practical things you can do that will help innovate your talent acquisition, quickly bring the innovators to your door and make such a difference in your company:

1. Define your Talent Acquisition Strategy – is it simply the tactics of filling open jobs (be honest) or the higher calling of attracting good caliber people to your company, regardless of job availability? Getting proactive about talent acquisition is the most difficult, and most important first step in innovating talent acquisition, especially for busy HR professionals who feel like teachers in an overcrowded classroom. If you’re going to make a change, you’re going to need help in doing it. Get support for your initiative if you don’t already have it by educating Management that proactive Talent Acquisition builds company brand and strength. Make two lists, one being what you want your talent acquisition strategy to be, and one consisting of how you actually spend your time. Any disconnect clearly illustrates a problem that can be solved with additional resources. The payback for investing in new technology of automating, or outsourcing the major drains on your time can be easily seen when you show the savings in time to hire. The value of having a talent pool to draw compatible job seekers from, versus responding to unqualified applicants is also easy to show.

2. “Outsource Internally”…A clever way to get someone else to do your job? No. (And if this is the first thought in your head, you really do need a day off!). It’s a clever way of finding the right person for a position while adding to the insurance of a successful hire.

Don’t develop the job spec in a vacuum. Involve the hiring manager, the superiors, the subordinates this person’s work will affect. Collect their ideas for increasing productivity, satisfaction and success. What skills are required? What personal traits will be helpful? What strengths are already on the team? Which might be missing? Translate this input into the skills and personality attributes that tell you exactly what to look for in a candidate. Competencies are only half the equation, with personal style being the other half, so build it in to the creation of your preferred candidate profile.

Be realistic about the skills and attributes you seek. Does the job description sound like the unattainable Super Candidate who is everything to everyone? A strong leader and team player? An accommodating analyst who quickly makes tough decisions? Realize when traits conflict. Draw up a list and decide or ask others which competing traits are more relevant or important. Once you pinpoint the personality traits that are more likely to lead to success, you can use this as an effective pre-screening filter.

Focus on the future rather than the past with innovative talent. What a person might have done is not as relevant as what they need to do. Ask several people from the department to think of real-life situations that this person might have to deal with and get a better sense of the true resource and style of the person. Ask specific situational questions that are relevant. Concentrate on a comparison with the true skills and personality traits the company needs and which the position requires, not on filling a predecessor’s shoes.

3. Market your openings in ways you may not have tried before, and build relationships to reach people you’ve never reached before. Set up an ‘employment interest’ station in your lobby, at tradeshows, or conferences. Give your business cards to salespeople, or anyone who can ‘evangelize employment’, or who may come across colleagues, or even customers, interested in employment with your company. Think like a talent ‘scout’, and open your recruiting efforts up to extend beyond the familiar grounds for sourcing talent. Are you impressed with how organized your daughter’s Scout leader is? Get a direct mail piece that you thought was creative and effective? Persuaded to donate money to a charity you’ve never heard of before by a caller with a great attitude? Talent is everywhere. Recognizing and reaching out to it is the first step in building a lasting network of talent you can tap when you need it.

4. Create a widespread referral network that works continuously. Recent hires, association colleagues, retirees and high performers who have left your company are all excellent points of reference. Consider putting up “wanted” posters, describing your ideal candidate, complete with a cash reward. The reward gets split among all referrers in a line that lead to a successful hire. There can also be other incentive referral programs, like ‘points’ awarded for referrals, with redemption for prizes, travel, or paid vacation days. However it’s implemented, the key ingredient is people reaching out to other people.

5. Really interact with people who show interest in joining your company. Job seekers, both active and passive, are a fountain of information about your business, your industry, your competition and your customers. If you develop the approach of treating your interested job seekers like you would treat prospective customers, this can become second nature. Forget about auto-responders on email, or generic postcards. These can actually confirm an applicant’s suspicion of being a number rather than a valued prospective employee.

6. Create an easy, non-intimidating talent ‘collector’ that makes it easy for people to explore your company, what it’s about, what it’s like to work for. The best place to do this is your company website, with it’s global reach, and endless possibilities for communication and relationship building around the clock. Move the ‘Careers’ area to a prominent position on your site. Nothing shows the relative importance of people to your company more than having the careers area behind ‘Contact Us’ and a link which is beside ‘Terms and Conditions’ in 6 point text. Use your website as a branding tool for working with you as much as it’s used to promote your company’s products, services and brand. As the first point of research for many prospective employees, your website will likely be their first impression of you. Make it more than a one way experience by asking your visitors about themselves, and giving them a ‘no obligation’ way to express interest in employment. You can direct all your referrals, retirees, past and current employees to create a profile in your talent pool, and in this way automate your increased marketing and referral networking efforts in talent acquisition.

7. Turn around your application process, reduce your workload and find the right people for open positions fast by having interested job seekers create a ‘profile’ of themselves. You can collect more information specific to your company’s hiring objectives, and also begin to turn the workload in your favor by not having to respond to each individual application. This way, you can build your talent pool exponentially to always have a ready source to search for current and coming position openings.

eBullpen.com, Pleasant Prairie, WI, formed in 2004 to build the first employment website that matches job seekers to employers using 3 dimensions of compatibility instead of resumes: personality traits, job preferences of the seeker and job requirements of the position.. Its website, www.ebullpen.com determines compatibility between what job seekers and employers are looking for automatically, and presents matches to employers in order of percentage match for immediate online communication.

eBullpen also helps companies turn their websites into branded talent collectors, possessing all the benefits that the eBullpen profile matching technology brings with their TalentPen collection system. The system allows recruiters and HR personnel to interact with potential job seekers via built-in forums and communication modules. It easily integrates with existing applicant tracking systems, eBullpen’s own Applicant Tracking module, or can self stand to collect and search profiles of job seekers before they become job applicants.

eBullpen helps shorten the hiring process by quickly identifying people who are compatible for a job’s profile, and because personality is included up front as an added filter, it helps find highly compatible people much quicker than resume and telephone screening do. The system is low cost and easily accessible to HR departments, small business owners and recruiting agencies alike.

For job seekers, the system is like having the best matching jobs find them, spotlighting them to employers as a match more obviously than a resume would. It places the focus of an initial candidate search back on the individual rather than purely the resume, giving the job seeker a better chance of being found for jobs that fit their personality and search preferences.

Over 12 years of research has gone into the personality model that the eBullpen matching algorithm is based on, including PhD certified test validation into its search mechanism. eBullpen’s mission is to bring powerful, accessible tools to employers and job seekers to improve the hiring process, get the right people in the right jobs, and improve the economy by making it easier and faster than ever before to find the right people.