Full Employment & Recruitment

By Declan Collins

We’re pretty much at full employment in Ireland, so we need to adapt our recruitment practices and processes to make sure it reflects the candidate scarce market we are in. We need to start to understand that most candidates in the workforce are fully employed and not actively looking.

Most processes weed out the weak candidates and this is no longer sufficient in a full employment market where we’re just not getting the volumes of candidates applying that we need. So now is the time to start reaching out to the candidates who are the best in the market place directly to make quality hires.

When you are directly approaching the best people in the marketplace, make sure that they don’t need to go through any steps that don’t add any value to them if you do get them to ‘apply’. When you’re initially talking to these candidates you need to have a clear employee value proposition (EVP) that reflects your understanding of why somebody perfectly happy in their existing job want to move. Ideally link your EVP to your company strategy or your companies ‘Why’. When approaching these people initially you will need an attention-grabbing mechanism to make sure that they interact with you, so whether that is in an email or voicemail (or however), it is it is really important that you grab their attention. Perhaps even touch on some intrinsic motivators they may have for a job change.

The initial contact should just sell the discussion to them or that initial phone call or conversation with them. That’s when you can get into more detail. During that initial contact you can sell the job as a series of opportunities and explain to the candidate what they’ll get out of it. It’s important you shift your mindset to a consultative approach at this point to ensure that if that particular role is not for them, you are not forcing a square peg into a round hole. This will ensure you have a network of candidates for roles further down the road.

Think carefully about what information you require at this point and what questions you can ask to gather that info. Also make sure that you show that you’re more than just a box ticker and have an open and honest conversation with the candidate. Do a work history review with them and find out what the greatest accomplishments are and do a deep dive into that area.

A professional consultative approach will let the person to feel as they were assessed fairly, irrespective of where the role goes and will build your credibility in the marketplace.

A couple of things to note, if you’re actively reaching out to passive candidates. They may not have an up-to-date CV and you definitely don’t want to encourage them to do one. The reason being CVs get sent to other companies and that’s not what you want. It does mean that you need to tackle this in your existing recruitment process and explain to managers that they might not have a traditional CV to reference at the interview.

Also consider what objections you are likely to encounter when you are talking to these candidates, these will be the common sticking points you may get from multiple candidates. If your company has had some bad press or has a reputation within the marketplace these are things you need to be conscious of and tackle head on.

Most companies are using techniques that are based on a lot of people applying for each role, using online testing and keyword searches to vet out multiple applicants, so get out of your comfort zone and start networking with the best people in the marketplace and you’ll uncover some amazing candidates for your organisation.