Calibrate Your Goals with Your Client To Find the Ideal Candidate

As a recruiter, it is your responsibility to meet clients’ needs through engaging, sourcing and recruiting top talent. This can all be accomplished through expanding the marketing funnel to fit new styles of recruiting. Take the marketing funnel and rotate its box 45 degrees to turn it into a diamond. The expanding axis of the diamond fits recruiting models more accurately because we start small and expand out as we continue to analyze and understand talent.

In our last blog, we talked about the importance of collaboration to your recruiting model. This is the stage where you get to see exactly what the recruiting process will look like and what kind of people you’re looking to acquire. This stage is called Calibration – where you produce a short list of the ideal candidates your client is looking for based on the sourcing and research you’ve gathered on your ideal candidates. This list can teach you what skills are necessary to align your recruiting goals with your strategy. The calibration stage is all about continuous learning because you need to adapt to fully calibrate your process to fit your current scope of candidates and hiring needs. Follow these simple guidelines and in no time you will be finding diamonds in the rough!

1. Create Candidate Profiles

Filling time-to-hires quickly, in a cost-effective and productive manner can be stressful for recruiters (even with the help of AI). As such, ideal candidates can sometimes fall through the cracks. Recruiters spend an average of six seconds reviewing an individual resume. You aren’t purposely overlooking an individual, there simply just isn’t enough time. However, there are tricks to streamline your recruiting process.

Organize your candidate profiles. In the calibration stage of diamond recruiting, you should always create candidates profiles. Resumes only let you see basic information about candidates. And, you already have the keywords and criteria your client wants to hire, so why not use the information to your advantage?

In this stage always remember these 4 important guidelines to recruiting:

• Address Your Company’s Keywords
  • Use the keywords you came up within the collaboration stage to create a profile and highlight if a candidate would be the right fit.
• Recognize Your Company’s Criteria
  • It’s important to continuously remember the type of individual your team is looking for and create each profile to state if they fit the benchmark.
• Advertise the Opening
  • Make sure you still have a posting open that a job is available with your organization, don’t ignore the perfect candidate because they were late to the game.
• Be Time Sensitive
  • In order to hire the best candidates, you need to have a speedy process to ensure you are not losing top candidates to other companies. Make sure everything you are doing throughout diamond recruiting is done with speed and accuracy.

2. Matching the Client and Recruiter Direction

Before you begin inputting information for individual candidates into their profiles, you should create a document that shows the type of individuals your organization is looking to hire and the direction you are hoping to recruit. Allowing time to align your goals will save time and money in the end. It is important you are on the same page so later in the recruiting process you are not wasting time investing in candidates that would not properly fit your company.

The incorrect way to recruit:

Head of Company: “We are looking for an individual who is experienced with SEO, focused on getting work done quickly, works best alone and is available weekends.”

Recruiter: “In the past, we have recruited candidates that have teamwork as a strong suit and are available during normal working hours. Being that this criterion seems to fit our organization, we are going to continue to seek after individuals similar to this.”

The proper way to recruit:

Head of Company: “We are looking for an individual that is experienced with SEO, focused on getting work done quickly, works best alone and is available weekends.”

Recruiter: “I hear what you are saying. However, our team seems to be more teamwork driven. Do you think it would be appropriate to look for a candidate that works well as a team, but also makes it a priority to accomplish work alone?”

Head of Company: “That would be great, thanks for ensuring we find the perfect candidate.”

In order to make sure you get the perfect candidate, sometimes it is important to remember you are the recruiter and most likely you know what you are doing. If you feel the direction you’re going towards is incorrect, push back and express why you believe approaching it another way is better. Ultimately you should hear out your supervisor. But, remembering you are the expert in your position is important to ensure you are doing the best job possible for your company.

3. Make Profiles Unique

Each candidate is unique. So the next thing you need to learn as a recruiter is how to differentiate one from another. This is the stage where we can identify if there are "false positive" candidates. People that look right, but are actually quite off the mark.

Although you are creating candidate profiles, they should not mimic resumes which all start to blend. The calibration stage comes right before the fun part...where you start mining for diamonds. Setting yourself up with unique profiles will make the remainder of the process much easier.

You should have a uniform way of creating profiles. However, the information in each should allow it so you really capture a candidate's qualifications, even if you only have 6 seconds to review!

The example above lays out just how easy it is to compare the qualities your organization wants for a hire to what each candidate can provide. This part of the recruiting process should never be overlooked because it saves so much time in the long run. Creating a unique candidate profile allows you to match the company and recruiter direction to ensure you hire the appropriate candidates.

As you can see, it is vital to master continuous learning so you know how to align your goals with your clients. We know this can be difficult — that’s why teaming up with IQTalent Partners can be incredibly beneficial. We recognize there are many steps to matching goals. So, our mission is to act as an extension of your team. We are here to add value to your team by creating candidate profiles, never using the same recruiting process and matching the client and recruiter direction.

Learn how you can get started with IQTalent today!