This is the third and final section in my series, Enabling JIT Recruitment.  You can find the first two installations here:

Part 1: The End of Requisitions & Part 2: The Power of Centralized Recruiting

Any successful JIT recruiting deployment requires optimal candidate identification and conversion performance to meet strategic staffing needs, often in situations where the desired hire date may be weeks or months in the future.

Clearly, organizations operating in labor markets where candidates with critical skills are in high demand and short supply must seek ways to positively differentiate their opportunities.

Organizations deploying JIT recruiting must be both willing and able to implement sales-based techniques and tools to their candidate engagement model. This is doubly true when the organization isn’t viewed as an industry or sector leader.

But implementing a sales-based recruiting approach will be a significant challenge for employers whose systems and methods reflect what I refer to as a procurement-based recruiting approach; heavy on candidate screening and evaluation at an arms length, and short on anything resembling candidate consideration.

Procurement-based recruiting systems and methods are only effective in supply-heavy labor markets, as they assume the availability and interest of candidates with skills and abilities critical to the employer’s success.

That’s a fatal assumption for any recruiting organization operating in a demand-driven labor market.

In fact, any employer that’s still behaving as if they’re the only one making a buying decision in the recruitment process will inherently be at a disadvantage in the fight for high demand candidates.

The 5 following Sales Tips describe high impact, low cost methods that can help in the start-up of a sales-based recruiting culture.

1. Treat Candidates Like Customers

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But treating prospective candidates in the same way you treat prospective customers is easier said than done.

There are at least 7 candidate transactions, or touch points, in the recruitment process, and a very similar list of customer transactions in the sales process:

In most cases, that’s where the similarities ends. While prospective customers are viewed and treated as valuable assets, prospective candidates are typically viewed as something far less.

Just look at the difference in the response to a request for a telephone call from a prospective customer versus the same request from a prospective candidate. Sales organizations make it relatively easy for a prospective customer to speak to a real person in real time. Recruiting organizations do not.

Decades ago, sales organizations came to the conclusion that it made good financial sense to add a triage step to their customer engagement process. Once a potential customer expresses an interest in speaking to a vendor, the vendor immediately engages with the customer to gain an understanding of the volume and revenue opportunity the customer represents, as well as the level of immediacy associated with their need.

Unless they’ve already adopted a sales-based recruiting culture, most recruiting organizations offer no such triage step as a function of their candidate engagement process.

Instead, candidates are instructed to apply for consideration by downloading a resume to the employer’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or 3rd party career portal, and filling out a few pages of screens asking questions typically answered by the candidate’s resume. In most cases, it’s a 15-30 minute process.

How many potential customers would submit to a 15-30 minute session with a vendor’s CRM tool before ever talking to anyone?

Right. So why would a high demand candidate, likely receiving 2-5 recruiting calls a week, tolerate a 15-30 minute, on-line application process without having spoken to someone?

While it’s unrealistic to think that an employer will ever be able to engage on a call with all candidates for all jobs, it’s relatively easy to integrate a triage layer to the candidate engagement process for specific high demand or mission critical positions.

By adding a fast track screen to the candidate portal, enabling a 4-5 question triage step, employers can allow high demand candidates to bypass the full application process, engaging immediately with a human resources representative with specific knowledge of the job, as well as other jobs requiring similar skills and abilities.

While that’s certainly not the only opportunity a recruiting organization has to begin treating candidates like customers, it’s certainly a good starting point when seeking to achieve shortened cycle times and improved responsiveness to candidates with high demand skills and abilities.

2. Probing for Candidate What, Why, and When Guidance

Once a sales organization identifies a prospective customer, they immediately seek the answers to 3 critical questions:

1. What does the customer want to buy?
2. Why does the customer want or need to make the purchase?
3. When does the customer need to make the purchase?

The answers to these questions tell the sales organization who should be assigned to manage the relationship with the customer, what solution features should be highlighted to them, and with what degree of urgency the transaction should be processed.

As a function of a recruitment triage process, the same type of information should be gathered from candidates. What work does the candidate want to do? How many years of industry experience does the candidate have? What position-specific requirements does the candidate possess? When will the candidate be available to make a change?

Once acquired, this information positions the JIT recruiting team to determine who should manage the relationship with the candidate, what opportunities may best match the candidate’s skill set, and with what degree of urgency the candidate should be managed.

3. Preparing to Sell

There are 6 core motivational drivers for candidates to change employers:

• Place: Where the job is located
• People: Who the job works for or with
• Products: What products, solutions, or processes the job supports
• Potential: Revenue, organizational, and equity growth potential for the company
• Position: Level, experience, or knowledge growth opportunity
• Pay: Salary, equity, or benefits growth opportunity

Candidates will only make an unforced change in employers when they see an opportunity to fulfill a need their current employer can’t or won’t address, without creating a new need.

In simple terms, for a candidate to make a change of employers, they must have a reason to leave their current company, and a corresponding reason to join a new company.

Ironically, the candidate doesn’t have to have a precise vision of either reason at the beginning of the recruitment process, but the reasons to leave and join must be crystal clear before a candidate will accept an offer and make the break with their current employer.

It’s critical that JIT recruiters engage with high demand candidates to gain an understanding as to the factors that will drive their motivation to make a change; to determine what information and insight will best position a candidate to view the company (and its high demand opportunity) in a positive light.

As a result, it’s important for both HR representatives and hiring managers to understand where the employer is strong and long in each of the 6 areas of motivation, as they can’t be expected to present selling information to candidates if they don’t first know it themselves.

It’s equally important for them to understand where the employer is weak, especially in relation to other employers competing for mission critical talent. Understanding your weaknesses is the first step toward overcoming them.

4. Identifying and Tracking Candidate Change Triggers/Barriers to Closure

For decades, sales organizations have tracked change triggers for prospective customers. Budgetary cycles, terms of existing contracts with competing vendors, changes in decision makers; these are all data points that can go a long way toward positioning a great salesperson to be in the exact right place at the most opportune time.

The same opportunity exists for JIT recruiting professionals by creating candidate stockpiles for critical skill positions via monitoring situations for pending change triggers.

A candidate change trigger is an event impacting the candidate’s willingness or ability to change companies. Some examples include:

• Completion or cancellation of major projects or programs
• Relocation or reassignment becomes a condition of current employment
• Changes in immigration/visa status
• Children starting or finishing school terms
• Bonus or equity award vesting or distribution
• Performance review or career development meetings

When a change trigger is on the near- to mid-term horizon, it can act as a barrier to closure. Candidates driving to complete a major project, awaiting the approval of their permanent residency, or anticipating the vesting of an annual stock or bonus award will rarely be open to making a company change.

As a result, in a JIT recruiting environment, it’s critical to not only track the potential for change triggers, but to also track anticipated timing of the triggers.

JIT recruiters, armed with the knowledge of future headcount requirements for critical skill positions, can leverage their knowledge of candidate change triggers to stage the introduction of candidates to opportunities such that the employer will be prepared to hire the candidate as soon as the change trigger becomes a reality.

5. Maintain Analog Communications

Nothing is more important to a sales-based recruiting approach than maintaining the use of “analog”, or verbal communications, especially as the candidate advances past the interview stage of your recruitment process.

The deeper a candidate goes into your recruiting process, the greater your financial and emotional investment in them, and the more costly it becomes to lose them to a competitor or a counter offer.

While e-mail and text messages are well and good for simple update and clarification communications, there is nothing like a telephone call or a face to face meeting to assure that critical information has been effectively exchanged….even if the information is not what you want to hear.

We’ve all had phone calls where the other person’s affect; not necessarily what they say, but how they say it, tells us there’s a problem. This insight is easy to miss if you’re relying on digital communications platforms like e-mail and texting.

The Tip of the Iceberg

The 5 Sales Tips offered here are literally just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the creation and maintenance of a sales-based recruiting culture. But if you see the potential value that can be added via these 5 tips, especially in the deployment of a JIT recruiting enterprise, I’d encourage you to seek and explore the rest of the iceberg.

Manufacturers who implement JIT and TQM jointly outperform organizations that only pursue one, or none, of these strategies. For more information: Total Quality Management (TQM): Your best path to sustainable recruiting excellence.