When it comes to employees, bad apples do spoil the whole bunch.

Team members who lack the skills to do their job well, or the social graces to get along with others: make more work for everyone else by forcing their peers to pick up their slack, are a huge drain on their superiors’ time, and are poison for overall moral.

Even worse, candidate failure can cost you up to one and half times an employee’s annual salary!

Your company’s culture, growth, and overall success depend on its people.

Hiring good apples is crucial, but it’s also an extremely difficult task, especially with the war for talent back on and quality candidates becoming an ever scarcer resource.

What can you do to create the best team possible in the face of a growing talent shortage?

Get active with your recruiting!

Job boards are one of the best ways to get candidates attention, especially niche job boards based on location, but posting on job boards is no longer enough if you want to hire the best.

Along with niche job boards, and social media; top recruiters today all incorporate sourcing into their candidate acquisition strategies.

(Check out this post for a definition of sourcing in relation to HR)

Making candidate identification a part of your recruiting is one of the most effective ways to get more good apples on your team. You can do this by leveraging databases, the internet, and social media to source, then connect with potential hires.

Here are 4 best practices to keep in mind when employing sourcing techniques for your own hiring process:

1 – Start with a Plan

Think through your strategy before you start searching.

Take twenty minutes to analyze the job you’re hiring for, this will help define your search. Then use this information to determine what skills and qualifications the position demands. Make list of the qualities you need your candidates to possess and keywords that relate.  You can also make a list of terms to exclude!

Don’t worry about being too specific, specificity is a good thing. In fact, when using Facebook ads (a highly effective sourcing tool) research shows that narrowly defined ads reach their target 90% of the time. The more picky you are, the fewer “bad matches” you’ll have to sort though. (Alprazolam)

2 – Use Niche Databases

Using candidate databases or searching sites that are specific to the type of job you’re hiring for is a great way to make your search more efficient.

When looking for qualified talent you want to fish where the fish are. For example if those fish are tech pros, you should source with a site like Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is an excellent choice because not only is it a favorite hangout for 2,000, 000 tech savvy programmers, but because it is a site where those programmers go to ask questions, learn new skills, and get better at what they do. This is a great indicator that those potential candidates are both motivated and passionate, two defining qualities of good apple candidates!

A problem you may run into when using a site like Stack Overflow is that the candidates you find their may live on the other side of the world and this is often a deal breaker. Using local databases can help you avoid this problem entirely.

Searching local job boards like BC Jobs eliminates this problem entirely. So you don’t have to worry about wasting your time on perfect candidates who are impossible for you to recruit because of their location.

3 – Skills Trumps Title

Never rely on job titles too heavily in your searches. Different companies use different titles for the same positions. If you only search based on job title or experience you’re going to miss out on a ton of qualified candidates.

Search for candidates based on skills!

Not only does searching for candidates based on skill make it more likely that you’ll actually find them, but because skill requirements often overlap, you may even find candidates qualify for multiple open positions within your organization with a single search.

(How to avoid the 15 worst sourcing mistakes)

4 – Make Contact ASAP

Once you find a great candidate DO NOT HESITATE! If you think they have potential, chances are your competitors feel the same way.

As soon as you find someone with the right skills, send them an email, or even better, engage with them from within the site you found them (messaging with Facebook for example).

Keep your message short and sweet, tell them how impressed you are by their skill set, and then sell the position with gusto! Ask them to send you a short write up on why they think they fit the position and an updated version of their resume, if you don’t have access to it.

Again, DON’T HESITATE…

Go out there and get that talent!

The post How to Actively Search for the Best Candidates appeared first on BC Jobs Blog.

The hiring process is flawed. Don’t believe me? Just ask Leadership IQ who recently reported that:

“Almost half of all hires fail within the first 18 months on the job”

Across the board, the number one problem many companies face is hiring qualified employees who fit. Whether it’s a huge retail chain, or a small accounting firm: sourcing, qualifying, and hiring takes up a lot of time, energy, and money. When faced with a 50% chance those candidates won’t even last two years, we start to really recognize the importance of fixing the hiring process.

Even if you have many resources devoted to hiring, the number one pain point remains the same. There’s something fundamentally wrong in the actual process of hiring.

So let’s start fixing it! Not with fancy tricks, or a shiny new ATS, but by revisiting how we view the process of talent sourcing, qualification, and acquisition.

These five tips will help you improve the ROI on your hiring process, and hopefully inspire you to become a part of the recruitment solution.

1. Asses the Candidate, NOT the Resume

There is so much more to a candidate than a series of credentials, and yet often they are ruled because they fail to tick off one or two checkmarks on a list of “mandatory experience”.

I am not suggesting you don’t use resumes, they do give you a lot of worthwhile information about a potential hire. What I am saying is that you need to learn to read between the lines!

If you get too focused on details like a fancy degree, for instance, you may miss out on a candidate who took a less conventional, yet often even more educational route: like starting their own company, or pursuing various internships.

This is a great argument for checking out potential candidates LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles – you may just find a diamond in the rough.

2. Create Benchmarks for Fit

You know what kind of candidates “fit” at your company. What makes your employees excel, what values you need them to share. (https://vipcleaners.com) Your interview process must be specific to those needs. Along with technical skills, consider these four aspects of a candidate’s personality when interviewing:

• Motivation
• Emotional Intelligence
• Coach-ability
• Temperament

Ask behavior based questions that give you insights about each of these qualities, and any other personality traits that are important to your specific company culture.

Behavior based questions are more easily measured, and tend to elicit a more honest response from candidates.

Example of a series of question to ask if team work is one of your company’s core values is:

• Can you describe a situation where you had to mediate between co-workers?
•  How did you approach the situation?
• How did they react to your approach?
• Would you handle things differently next time?

Make sure that every one of your interviewers knows what to look for in a potential hire, what questions to ask, and what specific skills your company needs them to posses. This will help your interviewing process become more unified, efficient, and repeatable.

3. Make Data Your Friend

You must understand your process in order to improve it, that’s why one of the best ways to streamline any business process is by making that process data driven.

Track your entire recruiting practice from start to finish so that you can tell what questions lead to better hires, which interviewers are the strongest, and what traits best help determine candidate success.

Make this information the basis of any changes and improvements you make to your recruiting process moving forward.

4. Attraction Trumps Sourcing

Yes, you need to post jobs, reach out to passive candidates, and actively recruit, but generating inbound candidate interest is one of the best things you can do to improve your hiring process.

“58% of employers say that a strong employer brand increases the quality of candidates”

If you can brand your company as an incredible place to work, candidates will come to you. The best and brightest candidates are more interested in your company culture than salary, so culture is one of the best tools you have to win talent.

5. Engage Your Talent Pool

Post and pray is NOT effective. Job boards are an awesome way to recruit, especially niche boards like BC Jobs, but if you want to make your recruiting as effective as possible, you need to drive quality candidates to your posts!

Social media is one of the best ways to do this. Use platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and, Google Plus to engage top talent.

Tell the world what you’re working on in a fun engaging way. Show them how awesome your culture is with images and video. Even better, get your current team to comment and share what they love about working at your organization via their social channels and your own. Respond to any questions your talent community asks, and ask them questions in return.

Oh, and make sure you share the jobs you post on BC Jobs across all of your social channels!

The post Recruiting Is Broken: 5 Ways To Fix It appeared first on BC Jobs Blog.

The shift towards a labor market comprised of younger candidates requires a shift in recruiting strategy.

This generation of candidate has very different expectations of their potential employer than the generations before them had. Traditional recruiting methods simply aren’t enough to win the war for millennial talent.

Here are 3 things you can do to attract, engage, and recruit millennials:

Make your recruiting social

Millennials use social media for everything, including their job search. In fact 83% of millennials reported using Facebook to look for work in 2013 (Jobvite). This is why social recruiting is one of the best ways to reach younger talent.

To get started with social recruiting you will need to build a presence on at least one social platform. As Facebook is the number one choice for millennial job seekers I suggest you start by using a recruiting app to create a career section on your company Facebook Page. Twitter is another excellent social platform for recruiting millennials. You can use Twitter to share the jobs you post on your company Facebook Page to get your post seen by more potential hires. Use tags like #hiring and #recruiting to make your job posts searchable. It is also a good idea to include a location in your job Tweet.

Check out Jobcast for an effective Facebook recruiting app and TweetMyJobs to help improve your Twitter recruiting.

Make your recruiting mobile

Millennial job seekers expect to be able to connect with potential employers via mobile. In fact approximately 77% of job seekers reported using mobile to look for work in 2013 and most of the job seekers who reported doing so were millennials. This is why not having a mobile friendly career site is huge problem for employers looking to attract younger candidates.

In order to make your recruiting more mobile you can either re-structure your career site so that it is mobile friendly and responsive (works on a wide assortment of devices), or you can use the social recruiting strategies mentioned above. Having a Facebook and Twitter presence means you also have a mobile presence and, if you have a Facebook career section, the jobs you post there will also be visible via mobile device.

Appeal to millennial’s values

Surprisingly salary rates significantly lower on millennials’ list of work life values than it does for boomers. The potential to progress and grow with a company is much more important to millennials than the promise of a high salary. They also value flexible working arrangements and hours, training and development programs, and a company culture that is in line with their own values.

To better attract millennials you should highlight the aspects of your company culture that reflect these values. If, for example, your company offers excellent training opportunities and provides employees with flexible work options, you should be sure to highlight this in all of your job posts, in your interactions with potential hires, and in all of the content you share via social media and job boards.

There are many more ways to appeal to millennials, but these three techniques are extremely effective and should serve you well to start. For more detailed information about millennial candidates you can check out this survey by PWC.

The post 3 Effective Ways to Recruit Millennials appeared first on BC Jobs Blog.