Attract the Best of the Best

Article courtesy of Catchafire; written by ReWork

Is recruiting exceptional talent one of your top priorities? If it’s not, it should be.

Knowing how to hire well is critical to the success of any organization. And when you’re faced with budgetary or timing constraints, it just means that you’ll have to get crafty. Here’s how to attract and secure the best of the best.

Create a Dedicated Talent Team

The best thing you can do to ensure that you advance your mission in a meaningful way is to prioritize hiring. This means setting aside the time and money to get it right – so that you have more time and more money later to devote to all the other things you want to get done. Start by creating a dedicated talent team that is on the pulse of what the most dynamic professionals long for in their work. Schedule regular meetings for the team to brainstorm and refine recruitment strategies.

If you suspect that you could use a hiring budget, the first thing you should do is sit down and really picture what your organization would be like if everyone on your staff was as dynamic, effective, experienced, and dedicated as you can imagine. Recognize the gap between where you are now, and where you could be with some great hiring outcomes – this will help you make the case for investing resources in hiring.

Cater to the Job-seeker

What talented people want has changed. They used to want high salaries to verify their value and stable career paths to allow them to sleep well at night. Now they want purposeful work and jobs that fit clearly into the larger context of their career. And that means they want jobs that are sensible parts of an ongoing journey through a series of professional endeavors — not some supposedly linear path toward “success”. Here are two ways you can adjust to this shift:

• Communicate impact. Make sure you’re getting across how much you care about your vision and how you’re working towards it. Things like start dates, vacations days, and even salaries and bonuses are then far less likely to be deal-breakers.

• Design your roles for their future. People now see each job as a stepping stone that fits into their career. The best way to keep them with you indefinitely is to focus on making your stone as attractive and inviting as possible. Decent pay, rewarding perks, flexible work environment, an engaging culture and large doses of autonomy (on top of a compelling mission) demonstrate that you take their professional development seriously.

Recognize the 8 Traits of an Indispensable Employee

At ReWork, we’ve found that top talent tends to share eight common traits. Here’s a quick look at the list, along with some advice on how you can uncover them.

1. Resourcefulness, the ability to find, unlock and mobilize resources in order to evaluate and execute projects. How to spot it: Ask for examples of times they found critical information or resources quickly. This includes anything fundraising to coalition building.
2. Resiliency, the ability to work well under uncertainty and continue after setbacks. How to spot it: Ask for evidence of grit. This could be times they narrowly averted disaster, took a huge risk and had it pay off or came back from a defeat to achieve victory in the end.
3. Confidence, a healthy esteem of one’s abilities and approach to life. How to spot it: See if the person is willing to say, “I don’t know.” Ask a question that has both a right and wrong answer and is highly unlikely that the person knows how to respond. Take notice if they admit to not knowing or if they dodge around the answer.

Armed with the strategies above, you’ll have a significant advantage over organizations that are competing for the same talent, so you can attract and hire a truly great fit for your role. For more tips on hiring visit ReWork’s Hiring Academy.