A 5 Step Guide to Turning Your Company Into a Recruiting Machine

If you want your company to be the best, you have to have the best talent. It’s as simple as that.

And when it comes to marketing this is 100% the case, top talent makes the most money.  The potential profit you can make having world class talent vs. average is night and day. Through trial and error we have been able to come up with a formula for success at Power Digital to recruit the top talent in our industry and have a steady flow of high-quality recruits applying at all times.

Below are the key five things that we have determined really work. I can guarantee you that if you implement these processes within your company you too will see a significant improvement in your talent level and recruitment pipeline.

Tip #1: Turn Your Current Employees Into Recruiters And Brand Advocates

This one should be pretty easy if you are a company that really cares for your current team and have a team that wants to work with the best of the best. All you need to do is motivate them to help you recruit top talent. Here are a few things that will help you do this:

• Take great care of your current team and get them very involved in all recruiting and hiring decisions so they have a say in who they work with.
• Show them what a difference it makes to have the best talent and how it will make them better and more successful.
• Pay them to recruit for you! At Power Digital we pay our team $2,000 for any new recruit they bring in that we hire. This is a no-brainer, I would much rather pay one of my awesome team members than a recruiter and $2,000 is a very small amount to hire a great candidate that your team loves.
• Make them aware of the key positions you need, give them the job descriptions, and discuss the type of candidate you are looking for.
• Show them how to push those positions out to their networks through Facebook, LinkedIn, and email.

Here are a few example posts, but it’s critical that you have your team put their own personality on it, just give them some examples and have them post multiple times.  We even offer to pay anyone in our professional network $500 – $1,000 if they bring us a great candidate that we close. Money talks, and this creates an audience of people who want to help you make your next hire by sending you the best of the best. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tip #2: Create An Awesome Internship Program

You can think of your internship program as your Minor League team. It is the place to recruit and develop your future stars. The key to attracting the best young talent and future stars to your internship program is to make it an awesome experience where they really learn.

Related: Tips for Managing Millennials in the Workplace

Too many internships are simply resume builders where the interns gain no real skills and feel like they are doing low level tasks. Make sure your interns know what they are contributing to, show them the bigger picture and the stars will work very hard for you and just might become one of your best team members in the future.

A few other tips we have learned as our program has evolved:

• Work hard at the internship program, solicit feedback from your interns and continue to evolve it. Your program should get better for every intern class.
• Have multiple interns in “classes” together so they can have camaraderie and be a part of a group of peers.
• Let your intern hires run the program and improve it – once you have a star intern that earns themselves a full time role, they are the best person to manage your future intern program until this happens again and the reins are passed off.  We started by having an intern committee of our more junior team members and past interns. They did a great job, were fired up to manage this, and have ownership and can really relate to your college interns on a level that more senior team members may have a hard time doing.
• Showcase your internship and hustle on campus so that the best student interns want to be a part of your program.  There is a huge difference between that super talented and driven college student and the student that is just looking for an internship to build their resume.
• Build some strong relationships with professors and directors on campus who can scout the best talent for you.  We have done this at San Diego State University with the Business School and Entrepreneurship Center – we even have one of our Executives now on the board and have team members contribute as guest speakers each semester to give back to the professors that help us and get visibility for our brand on campus. They also have very low-cost career fairs and events that are good to evaluate, help the university, and make them want to support your program.
• Once you have a great program, brand your program and work to make your program one of the most coveted at your local universities – Example: ChargED the Internship Division of Power Digital!

Tip #3: Build Out Your Recruitment Content And Let Candidates See What You Have To Offer

You really need to showcase what makes your company great and why it is an awesome place to work.  I recommend building out the recruitment section of your website and showcasing things like your culture, your team, the benefits you offer, why your company is the best in your industry, and much more.

The more content you have for candidates to digest and understand what you have to offer, the more resumes you will get and the more pumped they will be to interview with you.

Related: 4 Easy Steps to Team Building – Turn Your Office Into a Community

Here are some examples of this.

• You can see this page showcases our core values, mission, team, and much more. It helps candidates begin to get a feel for what the people at Power Digital are like.
• We wanted to showcase the Culture at Power Digital and things that we do together.  We didn’t feel this was always super relevant to other people visiting our site but for potential recruits it is super important that they understand what we are into.

Tip #4: Leverage Technology To Connect With Candidates

The 4 most impactful and cost efficient technologies and platforms I have found for driving candidates are:

• ZipRecruiter – Zip has been a great volume play for us.  This service syndicates your job applications across a bunch of the top job boards. You can pay a monthly fee in order to promote your key positions as needed to develop a steady source of applicants. What I love about Zip is that I can go after resumes for a Social Media Manager in one week and go heavy after a SEO Manager the next week. It is a recruitment platform that is very flexible and can be updated on the fly by your team with very little time commitment.
• Glassdoor – has proven to be a huge brand builder for us and major influencer for potential candidates. I would highly recommend investing time in your Glassdoor profile and even paying the quarterly that will allow you to advertise with them and get premium features. If you are a fast growing company that values top talent, I am confident you will find it well worth the time and investment.
• Facebook Advertising – this may depend on your target audience of recruits but if nothing else I like to use Facebook to retarget recruits.

How I use Facebook retargeting for recruitment:

• Set up an audience around the URLs that recruits visit on your site
• Push applicants to your website through Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn as outlined and pixel them into that audience when they visit
• Serve nurturing ads to those people that highlight things such as:
  • Employee perks
  • Press material that industry leading outlets are writing about you
  • Content that shows off your thought leadership
  • Fun things that your team does together

I’ve found that doing this brings me new leads but also helps me convince the applicants that I really want that Power Digital is the place for them. It sells them while they are waiting for their first interview and all throughout the recruitment sales cycle, which can take weeks to complete and get to the offer letter stage.

• LinkedIn Advertising – LinkedIn is a great network to explore for recruitment purposes.  You can target those candidates by job title, company, etc.  I like LinkedIn because oftentimes these candidates may not even be looking to make a change yet and you can reach them and convince them.  A lot of times the top talent is already happily employed somewhere and to get them you need to reach out and give them a compelling enough offer to make a change.

Tip #5: Always Be Recruiting, Never Stop

We all know the old move “ABC, Always Be Closing”, the same is true for building a strong recruitment pipeline.

Not only is it critical to create a constant source of resumes and talent but you really need to evolve the process for vetting and selling great candidates on your brand.  As much as you are vetting them, they are vetting you and this is a dance that takes practice to perfect.

A great source of feedback is candidates that you successfully recruited and onboarded. Ask them what stuck out to them about you and what red flags they has. Use these insights to get better and keep working the steps above so that you can become one of the most coveted job opportunities for the best talent in your industry.

What I Have Learned

I discovered that early on in the history of Power Digital we sucked at recruiting. As we rapidly grew, we were forced to improve and we worked the steps above and now get probably 30+ resumes a day and tons of great candidates coming through the door every week. This has caused us to develop clear processes so we do not waste our time or the time of candidates.

Our people are by far our #1 and most important asset to the company. We work hard to keep building the best team possible.  We look for current superstars or candidates with star potential that want to be on a team of leaders.