Running Out Of Ideas To Find New Staff?

20 Jul 2023

You've followed all the advice and recommendations your advisors have provided you with, but still fail to bring in applications from the type of people you are looking for. You've developed fantastic adverts, including all the detail candidates could possibly want to see - skills required, job description, salaries, location, development and promotion opportunities, company profile, etc etc, and you've still not got what you are looking for.

Have you ever tried a totally open approach to recruitment to see what results you get? By this we mean not being too specific about the jobs you are looking to fill.

You will always find that candidates carry out a degree of self-deselection in recruitment - they'll see a skill or qualification you've listed and think they'll be discounted because they don't have it, or they will think the job title doesn't necessarily fit with work they've done in the past. Many of you will think that these are decisions you want to make, rather than candidates.

Next time you advertise, why not try something totally different:

Make the title of your advert something inspiring - something that makes prospective candidates want to read on (without it being a job title)
Include a couple of paragraphs about what a fantastic company and employer you are, how well you are doing, how happy your staff are in the working environment you provide, and then:
Mention that you are looking for new recruits, at all levels, in, e.g. operations, administration, HR, Finance, Manufacturing, Engineering etc etc. Say that you want to hear from people who would love to work for you in one of those fields, and you want to see their CVs to see if they could add value to your organisation.

You'll then be able to decide who could do which job you need to fill, or indeed if you could make changes to any aspect of the work you do or structures to enable you to bring in some real talented people.
Finally, wait for the CV's to come flooding in and get to work looking for your next high performing stars!

It's an approach larger employers take when they know they'll be needing an influx of staff soon, and one which gives them a whole raft of CVs to look through without being too prescriptive about who is applying for which job. They'll look for achievements rather than just skills, and will be able to make a clear judgement about who could actually excel in their workplace.

This is the opposite of having a very targeted recruitment campaign. When you do this you are almost certain to get hundreds, if not thousands of CVs and it will take a supreme effort to sift through all of them but you may find some diamonds in among them who would have never applied to your normal job advertisements.

You have nothing to lose, so if all else has failed, why not give it a try?