I’d like to talk to you today about using a multi-pronged approach to look for sales job candidates. I was just on the phone, we were doing our weekly call with those people that are enrolled in our Business Builder Program. Every week we get together, we talk on the phone about what’s working, what’s not, we help people tweak their ads a bit, we help people implement our strategies to go out and hunt for candidates versus just fishing, we talk about people’s application forms, answers to questions, we talk about the results on our sales person candidate assessment, things like that. Anyway, one of my clients was saying that in a particular geography, it was St. Louis Missouri, they were having a hard time pulling candidates and they wanted to know what I thought and how they might find some more.
What we did was we went over the multi-pronged approach. We took a look at all of the different job boards that we could potentially be on. The truth of the matter is, years ago you could get by, by being on one, there was a time where local newspapers did it and you had enough candidates. Then there was a time where we went to Monster.com and in most markets we could get enough applicants from that. Eventually, we ended up having to add CareerBuilder, so we went to Monster plus CareerBuilder, sometimes we still used newspaper and sometimes the newspaper would post to a local internet job board.
In today’s world, like what we do in our program is we use a system, an applicant tracking system and we push the job ads out to MANY boards (growing daily) and we spread the advertising dollars around to many boards because the reality is, you need to really cast a wide net.
The job board that works today may not be the job board that worked yesterday. The job board that works in one geography will not be the job board that will work in another geography, so we really need to spread it out and then we need to measure results.
What we do is we take a look at traffic analytics coming into our job application page and we see where the traffic is coming from so that if we know one channel is more effective than another, we might pump up our advertising on that channel.
You definitely need:
- a multi-pronged approach,
- you need a way to measure your results just like you would measure your marketing results.
- The last thing you need is a hunting strategy that uses some technology and allows you to go out and look for applicants, not only applicants, but also passive job candidates on LinkedIn.
You need to be able to go out and hunt and do advanced searches and find people that might be interested in the job. On another post, I’ll talk about how you can tie together your job classified Landing Page with your LinkedIn strategy and with some of your content that you could post on LinkedIn Pulse.
I hope that helps, .. have a multi-pronged strategy, measure the results and you’ll get the candidates that you need.
Filling the funnel from a variety of sources requires a strategy for automation – partially computer software automation and partially human automation. Tune in to a future episode to learn more about the best systems.
Wayne Herring helps companies to build their own highly effective and efficient Sales Person recruiting processes. This allows companies to drive New Business and profit and to push the current team forward and give the Exec/Owner the confidence to manage in or out the average performers and bad attitude rotten apples.