Art of Recruiting
Art of Recruiting
Art of Recruiting: Fish For Talent With The Right Bait
There Were Fish in the River: Why Top Candidates Swim Past Your Job Post
Learning to fly fish around Bend, Oregon, I’ve learned rainbow trout are not sampling the menu on a mountain stream. They are keyed on a particular food, like a caddis fly, that looks a certain size, rides the water a certain way, and shows up at a certain hour. Present something that looks and acts like that, and you’ll hook the rainbow trout and have a story. In fly fishing, they call it “match the hatch”.
To match the hatch in recruiting, you need a clear story of the company and a specific reason this role would be worth leaving a good job for.
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Art of Recruiting: How to “Stage” Your Job Description
What Real Estate Can Teach Us About Job Descriptions
Think back to the last time you were shopping for a new house. Late at night, phone in hand, you swiped past dozens of Zillow listings and saved the few that looked worth a Saturday open house.
Pretend you are on that hunt again. You land on the two listings below. Which one do you actually go see?
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Art of Recruiting: Secret Shop Your Hiring Process
Have You Applied to Your Own Company? Retailers have known for decades that the experience they think they deliver is not the one the customer actually gets. That is why mystery shopping is a multi-billion-dollar discipline
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Level Up Your Linkedin Profile To Inspire Candidates
Hiring managers will talk about “the brand,” “the opportunity,” and “the culture deck.” But candidates hear something quieter and more decisive: Who would I actually work for?
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Art of Recruiting: Creating Candidate Personas
The best hires often are not looking at all. Learn how building candidate personas helps you write recruiting outreach that speaks to one specific person, and get 12 pitch examples you can adapt to almost any search.
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How to Deliver a 5-Star Candidate Experience
Whether fair or not, an executive candidate will judge what it’s like to work at your company based on their recruiting experience and communication.
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The “Flip an Egg” Question: The Epic Interview Story
What if you could ask just one interview question and achieve a remarkably high degree of hiring success?
Here’s the story of when that actually happened—and how you can put this concept to work in your next search.
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Top 7 Video Interview Tips: Nail First Impressions in Executive Interviews
Like them or not—video interviews are here to stay. In my experience conducting hundreds of video interviews each year, I’ve seen simple mistakes trip up both executive candidates and company leaders on either side of the screen.
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Telling Your Story & Helping You Win
Storytelling is one of the most important tools we have to help find your next top talent. Crafting a compelling narrative of your company and its specific needs is a no-brainer in attracting the right caliber of person to help you move forward.
QUALIFICATIONS
Screen with measurable criteria — and avoid the two failure modes: so few or so vague that “everyone qualifies,” or so many that no one can tell what actually matters. Separate “required” from “preferred,” and don’t pad the list with personality traits.
Call To Action
You worked hard to inspire someone — now make the next step obvious and low-friction. Favor “Learn more” over “Apply” to reach people who aren’t actively looking, and never let a candidate feel they’ve vanished into the “HR black hole.”
How To Be A Talent Magnet
Do your job descriptions attract talent like a magnet? Do they make a busy, employed, in-demand candidate stop scrolling and lean toward your company over every other option in their inbox?
INSPIRING
Talent wants to feel something before they’ll act. The first job of your job description is emotional, not informational — the “sizzle.” Make your mission, your momentum, and the reason people love working at your company vivid enough that a candidate leans in with their heart before their head starts weighing logistics.
DIFFERENT
Once you’ve won the heart of a candidate, now it’s time to also earn the head. Proactively lay out the facts a serious candidate needs — the “steak.” What you sell, who you sell to, how you make money, how big you are, where you’re located, and who backs you. Answering these questions up front signals respect and saves everyone hours as you are proactively answering questions a candidate would have about you.
AUTHENTIC
Sound like a human, not an HR filing. If you read your description aloud, is it what you’d actually say to someone over coffee? Authenticity — a conversational tone, real culture and values, links, and video — builds trust and makes the reader feel they already know you.
TITLE & ROLE OVERVIEW
This is where the role-specific pitch begins. Use a title candidates would actually search for, then give a 2–3 sentence, plain-language summary of the job — the version you’d give someone standing in line for coffee. Then make the whole thing easy to skim.
KEY OUTCOMES
Define the Top 3 outcomes that would make someone a hero in year one. Most descriptions list activities — being busy — when A-players want to know the mission: what success actually looks like and how it’s measured. Getting clear here sharpens your interviewing and your onboarding, too.
ROLE ACTIVITIES
Now describe what the job actually looks like week to week — enough to answer the obvious questions and paint a realistic picture, not an exhaustive HR task list. Less is more, and every activity should tie back to the outcomes.
How Job Title Buzzwords Help You Attract Talent
Paul Freed, Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Herd Freed Hartz, was interviewed for a UK article around the trend with companies using new creative buzzwords to attract talent using non-traditional job titles such as “Ninja”, “Rockstar” and “Guru”. See full UK article (published March 2, 2018) HOW JOB TITLE BUZZWORDS CAN HELP YOU ATTRACT TALENT…
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Hook job candidates with your “company sizzle”
(By Karen Bertiger – 2/18/17 published in The Seattle Times) Most company pitches to job candidates tend to start out the same way: either with an innocuous question (Do you want to make a difference by working for an exciting company?) or a dry statement (Company X is a $100M company in the aerospace industry).…
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5 Ways Ineffective Recruiting is Hurting Your Business
You rely on your employees to keep your business running and your customers satisfied, which makes finding the right candidates critical to your success. But let us remind you, in the U.S., managers have an average hiring success rate of only 50%. That’s far too many missed opportunities, and too many unfortunate consequences as a…
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How to Strike through the Competitive Talent Market in Order to Find the Right Candidate
The current competition within the job market is pretty steep, for both employees and employers. Everyone is out there looking for the best candidates, and likewise, candidates are searching among employers to see where they fit best, and fit involves everything from job title, to salary, and more recently, company culture. In many ways, employers…
Art of Recruiting Storytelling
We love epic stories like Lord of The Rings, Star Wars and The Matrix. They are timeless and epic because they go beyond entertainment. They invite us into a bigger narrative and an important quest. Likewise, I believe the world of recruiting needs better storytellers. For a candidate, it’s the difference between a decent job…
Create an Excellent Candidate Experience
Learn why creating a positive interview experience can strongly influence a candidate’s interest and have an impact on your overall brand.