Recruiting

The Pipeline and Millennials—More Secrets of Long-Term Staffing

In yesterday’s Advisor, Miranda Nash shared three of her five secrets to prioritizing long-term staffing needs; today, the final two secrets along with some analysis from Nash.

Nash, who is the president of Jobscience and has worked as a hiring manager, entrepreneur, and C-suite executive, wrote the following in an article published on HR.BLR.com®.

4) Build a pipeline.

Taking another page from the sales professional’s playbook, strategic HR teams know that building a pipeline of qualified ideal candidates is critical to meeting long-term staffing needs. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for vacancies to occur before starting the process of filling them.

It’s flat-out impossible to cram 4 to 6 months’ worth of work into just 4 to 6 weeks. By building relationships with potential candidates now, you can establish yourself as the employer of choice, promoting your superior company culture and value proposition. This makes your organization attractive even to passive candidates who may not actively be looking for a job right now, but could be lured away from their current employer by the right opportunity.


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5) Plan for Millennials.

The majority of this newest generation of jobseekers have never lived in a time without the Internet, cell phones, and 24/7 access to media—social and otherwise. They search for jobs in new ways, want different things from their careers and employers, and are more concerned about having a purpose vs. just a job than their predecessors.

Long-term strategic HR planning requires that you meet their needs, regardless of how you or your organization may feel about them. Engage them over social media, as a real person and not just a corporate identity, and offer a motivating atmosphere with a career path that both challenges and helps them feel as though they’re making a difference.

The Bottom Line

In modern business, it isn’t just the IT, sales, and product departments that need to be agile and strategic. In order to compete for the best talent in a tight marketplace that favors the jobseeker, HR must also adopt this new approach to recruiting.

When the day-to-day responsibilities prevent the internal HR team from developing and adopting this strategic approach, it may be a great time to consider partnering with a staffing firm to provide added support.

This added assistance can enable the internal team to either outsource the tactical aspects of recruiting and hiring or provide expertise to develop and execute a solid strategy, freeing up internal resources for the tactical work. Either way, the additional support will give the company a strong advantage in a tight job market.

From this solid foundation, the next step is to build an ideal candidate profile, especially for strategic positions, and build a solid pipeline of prospects that captures even the passive candidate. This comprehensive approach allows savvy HR pros to be proactive—rather than reactive—and attracts the best talent faster and more cost effectively, giving them a much higher strategic value for the entire organization.

From maintaining the talent pipeline to dealing with the C-suite to routine discipline and documentation, HR never sleeps. You need a go-to resource, and our editors recommend the “everything-HR-in-one” website, HR.BLR.com®. As an example of what you will find, here are some policy recommendations concerning e-mail, excerpted from a sample policy on the website:

  • Privacy. The director of information services can override any individual password and, therefore, has access to all e-mail messages in order to ensure compliance with company policy. This means that employees do not have an expectation of privacy in their company  e-mail or any other information stored or accessed on company computers.
  • E-mail review. All e-mail is subject to review by management. Your use of the e-mail system grants consent to the review of any of the messages to or from you in the system in printed form or in any other medium.
  • Solicitation. In line with our general policy, e-mail must not be used to solicit for outside business ventures, personal parties, social meetings, charities, membership in any organization, political causes, religious causes, or other matters not connected to the company’s business.


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We should point out that this is just one of hundreds of sample policies on the site. (You’ll also find analyses of all the HR-related laws and the current critical issues, plus downloadable job descriptions, and complete training materials for hundreds of HR topics.)

You can examine the entire HR.BLR.com program free of any cost or commitment. It’s quite remarkable—30 years of accumulated HR knowledge, tools, and skills gathered in one place and accessible at the click of a mouse.

What’s more, we’ll supply a free, downloadable copy of our special report, Critical HR Recordkeeping—From Hiring to Termination, just for looking at HR.BLR.com. If you’d like to try it at absolutely no cost or obligation to continue (and get the special report, no matter what you decide), go here.

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