Founder/CEO of Cairn Consulting Solutions; speaker, advisor and best-selling author of People First.
getty
It will likely not surprise you to hear that competent, efficient talent acquisition is essential for long-term business success. Yet for many, it is a perennial struggle, and finding the right people can feel impossible. This is a problem that needs to be solved—because there’s no way around it: Your success will largely depend on how well you can hire to fill out your team’s needs.
Current Trends In Hiring
According to the "2023 Employ Recruiter Nation Report," "nearly two-thirds of small business talent professionals said a lack of qualified candidates will pose a hiring challenge in 2024." Meanwhile, "53% of in-house recruiting pros predict their recruiting budget will decrease or stay flat." These two statistics, considered side by side, present an obvious problem. If finding qualified candidates is only becoming more difficult, how do we find the right people to hire without breaking the bank on expensive new resources?
This difficulty is not going away, and at first glance, there doesn’t seem to be an elegant solution at hand. But I’m here to suggest that the problem might not actually lie with the lack of qualified candidates. Perhaps the problem instead lies with our talent acquisition strategies.
Clarity: The Name Of The Game
In my experience, it’s not nearly as hard to find people when you have real clarity as to what you’re looking for and the capacity to articulate it well. Without these things, talent acquisition is an amorphous, directionless process. I find this makes sense to most business professionals when you use client acquisition as an analogy.
Client acquisition is nearly impossible when it lacks clarity. In business development, attracting new clientele requires having a clear picture of who you want as a client and a cohesive method for articulating that picture. Once you have those two things in place, it’s relatively simple to find the right clients and attract them. It’s the same with employees.
Just as in business development, talent acquisition fails with a lack of clarity. You will never find the right candidate if you don’t actually know who you’re looking for. Before you spend months of your time and a host of valuable resources searching for the right person, make sure the person you’re looking for could feasibly exist. For instance, if you are looking for someone who is warm and friendly but at the same time has the competitive drive that leads them to win at all costs, your search might just be interminable. Those two character traits simply don't align: You’re looking for a person who doesn’t exist. This is a sign that your search lacks clarity.
The Myth Of The Talent Gap
Methodically and comprehensively identifying your ideal candidate doesn’t have to be a time-consuming process. In the space of a few hours, you can bring astounding clarity to your search if you simply ask and answer the questions needed to bring clarity to the process—questions such as:
• What competencies do we want our candidates to have?
• What do we need our candidates to see about the company and the position?
• Given the way the company motivates its employees and rewards performance, what behavioral style do we want our candidates to have?
Once you’ve answered these questions and profiled your ideal candidate, you can start generating interview questions to identify the candidates who can bridge the gap between the actual and the ideal. Good candidates will likely have ideas for how to overcome the fact that they're not the ideal, especially if you’ve effectively articulated to them exactly what you’re looking for.
We always talk about the talent gap, but often what we have is not a talent gap but rather a gap in how we analyze talent. There are plenty of qualified people out there. If we can bring clarity to our talent acquisition process, we can not only bring the right people in to interview but also give them a chance to demonstrate how they will provide what we need.
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
