Casting a Wider Net Gets Faster Results…

When you’re selling a product or service, what you’re really selling is the various ways in which your product or service is better than the competition’s at meeting a potential customer’s wants or needs. When you’re promoting a new position, it’s the same thing. You’re selling the reason why your company is better than other organizations at meeting the candidates’ wants and needs. To do that, you must think about why people would want to be associated with your company.

Just as sales and marketing identify prospects who are a great fit for a company’s products and services, good recruiting finds candidates who are a great fit for your business.

How do sales and marketing do it? They cast a wide net. They assume that marketing campaigns will always have many more misses than hits. Direct mail, email, and other marketing campaigns typically yield response rates of 2% to 5%. Although that rate of return may seem low, it’s considered successful enough that the same campaigns are used again and again. Sales also casts a wide net. Only a tiny percentage of the catch become customers, yet we celebrate and continue those methods as well.

Better Employee Recruiting is a Business Growth Driver

Both marketing and sales refer to this as a “funnel”; many leads flow into it but only a few customers come out. Sales and marketing use the funnel in good times and bad, tweaking it as needed to increase the leads that go in to maintain a steady conversion rate. To tailor their efforts to customers’ buying habits and increase the number of shoppers they convert to buyers, sales and marketing teams commonly create personas, or categories of customer types.

Now think of hiring. Most midsized companies wait until there’s an opening to fill. Then they run an ad and hope to convert a candidate who responds into an employee. If sales and marketing took that approach, the business would go broke pretty quickly. Imagine putting a product on a shelf before looking for someone who might buy it. Overall, 59% of midsized company executives say they wait to recruit until there is a specific position to fill rather than having an ongoing outreach effort to stock talent pools with potential candidates. No wonder midsize company executives are always in a lather when it comes to filling positions.

Human capital management for mid-sized business that want to grow… so cast a wider net!