Top five ways to attract a candidates attention for hard to fill positions

Rollis Fontenot III:

Alright, so let's go let's get to go through this list. Here are the top five ways to really attract a candidates attention for hard to fill positions. The reason why I say that is there's so much stuff that's going out right now there's so many jobs are going unfilled, it's hard to fill positions, I say hard to fill, these are the type of let me let me explain it my hard to fill. Hard to fill is one of those, when you're putting a requisition out there, you put it out to the to the world, the universe, and crickets, you're not getting, you're not getting applicants. And if you do get applicants, that they definitely don't have the skill set or the qualifications that line up with your job. And so it's difficult for those types of positions. And so that's a, it's a challenge for us. And a certain amount of those candidates that you're looking for are going to be what we call active, and then a small percentage are going to be passive candidates. What I mean by that those of you who are in the business, you know, the active ones are on the job boards are looking for jobs, they're searching, so if you post a job, they will likely be able to see it if it's if it's within their location, and the type of job they're looking for. Then we have the passive candidates. On the other hand, they're just, they're just hanging out. They're not they're not looking at any of these job boards. They're just on the web, they're just on their phone, just doing what most of us do, which that's a much wider audience, right. So what I want to do is kind of talk about what are the top five ways you can start to grab their attention. And the some of these concepts will be used for active users that are actually on your site looking at your job.

And then also it'll be on the other hand, it will be for those who are what we call passive candidates. Those are the ones that are on the job boards. They're just on their phone, or on their desktop or on their tablet, but most cases on their phone. So if they're on LinkedIn or like on this platform, if they're on Google, if they're on YouTube, if they're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, They're just kind of doing their thing. And then boom, your job comes up. So what can we do to kind of grab their attention? Well, I'm gonna go over a few things that may give you some ideas. And I'm gonna go through these step by step. Hi, we got Mark came in. Good to see you, Mark. And we've got Marat coming in. Everyone who comes in, let us know where you're signing in from? Let us know what city what state, what country? And also let us know where you are in the process. Are you in the talent acquisition space looking for candidates? Are you perhaps on the candidate side looking for a job? Who knows, we may make some connections while we're here having this discussion. So let me go over point number one, point number one is going to be I would say interview, incoming and exiting employees. And when I say interview, I'm not talking about the interviewer you're hiring them. I'm saying that after they start working for your job, one thing that I think that will be very important is after they start is you know what I'm so glad you came on and join our organization are really excited about you being with us. There's a question I wanted to ask you. I know that you were looking at other opportunities, what made you choose us over the other opportunities? What was that one thing that really kind of got you over the hump that made you want to actually come to our organization? And you're going to be surprised? The the types of answers you're going to get. But that's an important thing you want to do is ask them, what is it that made you want to come to our organization, we're so glad you're here. We want to know what that was because we want to get more folks just like you. That's what that's for your incoming employees, the exiting employees, is there a way you can have some whether it's using a chat bot, if it's using, you know, face to face, interview with them as they're leaving, if it's a combination of those, it's kind of almost a I usually I kind of call it more of an art, but it's also part science too. But what you're trying to do is you're trying to find out what's the real reason why they're leaving. And if you can find that out, that will be incredibly helpful on the recruiting end, because the reason why they're leaving may be something that you could easily address. And you could actually mention on the front end whenever you're bringing employees in. And the same reason why one person may be leaving may be another reason why another person might be attracted to your organization. And you may want to flip how you are presenting what you're offering. Okay. Now another let me give you some places you can look at to find exit interviews if you don't have access to them at your at your place, because you may not have access to talk to those people as they go on their way out, which is happens in a lot of places. One of them would be is looking at the reviews on indeed, they do have a review section. Now Glassdoor is mostly known as having reviews. But Glassdoor is another good place. I'm sorry, indeed is another good place in addition to Glassdoor, so glad Glassdoor. And indeed, look at the reviews for your own organization, go to your company page, go to your sexual has reviews, read your reviews, see what people are saying, as you're leaving, I'm talking to you, recruitment, folks, folks are in talent acquisition. I'm saying for you don't leave it up to the other folks in HR. You go look at that page and see, why is it that folks will leave it that may give you some great clues. Okay, So indeed, Glassdoor, Yelp, believe it or not, you may be on Yelp. So double check on that, especially if I'm talking to folks who are in health care, obviously, if you're in other spaces, like restaurants, things like that. But definitely check out check out Yelp, another area is going to be Google reviews. So Google reviews could give you some great clues as well. Another one you don't want to overlook. And this is really awesome, is YouTube, there are lots of exit interviews on YouTube. Now I'm in the healthcare space. We do a lot of recruiting for nurses. And so you can look at tons of videos to talk about why I quit nursing or why I left the bedside of nursing. Why I quit my job though. So you get lots of good information because some of those things are they're saying in those videos, they actually have valid concerns as to why they left. So we want to find out what those reasons are and address those things head on. Okay, let me look back at the comments that we got coming in here. So houses he says need nurses Hey, I feel you, everybody pretty much every organization that isn't isn't patient care needs them. And hopefully what I share with you today how we'll help you in doing that. Mark is from Reno Nevada says I will soon be a in a hiring position in my new position in 2021. Congratulations, Mark, happy for you. And oh, Glenn says this is our last Monday of 2020 You're so right. We're gonna make the best of it. And thank you for your message earlier today. Glenn. said get Merak says hi. And then Devin says I'm from Dallas, Texas. I'm a business development manager joined to get some great strategies from our recruiters. Awesome. Okay, well, hopefully we can share some things that definitely help out. We've got Dr. Timothy Brown. Good to see you, Timothy. Glad you Okay, so that was that was number one. So try and collect as much information as you can from incoming and exiting employees to see what it was that made them come to your organization, as well as what was made other folks perhaps leave your organization, this would be incredibly helpful when you're trying to grab them. Because if you're on a passive in front of a passive candidate, you want to hit them with something that hits home with them that resonates with them, and strikes a nerve with them. I'll give you an example. One of you may have seen one of my recent videos where I was talking about overtime. There are a set of nurses right now who definitely want overtime, they want to work more hours, they don't want to do it forever, but they definitely want it now. And let's say your facility has a lot of overtime, because you're short staffed, but it's not something you want to do forever, right? as an organization, you don't want to offer overtime forever, it's just not sustainable for you. However, right now, that is the reality, you may have some nurses that are leaving, because they want more of a work life balance, work life situation where they have more time off, and they just can't do the overtime anymore. So some have actually chosen to leave bedside and go to other situations like what, I've got the same thing as Hell, yeah. How it says, here, he's a court care coordinator at Pinnacle home. So let's say in his situation, that's maybe something he can present as an advantage, right? He knows that there's lots of hospice, nurses who are leaving the bedside, because of the work schedule. And he may use it as his competitive advantage. Because he's looked at interviews, he's seen locally what people are saying, in the reviews and whatnot. And so that's one of the things he definitely wants to focus on in his job postings, or in his ads, that this is something that we treasure here at Pinnacle, for example, just used as an example, we treasure work life balance, we're going to help you in terms of you being able to set a schedule that's reasonable for yourself, you're you're hitting those, those hot points for those nurses who are looking for work life balance. Whereas on the other side of the coin, if your situation is one where you are working in nurses quite a bit, you can focus more on the opportunity to make a great income to really kind of pay off some of those past bills they have, I mean, you can have some, some some verbiage or some ads that kind of cater towards more of the income opportunity that they have in front of them. But you can also focus on the fact that whenever you're bringing those folks in and interviewing them, this is not something we're looking at to be a forever situation. But this is the present reality, what we want you to be a part of our company to help us to work on this issue, we so we can eventually get those, those staff levels up to a point where the overtime will eventually come down. But for now, it's going to create an incredible opportunity for you. Okay, that's number one. Number two, is going to be educational benefits. What I notice this is missing a lot. What educational benefits. Does your organization offer, that perhaps they may not be getting where they are right now? Do you have a very strong tuition reimbursement program? Do you have a loan repayment program? If so, how much is that? What does it cover? Does it also extend out to the employee's family? In some, some cases it does. So whatever your educational benefits are being clear on not only what they are, but how you can position in a way that might be better than what your competitors are offering in the same general area. And in some cases, some some candidates are going to value that more actually, then the the the money that I saved money, I mean, the pay all things being equal, they'd be maybe more leaning towards educational benefits, because that's something that they're paying out of pocket right now. And perhaps your organization will help them with that. Okay, so let's move on to number two. Because educational benefits, I think is very important. And I can tell you in the nurse space, it's really important as well. Now, but you know, before I move on to three, look, also not at what your facility offers, but also look at what your competitors offer, what are they offering in your space in the industry, and what are they offering in your vicinity or in your area. Now we're living in a space right now where the area where you live is not as important because a lot of folks are bring on remote employees. So I do get that. So that's why you may want to look at your space as an industry as well as what's being offered locally and in your your community or in your area. Alright, so number three. We know you have benefits. Your candidates expect you to have benefits. However, there are some benefits that are being paid for by organizations that are being utilized in a very low they're not you're being underutilized are not being used often. So if they're not being used often they may not be something that's valued by your employees. Could it be that those dollars could be spent more towards a higher living wage, or a higher wage to a way to increase the pay to make your pay of your organization that much more competitive? So it may, you may want to take a look at that. So to grab their attention, one of the things you can do is talk about that in one of your videos or in your ads is something that grabs our attention in terms of what are you doing to help increase your pay for your, for your employees? So one of those things that indeed Glassdoor are starting to track now is salary. So let's say you decide, you know, what, we're not going to put salary on our jobs, because we just don't want to let that out. That's that's proprietary. The problem with that, is that because the the the users of those programs are wanting to see the salary information, guess what, indeed and Glassdoor, and many of the big websites are doing, they're guessing at it. So they're gonna guess the salary anyway. And I would say you don't want them to guess. Because they're either going to guess it too high or too low. In either situation, it makes it harder for you, as the recruiter, once you do get on the phone with that particular candidate, and they find out, it's not what they thought it was supposed to be. Okay. So the, and the reason why I say that guess, is if you look at a lot of your positions, you can go back and look at your positions. And next to your positions, it'll give what they call, they call it an estimated salary. And when you click on that, you will find that it's basically just an educated guess, they guess, based on folks who have left your organization and what they reported their salary to be, are the ones who still with them what their salary is, but it doesn't take into consideration all the factors that may go into whoever's looking at the job, I'll give you an example. Let's say it's a person who's looking for a mid search job in in a facility as a nurse. Okay, the pay rate, and let's say they're brand new, they just came out of nursing school, and they're new grads, that pay is going to be different from someone who has been working in the cath lab for seven years, they may have a totally different pay scale, based on experience, and based on the specialty that they're in, or let's say they're working in the or. So those estimated salaries may be incredibly off, depending on the amount of data they receive from people who've reported their salaries. So that's why you want to actually put a range in there and not leave it up to the job board. So that's going to be my third point is making sure that any of your underutilized benefits are being kind of trimmed, if you will, and making sure you put most of the money in the into the living wage, and have that salary range visible, easily seen, either in the job boards or on your career site. Now on your job boards, keep in mind, most of your traffic, most of your candidates right now are probably coming from job boards, unless you're doing a whole lot of advertising. If you're doing a whole lot of advertising, you can kind of tip the scales a little bit. But most people like to look at job boards and compare them there versus going to your actual website. Why is that because of inventory. Is because simply, if I'm if I'm looking for a certain, let's say, I'm a developer, or if I'm a nurse, or whatever I'm in whatever field I'm in, if I'm looking for a job in a certain area of the United States, I want to look and see the maximum amount of jobs in one available website that I can. So it doesn't behoove me unless I'm just really in love with a particular company, I already know about a company, it's going to be better for me to go to an area that has pretty much all the jobs listed. So that's why you find that when you look at your analytics, and when you see your kids coming in, most of them are coming from external job boards. Alright, so before I go into my next one, which is point number four, let me just do a refresh. See if I have any questions, comments where you guys signed in from this come in and say hi, loved love that you guys were able to join this evening?

Okay, let me go to number four. Number four is going to be work life balance or work life integration options. So what type of freedoms can you offer? Or can you provide to your potential candidates that perhaps are not getting where they are. So if you're going to grab their attention, remember, you're going to want to have some options that they don't have with that their current place. So maybe they're working at a place where they're required to go in the office, maybe you have flexible, well, they don't have to go into the office, they can work remote. Maybe you have a situation where the work schedule that they're working with is not really flexible where they are. But your your work schedule is more flexible. Maybe where they're working, they don't have the same type of maternal or paternal options. As far as time off, maybe yours does. So whatever information you can provide that kind of highlights your company that's really going to help to grab their attention when they're out there looking for jobs. Okay, another thing, number five is going to be competitive advantages. This, this kind of goes back to some of the other things I've talked about in in points one through four. There's some similarities there. The difference here is it's going to take a little bit of work on your part. I know in Iran, we've done some some research. And we found it's quite interesting that there are certain jobs that pay certain amounts in certain areas, but the pay a different amount in other areas. So let's say you're only looking for people who live locally to your area, then the research project is going to be a little bit easier for you, because you're only going to have to look at a few companies that are in your in your area, your purview. But what if your search is more statewide, or it's more regional wide, or it's nationwide? Now, you got to do a little bit more research to find out how do you stack stack up? What are your competitive advantages? Because if you know this, this is going to help you to be able to attract those candidates, right? What what I think there's an assumption that's made a lot of cases on HR departments, and some some of the some of our colleagues are in recruiting is that if we just expose more people to this job that we're offering, we're going to get more candidates. That may not be the case, because you're what you're offering in the candidates eyes has to be greater than what they're getting where they currently are. I know this is this is a this is one on one. I mean, you guys like I know that already Ross. But if you really think about it, you have to remind yourself of that just because even though you you're working there, you love it, you think it's great working there. They don't know that right. So if you're advertising to somewhere that's out of your particular area, they may not be aware of what your company is offering, they have nothing to compare it to, they're not able to compare it to where they are. So that's why you have to kind of do your homework to find out what are your competitive advantages? What are areas where your your company or your organization really shines in comparison to the other companies that are in your same industry? Or in your same area? Or in your same state or region? Does that make sense? In other words, you want to find out where it is that you shine so that you're able to focus on those things. So it's good to know things like what are other companies offering in the same space. In terms of signup bonus, were they offering in terms of pay were they offering in terms of benefits? Where is that there's a little bit of a Delta there a little bit of a difference that we're able to offer something that they're not. So that's my, that's my fifth, fifth one. And before I go into my bonus, I want to see, do we have any questions that have come up? I want to see that. about where you are in the space? If you're one who is looking for a position, or if you're one that is,

Not coming through real time. That's okay. All right. So just to kind of recap, for those who just joining, I'm gonna sort of quickly go through these. And before I quickly go through these, again, I just want to mention that. Just don't, don't assume that exposing your job to more people is going to get you more candidates, it has to be better than what they're receiving where they are now. So you have to use things that's going to grab their attention. And I'm giving you some tips, these five tips will help you to get more attention quickly. Actually, we rephrase that these points will help you to generate ideas to help you to get attention. So the first one I mentioned is interviewing. Whenever you are having new kids that come in quickly finding out from them what it is that drew them to your organization, what was that main factor that sets you apart? And then also exiting employees doing what you can to try to find out? Why are folks leaving? What are the reasons what's the commonalities, and I gave you some different research, research tools you can use for that indeed, Glassdoor, Yelp, Google and YouTube and so forth. Number two, was finding out what your educational benefits are and how they compare to the other folks that are in your space. How can you leverage that, for example, if you're offering a loan repayment program, up to $30,000? That's pretty big. And let's say they comparing you to another organization that doesn't have a robust educational program. But one big difference is educational programs just kind of give you a little tip. Some some will pay for tuition, but they won't pay for loan repayment. So what if you have experienced person that already has ever ever already got their education? So now they're looking to repay their loan? does yours offer offer loan repayment because if it does, That's something that your competitors may not. So you can use that whenever you are putting your opportunity out there. Number three was the benefits or expected member benefits or they're expecting you to have benefits. But do you have benefits that people aren't really using? And if so, could those benefits be done away with it, they're not really being utilized in order to give a higher living wage for the ones that work there, that will help to bring in new folks because it may be that they the folks are looking at your job, maybe get it already getting paid, what you're what you're offering. And so you've got to find a way to kind of tie that up a little bit. Remember how I said money so he, he knows I'm talking about work life balance, we talked about that? Are there options you can that you have that you can offer to them that will get their attention, flexible work schedule, being able to work from home, or have having a hybrid situation where they want to go into the office and get away from home? Having having an office, they can go to supplying that. And then number five, was looking at all the competitive advantage that you have versus your competitors? Where do you shine? Where are you different? Don't just think about what your company offers. Think about what your company offers, within the lens of whoever's around you whether it's in the area, if you're recruiting locally, whether it's in the region or the state, or whether it's nationwide. So you can't just say, well, we offer this and this other company down the street doesn't offer that. Well, that's relevant only if you're only recruiting in that local area. But if you're recruiting in the industry, a lot of you folks know out there. This could be the other places offering a lot better in certain areas. So you obviously wouldn't focus on areas where you have a weakness. Okay, Does that help? Let me know, guys, does that help you in terms of giving you some ideas for 2021? What you could focus on, whenever you are making your offerings out in the space?