Five tips for finding the best candidate in the shortest time

I’m doing some work with eBoss and a conversation around the amount of time required to hire got me thinking about why searching for the best candidates is so time consuming.

In theory in this modern “instant” world, time to hire ought to have been reduced.  Gone are the days (well almost) of placing an advert in the Sunday Times and waiting for the response to come in over the course of the week and then deciding if you need to supplement it with some search work.

Now, recruiters are taking a spec at 9am and getting CVs out to clients by noon.  However, searching for the BEST candidates is still pretty time consuming.  Assuming you plan to do more for your buck than just type “National Account Manager” or “PHP Developer” into LinkedIn, finding the best candidates is still quite labour intensive.

Here are some tips to speed up the process whilst still ensuring you get the best candidates in front of your client or hiring manager, in record time.

Build an internal talent pool

Instead of reinventing the wheel for each new campaign, ensure your previous work on assignments counts for something long term by building up a pool of great candidates.  Also, always be on the lookout for great potential candidates within the sectors you recruit.  Store them, appropriately tagged, in your CRM.

Using semantic search is faster

If you are searching your database via keywords or searching for tags then no doubt you’ll get some good results, however, if you can use semantic search you’ll get more accurate results, find people faster and pick up people you might have missed.

Create external talent pools

Use your online resources to create “pools” of target candidates.  Yes, it requires forward thinking but you can tag your LinkedIn contacts for future use and why not create twitter lists of the best go-to candidates in your areas of expertise.

Create smart searches

This may be obvious but use all external data sources; LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, online forums, CV databases, etc.  Ideally use a tool which can search all these resources at once and cleverly import them into your database (global search along with semantic search, is actually a feature of the eBoss product – which I’ll review at a later point).

Take a really good brief on the requirements from the hiring manager perspective

And last but not least, ahead of all of the above, you need to ensure you’ve taken a really good brief from the hiring manager, have created a comprehensive job spec and got commitment on timescales.  There is nothing more frustrating than having the BEST candidates in the fastest time only to find the client isn’t working to the same project plan as you!!