Lightwork Services
Well-articulated team values generate a sense of "Tribe".
Good values persuade the right candidates, empower employees in decision-making, and make for a more enjoyable experience in collaboration.
The story of your organization's origin and trajectory must be tightly packaged and as compelling as possible to be impactful with the best candidates.
Make no mistake — you must optimize for the best candidates, so lean in and relentlessly refine your storytelling approach.
People talk, and what they say about your organization affects everything from your recruiting message open rates to your ability to close at the end of your funnel.
Clearly understanding the brand you want to build and the strategy needed to build it unlocks a host of tactical opportunities.
Outbound sourcing is the only candidate generation level over which you have full control. It's also an essential part of refining your target profile by implicitly asking, "If you could interview anyone for this role, who would that be?"
Learning how to quickly and effectively create a list of high-quality recruiting targets pays dividends for the life of the company and the earlier you start the longer the lever.
More on Sourcing
Driving referrals from your existing team and network is essential for high-quality hiring at every stage, so it's worth the effort to maximize this channel with a thoughful, strategic approach.
A well-crafted referral system will empower your network, increasing the quality and quantity of throughput, leading to exceptional hires.
Drawing top talent into your funnel, especially as a nascent brand, doesn't happen by accident. Getting your story to land with a cold audience over text is no mean feat, but worth every bit of effort when you get it right.
The conversion rates and first impressions you want depend on messages that communicate the essence of your larger story and point of view in few words, and the skills required to achieve these goals have broad applications.
The quality of your hires and quality of your evaluation are directly related. If you want exceptional outcomes you must also accept that you must create an exceptional process.
It's unlikely that the right evaluation for your company is identical to that of another organization. Learn how to design your evaluations from your values and first principles and watch as incredible candidates emerge from your funnel.
The way your approach your interviews communicates as much implicitly about your organization as anything you say explicitly.
Interviews are meetings in which you have the undivided attention of trajectory-changing talent who, at the moment of the interview, are external to your company. The knock on effects from approaching these interactions strategically can massively affect outcomes.
The counterpart to the right evaluation is the right grading system. And the glue that binds the two together is a well-executed feedback loop, which also provides fodder for innovation and continous improvement in your hiring practice.
A clear process by which decisions are made prevents bias from creeping in unnecessarily and reduces costly mistakes that are otherwise inevitable.
Few conversations are more valuable to your hiring efforts than the much maligned reference check. Each of these calls contain a wealth of potential for those who know how to leverage them.
Aside from the obvious benefits, like double-checking the assumptions you've made about your potential hire, a good reference check will improve your management skills, produce fresh leads, and enhance your employer brand.
It's easy to assume that the most important moment in the hiring process is the offer. That's not wrong, but it's also not the full picture, as closing your candidate is a process that starts with their first interaction with your company.
Learning to see your offer presentation as the end of a long thread will greatly improve your close rates and the overall efficacy of your hiring practice.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, onboarding is most effective when viewed as the final step of the hiring process. This is because hiring is ultimately about bringing on a new member of your team who will be impactful.
Viewing onboarding in this light helps align all other hiring activities to ensure new team members are quickly productive, thereby delivering on the promise of 'many hands'.
Most interviewers lack formal training in the practice, instead relying on their own experiences to guide their approach. While a well-intentioned practitioner will turn their intuitions into a reasonable experience for candidates, their output can be dramatically improved through coaching.
A well-trained interviewer is a long lever, saving time, improving hire quality, and dramatically affecting close rates.
When it's time to scale your hiring process, reducing inefficieny is generally the most cost effective way to increase capacity. Improving efficency tends to also have knock-on effects in candidate experience which filter down to improved funnel conversion rates.
Prematurely optimization is itself inefficiency, so it's important to be aware of the tradeoffs every change implies.
There are a number of advanced sourcing tactics available to motivated teams with good recruiting foundations. Team sourcing can surprise and delight and is a recruiting superpower.
Coordinated manuvers like these are high-risk/high-reward and are best reserved for those organizations with exceptional buy-in and ownership across their hiring teams.