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 Message from Chuck Smith
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Chuck Smith
President of New Office/NewHire™ |
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Recruit Executives Successfully with NewHire™
New Office has proven that executives are not exclusively passive job seekers who must be recruited by headhunters at a high cost to the employer. Using a customized NewHire process combined with targeted recruitment advertising, 291 candidates applied to become the President of a growing manufacturing firm. Twenty candidates were marked as “Recommend for Interview” by the company’s in-house recruiting team. Seven candidates were tested using TTI tools and five are scheduled to meet with members of the board. The best performing advertisement was from TheLadders.com, yielding 58 candidates, 9 of whom were “Recommended for Interview”.
| Recruitment ROI for President |
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Number of
Applicants |
Applicants marked
“Recommend for Interview” |
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WSJ |
38 |
4 |
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Monster |
59 |
1 |
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CareerBuilder |
56 |
3 |
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TheLadders.com |
58 |
9 |
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All other sources |
61 |
3 |
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| *Based upon survey data provided by applicants and confirmed by server data |
We worked with the company, its board of directors and a trusted consultant to implement the NewHire recruiting process to attract and screen top talent for this crucial position. The board expressed that they were looking for the right person to lead the manufacturer’s growth from $13 million to $20 million in revenue. While board members already had a candidate in mind, they wished to explore other options before making a job offer.
The NewHire application was crafted to ask questions appropriate to the position, and as of December 31, 2007, server traffic showed that 35% of candidates who viewed the job applied for it. This response rate beats our average response rate of 22% across all jobs.
The advertising plan included one print ad in the Wall Street Journal and online recruitment ads on Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com and TheLadders.com. All advertising directed candidates to apply online via a customized NewHire pre-employment application branded with the client’s logo.
Of course, the value of a job advertisement is determined by the number of qualified candidates who apply, not just the total number of applicants coming from that ad. Using these criteria, the top performing advertisement ran in TheLadders.com and the #2 ad was The Wall Street Journal. The company phone interview 20 candidates and went on to test seven of the applicants using TTI behavioral profiles. Five of these applicants are scheduled for face-to-face interviews as of January 26, 2008.
With the proper advertising strategies and the NewHire™ process, employers no longer have to rely on headhunters to recruit at the executive level. But don’t take it from me. Here is the testimonial from the consultant:
| January 7, 2008 |
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Chuck,
First and foremost, thank you. I cannot say enough good things about your company.
I recently used the NewHire Professional product to help a board member hire a new company president. Grace – our NewHire recruiter – netted us 310 candidates… 5 times what we had expected! Nearly 200 of those candidates were C-level execs, 40 of which were from competitors. Only about 20% weren’t outright qualified, but by using the NewHire™ software to instantly screen all applicants, we never wasted any time on those applicants.
NewHire also provided us with outstanding help in positioning our ads. The software itself managed all responses from all our advertisements, including our Wall Street Journal ad, and in fact, if we hadn’t planned on using NewHire to enable us to catch and screen all applications, we may never have placed the WSJ ad for fear of a huge response from unqualified people.
The ongoing support from your organization is what really keeps me and my clients happy. All of your people are responsive, knowledgeable and friendly.
Keep up the extraordinary work! Happy New Year!
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Mr. Tra Pippin
TAB Facilitator
The Alternative Board |
Use your job ads as a sales tool instead of a gauntlet.
The best performing job ads sell both the company and the open position to potential candidates, attracting a strong response and a solid pool of qualified candidates. Our experience and data consistently show that the best performing job advertisements – those which provide the greatest number of qualified candidates – have a clear value proposition for applicants. The employment value proposition is a statement that answers these two questions:
- Why is this company a good place to work?
- What are the interesting and attractive duties and responsibilities of the open position?
When you include this kind of information about the open position and company, your ad will stand out to job seekers. But one look at the majority of ads on any of the major job boards tells a different story.
Here are two examples of poor advertising strategies that are running on major job boards at this time:
- In one ad, the company description consists solely of “a fast-growing, dynamic company seeks a…” and then lists all required qualifications. If all a candidate knows about a company is that it’s fast-growing and dynamic, then they become meaningless adjectives and it can be a turn-off to people looking for a rewarding position at a good company.
- Another ad listed 17 “must-have” qualifications immediately followed by this phrase: “A criminal background check (both state and federal) WILL BE PERFORMED before a hiring decision is made!” Emphasis on that many qualifications immediately followed by the threat of a background check conveys distrust in employees and a hostile office environment.
These types of ads conjure images of employers scrambling to develop foolproof gauntlets of “musts and must nots” to deter people from applying. While this may sound familiar, it’s not a best practice for attracting top talent.
If you’re currently using the gauntlet method to prevent unqualified applicants from applying to your job, stop today! When you use the NewHire™ Candidate Management System to screen and identify qualified candidates, there is no need to use the classified ad to deter people from applying. In fact, the opposite applies. Because NewHire instantly screens out the people who do not meet your criteria, you no longer have to worry about attracting unqualified applicants. That means you can use the classified ad as a sales and marketing tool and feature the best aspects of open position. In short, sell your company and your job!
When you use NewHire Professional or NewHire Elements, our staffing coordinators carefully craft an attractive ad for you. But if you are writing the ad yourself and you’re unsure of where to start, we’ll make it easy for you. We have designed this fill-in-the-blank Job Ad Mad Libs® as a guide to the elements which help set your recruitment advertisements apart from those that use the gauntlet method.
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Identify the best candidates |
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Manage & share candidate information |
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Reduce your time-to-hire |
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