Answer Three Essential Questions Before You Start Recruiting

We start every Retained, Performance Payouts, and Exclusive Contingency search by having you (our client) complete a three-part questionnaire designed to proactively answer the key questions every quality candidate will have about your opportunity. We call this the Search Kick-off Questionnaire. It consists of three sections: the Opportunity Value Proposition, Key Skills, and Performance Targets.

Trust me, if you can't answers these questions it will be impossible to make progress with first-rate candidates.

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Opportunity Value Proposition

This questionnaire answers the question: "Why would a top candidate want this job?"

This is the single greatest challenge we face as recruiters when attempting to interest elite passive candidates in your opportunity. The opportunity value proposition (OVP) enables us to pique the interest of passive candidates who are typically not considering a career move at the time we approach them.

Thankfully, career-minded individuals are always receptive to learning about compelling new opportunities. Unfortunately, boring job descriptions are still the modus operandi for trying to attract individuals to an opportunity. Yet they are ineffective because they don't pique the interest of the best candidates. That's a serious problem when you consider that these individuals always have multiple opportunities to choose from.

Therefore, compelling career-focused messages are critical to recruiting success. The OVP supplements a traditional job description; it's the "mojo" we need to ensure every candidate that your opportunity represents a smart career move. 

Key Skills

This questionnaire answers the question: "What are the key skills needed to do this job?"

Whenever a thorough needs analysis has been conducted, a job requisition can always be narrowed down to three must-have hard skills and three must-have soft skills that are absolutely critical to achieving success in the role. If narrowing the requirements down is a difficult exercise, it might be prudent to spend more time analyzing your needs before proceeding with a precarious recruiting effort.

While additional skills are certainly desirable, we don't want to use them at this stage to start disqualifying candidates. Our goal is to speak with individuals who have the core skills needed and are highly motivated to do the work. As far as other desirable skills are concerned, we will use them later to rank our finalist candidates; just not in the beginning. We don't want to start ruling out individuals now before we've even had a chance to assess their potential by speaking with them.

Performance Targets

This questionnaire answers the question: "What must be accomplished to be considered a success doing this job?"

For top performers, a career move is not a tactical decision based on salary, title, or location. It is a strategic decision based on the opportunity for personal development and career growth. Therefore, to interest a quality candidate in your opportunity, we must clearly define what they will do and how their performance will be measured. Doing so does more than help a candidate understand the content of the job, it helps us screen and interview candidates more effectively by correlating their past achievements with your business goals.

Performance targets are represented by calendar day milestones. They delineate a logical progression of accomplishments toward first year goals. They serve as an expectations roadmap for both you (the manager) and the employee. The very best candidates will want to see some variation of this roadmap before even considering an opportunity. Therefore, it makes complete sense for us to define our performance targets upfront so that we can use them to improve the quality of the screening and interviewing process for everybody involved.

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Ultimately, the search kick-off questionnaires provide the following benefits:

• Better job definition
• Better requirements understanding by recruiter and hiring team
• Better recruiting
• Better candidate screening
• Better candidate interviewing
• Better employer brand perception
• Better chance of offer acceptance
• Better onboarding experience
• Better employee retention rates
• Better performance management

What's not like to like about all of those benefits?! In another blog entry, I will explain each benefit in more detail. For now, you can learn more by contacting us.