The challenge, or the elephant in the room for many canvassing departments, is recruiting. It’s a frustrating component of canvassing and the big question I’m going to address in this series is, how do we find the right people? There are 4 aspects of bringing talent to your company and recruiting is the first step.
- Recruiting
- Interviewing
- Hiring
- Training
In this article I’m going to address specifically, at least start to address, how to recruit online. Recruiting is just like marketing. In fact I approach it exactly the same as marketing. When marketing a product or service the focus is on communicating about the product or service. When recruiting, you’re looking for the ideal person for a specific job. The job position is the product and the target audience is vast. My experience is finding canvassers online is a very good communication medium to expand your reach outside the college or high school student market.
College and high school students are ideal when you’re hiring part time canvassers, they’re a perfect fit. They need a part time job and you need part time people. I’ve always found the best way to recruit for these part time people is to do the leg work on the campuses. There’s nothing better than getting face to face.
I’m often asked what is the best website to advertise on. You shouldn’t get hung up on the specific site or medium. You should focus on the target audience and message, and then determine which medium you should use to communicate your message to your audience; online, college campuses, newspaper, referrals, etc.
This series will focus on powerful ways to market/recruit via online.
I mentioned that I have my best success recruiting face to face. Online is my second best method of success, but I’m going to discuss this medium here because so many want to be in this space for recruiting. Throughout this series I’ll draw reference from and correlation with between canvassing and other industries with respect to recruiting. I highly suggest you invest in the book, both to follow along and to draw your own conclusions and correlations from the book. The book is, “Recruiting on the Web -– Smart Strategies for Finding the Perfect Candidate by Michael Foster.
In less than a decade the Internet has transformed the recruiting process. Your message can reach thousands of people a day whereas 10 years ago it would have cost you thousands of dollars to reach the same size audience.
Today you can find hundreds of resume banks of people and segment those candidates depending on how detailed you want to get. We’re far past the one on one telephone call of recruiting interviews and you can now narrow your candidates down much more efficiently.
Many times the technology creates its own obstacles and challenges. One of the problems is the speed of change.
- Employer referrals produced the highest quality recruits
- (everyone has a network, think Facebook) One college kid knows another and they all need money.
- 90% of corporations have an internal career board or job site for internal promotions. Unfortunately few companies look internally for candidates.
- General job boards produce a lot of unqualified candidates
- Money is being spent on head-hunters to find qualified candidates
The online medium will produce a younger group of people and it will require better methods for qualifying and training.
So how can we as small businesses use the web to find the right people for our canvassing efforts? What boards do you use?
What are the things that are here to stay? Let’s consider the universe you’re working with when it comes to recruiting people using the Internet. Unfortunately buried among the more than 2 billion web pages there are over 40,000 job boards and resume banks, 200,000,000 html resume and home pages, 2 million company-based websites not to mention the thousands of college and university site, trade publication, industry pages. There are a lot of people on all these sites doing various things at any given second. This is both a recruiter’s dream, but also a time management nightmare. To complicate things even further add to it help wanted billboards, recruiters and head hunters all clamoring for the same audience.
It’s a time management nightmare
So how can you take control of all this? How can you gain order out of chaos? The first thing is not to get overwhelmed by it all. It’s cliché, but start at the beginning and first understand the traditional recruiting process. The recruiting process can be broken down into a 5 stage process.
- Recruit your friends, build a referral or alumni system
- Enhance your organization’s recruiting website, Facebook page
- Attract the best active candidates
- Find passive candidate – those employed or not looking for another job
- Assess applicants using the web-based tools
In next month’s article I’m going to dig deeper into fine tuning the systems.
I know that recruiting is a challenging subject and if you have questions that are specific to your situation as a member you have the opportunity to use a one on one call with me to address the subject (Gold and higher members). Otherwise, you can post your questions to me at www.AskTheCanvassKing.com.