Planning your candidate search

BEGIN WITH ORGANIZATION

1. Know your client and there competitors
Understand the company and how they do business. It's important that when you talk to candidates that you sell them on the company not the job order. To effectively do that you need to understand what makes this company stand out from its competitors.

2. Know the geography
You need to know the radius around the company where you can reasonably expect to find candidates willing to commute to your client's location.

3. Past searches
Review the past searches you have done for similar clients in the area. Make a list of all the candidates you have submitted. You may find some potential candidates from previous submittals.

4. Top ten target companies
Next, you need to identify local competitors or companies using similar technologies that you can source from.

Once you have completed your preparation you should begin your sourcing starting with the easy things first.

A. Database - Check your company database first. It's easy and an obvious first choice. Ask for referrals!

B. Network Internally and Externally - Talk to your colleagues about who they know and ask your candidates for referrals!

C. Mass Emails - If you have thousands of people in your database you will not be able to reach out to all of them so send out an email alerting everyone to your new opening.

D. Job Boards - Post a job online and search the job boards. Who knows, you might get lucky.

E. Sourcing - Call into companies and try to identify potential employees that are dissatisfied with their current job. (See my post on sourcing)

F. Repeat - Go back to the beginning and do it again.