How to Find the Best Talent to Grow Your Business: A compilation of the best hiring tips, strategies and insights every leader needs to know from one of Canada’s top recruiters.

By Publishdrive

This book is the ultimate go-to hiring resource for business leaders, managers and HR professionals. Filled with smart, strategic real-world advice, Julie lays out straight-forward and easy-to-follow steps to find theright candidate for your organization- every time!
Introduction from the author:

If you’re committed to finding the best talent to grow your business, then you’ve come to the right place—I’ve written this book for you!

You may be a passionate business owner, senior executive or hiring manager, or perhaps you work in HR and want to hone your recruitment expertise. No matter what brought you here, I can promise that on the following pages, you’ll find some of the best tips, trends, and insights I have accumulated over the past two decades.

My team and I have weathered many storms over the years, from economic downturns to global crises like the SARS outbreak of 2003, the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and, of course, the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Through every ebb and flow, values such as trust, integrity and relationship-building have remained at the core of all my recruitment successes. What you’ll get from this book is intel presented through the lens of these fundamental principles.

For several years now, I’ve been sharing the best of what I know on my company’s blog at www.blueskypersonnel.com. Many clients have told me since then just how much value they’ve gained from this content.

So, I’ve meticulously scoured this collection of content and pulled from it what I feel is both timely and timeless in recruitment—all of it with the goal of exponentially growing your business by finding the best talent to hire from the marketplace.

As such, this book is designed for you to easily read it from cover to cover in one sitting. But if you choose, you can also use it as a quick reference guide, jumping directly to a specific topic of interest when needed.

Either way, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’m more passionate about recruitment than ever, and I hope the time-tested recruitment strategies contained in this book will serve you well for many years to come.

Cheers to your hiring success!

Best, Julie

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781738714810

Book preview

Introduction

If you’re committed to finding the best talent to grow your business, then you’ve come to the right place—I’ve written this book for you!

You may be a passionate business owner, senior executive or hiring manager, or perhaps you work in HR and want to hone your recruitment expertise. No matter what brought you here, I can promise that on the following pages, you’ll find some of the best tips, trends, and insights I have accumulated over the past two decades.

My team and I have weathered many storms over the years, from economic downturns to global crises like the SARS outbreak of 2003, the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and, of course, the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Through every ebb and flow, values such as trust, integrity and relationship-building have remained at the core of all my recruitment successes. What you’ll get from this book is intel presented through the lens of these fundamental principles.

For several years now, I’ve been sharing the best of what I know on my company’s blog at www.blueskypersonnel.com. Many clients have told me since then just how much value they’ve gained from this content.

So, I’ve meticulously scoured this collection of content and pulled from it what I feel is both timely and timeless in recruitment—all of it with the goal of exponentially growing your business by finding the best talent to hire from the marketplace.

As such, this book is designed for you to easily read it from cover to cover in one sitting. But if you choose, you can also use it as a quick reference guide, jumping directly to a specific topic of interest when needed.

Either way, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’m more passionate about recruitment than ever, and I hope the time-tested recruitment strategies contained in this book will serve you well for many years to come.

Cheers to your hiring success!

Best,

Julie

SECTION 1

________

RECRUITMENT BEST PRACTICES

1

How Do You Find a Good Recruiter?

Afew years back, a Globe and Mail reader asked me:

How does one find a good recruiter? I need one! What can a recruiter do for you? What can you expect? How do you choose someone? How would the relationship proceed? How much does it cost? What information do you need to know before you go searching?

I still get asked these questions from time to time, and the fact remains: A recruiter can offer both job seekers and employers tremendous value.

Companies with limited HR support can use a recruiter as an extension of their HR departments. Creating a partnership with a good recruiter will enhance human resources support for any business’ internal employees. Job seekers, too, should use recruitment agencies as tools to help them access companies that may not publicly advertise their job openings.

Here’s what I shared in the Globe and Mail¹ in terms of benefits specifically for employers. This content is as relevant today as it was when it was originally published.

* * * * *

The following are tips to find a good recruiter and maximize the value you get out of them:

First of all, let’s consider the question: Why use a recruiter? There are two very valuable benefits that recruiters offer: 1) They can tap into talent that companies cannot access to (e.g., approaching workers who are currently employed, scoping out the competition, etc.). 2) They can save a company considerable time on the search and pre-screening process. By leveraging the recruiter’s ability to find a needle in a haystack, executives can focus on what they do best.

When it comes to finding a good recruiter, here are some considerations:

Ask recruiters where their expertise lies. It’s best to hire a recruiter whose focus complements your hiring needs.

In recruitment, success is more closely tied to quality than quantity. Beyond the years of experience or the size of a firm, successful placements are key. (Even if a recruiter filled 150 positions in a short time, if many ended up tanking, their work can’t be deemed a success.)

How responsive is the recruitment firm? Will your recruiter prioritize you? Ask if they offer service-level commitments, such as timely responses to correspondence

Also ask whether the recruiter will support you in finding a replacement should their original hire fail.

Recruiters should really operate as an extension of your HR department. They will conduct all of the pre-screening, liaise with short-listed candidates, schedule interviews, check references, assist with negotiations and so forth.

In terms of remuneration, outside of some executive search firms with retainer fees, most recruiters operate on contingency, meaning the recruiter essentially works for you for free until they have successfully filled the position for you. Once a candidate is hired, a fee is paid to the recruiter based on a pre-negotiated percentage of the new employee’s salary.

If you work exclusively with one recruiter (as you generally would with a doctor, dentist, or real estate agent), you are more likely to get their full attention, effort, and service. In addition, the more open you are in sharing your company’s culture and the nuances of your workplace, the greater chance your recruiter will find the best candidate for your team.

The best hires are found when the company and recruiter commit to working together as if they were on a joint venture.

2

How Honest Should You Be with Your Recruitment Agency?

After twenty years in this industry, the short answer, in our humble opinion is: 100%.

When Kelly McDavid, Director of HR at Miele Canada, first connected with us, she explained that her efforts to achieve complete transparency with the recruitment agencies she hired in the past were futile.

Kelly would sit down with her external recruitment partners, sometimes for over an hour, so they could better understand her business and hiring needs. Still, at the end of the day, she felt like they weren’t listening and didn’t get what she wanted.

Kelly has been working with BlueSky Personnel Solutions for over fourteen years now. She recently sat down with us over Zoom to share her experiences and insights from a client perspective.

I am picky, and we are picky, said Kelly in the interview she did with us. We are a high-end company—a high-end brand, and we were looking for people who were professional and could represent the brand the way it was intended to be represented.

Too often, she felt like she was being sent warm bodies just for the sake of it.

In contrast, when Kelly became a client of BlueSky Personnel Solutions, she said what stood out for her was our integrity and the fact that we listened to what her company needed.

You were true to your word, you listened to what I needed, and if you didn’t have somebody to send me, you wouldn’t just send me anybody, Kelly said. You’d tell me straight up that ‘we’re having trouble with this one and it might take a little more time,’ and I was very appreciative of that because I didn’t want to waste my time interviewing people that I knew weren’t the right people.

If you want to work with a professional business partner, who truly listens to what you need and works with you every step of the way until you find the right person, then you need to work with BlueSky Personnel Solutions.

– Kelly McDavid, Director of HR, Miele Canada

And therein lies what we believe is the secret to success in recruitment: 100% honesty from both sides (agency and client) in the spirit of a true partnership. We believe this involves trust, collaboration, and a long-game approach.

In the interview with Kelly, I said, I must admit that, personally, it is truly important for me to make sure that I only send my clients what they are asking for. This philosophy is reflected by our whole team too. That is our brand promise. I’ve never been interested in just making a quick placement and walking away. I’ve always been in this for the long-term. Quite frankly, this is important for me as a person. That’s how I am in life anyway!

Cultivating authentic, trusting, long-term relationships with our clients rooted in honesty and integrity—this is what has defined BlueSky Personnel Solutions’ success over the years. And we wear this reputation as our badge of honour.

3

Should You Keep Working with a Recruiter Who Couldn’t Fill a Position for You?

As a recruiter, this is a very tough position to be in. You’ve done everything you possibly can to find the right talent for your client without success. Sometimes you can do everything correctly, but a star candidate still opts to decline your client’s offer in favour of a competitor’s. At other times, the right talent eludes you altogether. You just can’t find them. It happens.

For some people in our industry, panic sets in during these moments. They opt to continue sending their clients candidates, even if they aren’t a good fit, to fulfill their obligations. We all have a natural instinct to please others. However, where many in the recruitment field zig, we choose to zag.

We have always held the philosophy that we will exhaust all options while keeping our clients in the loop. If we can’t ultimately find the right talent for them, we will be open and honest and tell our clients as much. We don’t want to waste their time or the candidates’ time, and we also don’t want to waste our own