How to get better candidates

Hello, Brian Walsh here. And if you're a manager and you want to accelerate your career, you need to hire superstars. And I'm going to tell you one thing that's going to help you recruit top tier talent. Now, I've been wanting to do this LinkedIn live for a while. I just haven't gotten organized so I just had to get it out there. But I have some kids who are entering the workforce, they've got gone through college or they're just at a point where they're ready to start getting professional jobs. And they worry a lot about the types of jobs, the salary, the benefits, what they want to do, all the things that typically go into the thoughts when you're starting a career. And the advice I give them is apply to everything. The goal of an application is to get that, that first call that usually a screening call. And the goal of getting through that is get to an interview and then a job offer and the job offers when you're going to worry about salary and benefits. But all those steps along the way, you can make a decision if you want to proceed based on the people, what you learn, none of what you know by just looking at a job ad or when you apply. So I tell them, apply to everything. The goal is to get an interview. Don't worry about the end, worry about just getting to the next step. And it's the same thing when recruiting. So the point of a job posting is to get the applicants that you want, get them to apply. A job posting is not a job description, it isn't a contract. It is marketing to get the right people to apply. And so if you want to hire superstars and you want to advance your career as a manager, you need to recruit top tier talent. And to do that you need great job ads. That's what I want to talk about today. So as a manager you have to be involved in this. This is something that often I see outsourced to hr, just we need somebody so hr, go post a job. But if you're a manager and you want to up your candidates, you need to get involved and you need to be creative because you need better candidates, you need better ads. So don't just outsource this to hr. Unless they've got a marketing mindset or they do a really good job at this, this is something you're going to have to get involved with. And if they've got required stuff that they say this has to go in, put it at the end of a job posting. So I'm going To give you four things to consider when you're writing your job ads and helping them to be more impactful. First one is make it compelling. So your ideal candidate probably already has a job. And when they read your ad, it has to stand out. It has to, like, make it so that they want to keep reading. So the way I would try to do this is lead with something provocative. Use real examples from other jobs or candidates that you've talked to. Like, do you have to have five levels of review before your pull request is approved? Or maybe something about micromanaging, something that you know is typically true with people in that kind of job position, Something that your ideal candidate is experiencing and speak to them and make it about them. I was once writing a job ad for a business analyst and I led with 75% of projects fail from poor requirements. But you already know that something like that just immediately communicates, I understand you and I value the role that you bring. Don't lead with how great you are or how wonderful the opportunity is or all the things that your company does. Lead with them and talking about them and some of the problems they might be facing, some of the obstacles they have and how you understand them so they continue reading your job ad. You go test this with coworkers, get their feedback, but make it compelling. Number two, make it authentic. Boilerplate isn't attractive and neither is being fake. So don't, don't try to write an ad that you thought was cool but is not you. You know, don't try to imitate the cool kids. Just, just be yourself. You want to attract the candidates who are a good fit for your culture. That's what we call employer branding. So the tone and the language of your job ad should be similar to how you talk about it in a professional conversation. Number three, make it aspirational. Outline what a career is like and why moving would be good for them. And a lot of times in our job ads, I would put the outline of what an entire year would look like. So this is where you can just kind of think a little bit creatively. If you imagined a star performer coming in and being great, like the perfect hire, what would they be doing at three months, at six months, at 12 months, what did they do that made them great? And then that's what you want to outline. That's an aspirational job ad. So you don't want to come in and say, you know, you're going to come in and contribute to this great project that we have. But something like at six months You've changed the way that we design our features and everyone on the template or everyone on the team is using your template. And productivity is sort of something like that, something that they've accomplished and they've contributed at 6 months specific. Finally, the fourth one is make it real. This is probably one of my biggest things I always tell people is show, don't tell, don't tell them what a great culture you have. Show them, talk about the evidence of what it is like that you have a great culture. So we don't say we have a friendly collegial culture. You show them that by saying you might find teammates going to movie after work or grabbing a meal together or whenever you ask somebody for help, they drop what they're doing and help. You don't say we provide a supportive employment or supportive environment for our remote employees. You show them what you do to support that. We have a daily check in with our remote team. We use a Slack channel. What, whatever things you might do to support remote teammates. That's what you talk about. So show, don't tell. Candidates get job ads. So those are your four things. Candidates get job ads sent to them all the time and most of the times they're ignoring them. But what happens is one day they get that notification and they're having a down day. They're experiencing just what you put in that opening line and they go, oh, that's what I that you write. And then they're going to read, and they're going to read the, the aspirational aspect and they're going to be like, this is maybe something that I need to look into. And then they're going to apply and that's what you want. Now I used to write these by hand and it was hard. It takes a lot of work to be this creative. But these days it's a lot easier. You can use AI. So go find some ads that you like, ones that are compelling, and start using that as a template. Kind of define your own template using some of the things I just talked about and then feed into the chat or the AI engine the aspects of your job. Right. Try out different ads. So remember, the goal of the ad is to get the right people applying. So now that you have a one template, you can modify it, try to get some, some different results. But as a manager, that's your job because you're looking to hire a superstar. You're looking to hire somebody that's going to help your career and give them a great job opportunity. And so that's your role. It starts with writing a job ad. All right. Recruiting is just one aspect of management. It's something that I spent a lot of time doing, and this was a LinkedIn Live I wanted to make sure and share, but I actually have a complete methodology about how you can empower your managers to lead themselves, lead their teams, and lead their organizations. And if you'd like to learn more, I offer a free management strategy call. You Simply go to shiftfocus.com/strategy call and select a time that's convenient for you. I look forward to doing more LinkedIn lives. In February, we're going to move into some other topics and so stay tuned and thanks. Have a great day.