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Casting a Wide Net to Recruit Top Talent
April 25, 2007

In our last HR blog, Ten Steps to Hiring Retail Rock Stars, we examined the broad themes for finding and retaining fresh talent. But finding them is the hard part, and as any fisherman, or woman will tell you – “If you fish in the same pond every day…” well, you know the rest. So casting a wide net, and in different ‘ponds’ with your recruitment is essential if you want to catch fresh, hungry talent.The other wonderful benefit of looking in new places is that it can dramatically increase the range of diversity in the candidates that apply.

But where exactly do you throw this net? There are many, but here are ten suggested directions:

• Offer your regular customers an incentive for finding you a great employee: it could be as simple as a discount or gift voucher for your store.
• Join an industry related online community. Yahoo is a great starting point, but look for others in your field. It doesn’t need to be too time consuming. You’ll come across people who are passionate about what they do – a.k.a great potential employees!
• Start a blog. It’s free, it’s easy and all you have to do is write your own thoughts down on what’s going on in your industry, market or store! Do it well and potential employees will find you.
• Join Linkedin.com and connect to the people you know, who connect you to the people they know, who connect you to…you get the idea. Thousands of people are waiting to act as your recruitment army.
• Put a sign in your local coffee shop. Of course you’ll have a sign in your own store too, but who doesn’t drink coffee these days? Grab the attention of a new audience while they’re relaxing over a nice frothy cappuccino.
• Always Be Hiring – be alert to the great service you receive in all those places you go each day. Hand out business cards to the people who impress you.
• Craigslist! It’s either free, or really cheap and the whole world is on there. I’ve found a President, a Receptionist, A Head of HR and a ton of sales people on this site. Posting an ad on your local Craigslist site is easy – just go to <city>.craigslist.org (eg newyork.craigslist.org).
• Offer your existing staff a referral bonus or incentive for referring strong candidates from their pool of friends, family and ex-colleagues.
• Use your local/city newspapers. In New York, the free Metro newspaper is read by hundreds of thousands of commuters every day. If it’s not going to be cost prohibitive for you to advertise, there’s a massive potential employee market there.
• Tell absolutely everyone you meet everywhere you go. Have a small flyer written up and give it out to Mom’s at school, people in the dog park – wherever you find yourself as part of a close knit or even anonymous community. People like to help – make it easy for them.

There are a myriad of other ways – most of which will be relevant only to you. Use this list as inspiration to get you started : and let us know some of your recruitment success stories!

Posted by Alan Ibbotson on April 25, 2007 | Comments (0)