Leadership Archives

This is a guest post by Ross Statham of Dogwood Services Inc. In a previous post, Ross shared the top three reasons to hire an executive search firm, and offered his expert tips for ensuring a productive partnership.

Want to tackle the hiring process yourself? Here are some suggestions for how to proceed, though keep in mind that the top talent will rarely respond to job postings.

Allow sufficient time. My own experience has been to allow two or more hours per day (minimum) for 2-3 weeks.
Determine the salary range, daily duties, and a brief overview of desired qualifications.
Ask for help. This could be from your HR department, from subordinates, or from others on your team. They could help you write a good job description, help you better communicate with candidates and help you to find and select better talent.
Setup someone you trust (HR, a member of your team or subordinate) to do some of the heavy resume filtering before handing them over to you.
Post your job opening. But as noted above, don’t have the resumes come to your work email (which can be overwhelming), have them go elsewhere for filtration.
As the resumes arrive to you, toss out those who obviously won’t make your cut. Those who are a “maybe” can be sent a (form email) note thanking them for their interest, and spelling out some details of what you are looking for and painting a realistic picture of the job. Many people can be filtered out this way, saving you additional looking.
If you need to perform a software “scan” for key words again (perhaps using a Boolean search), now’s probably a good time to do so. This is particularly helpful with technical positions, when you’re looking for details of what they’ve done and when.
At this point you’re starting to see where some resumes are starting to meet your needs by putting eyeballs on the ones that get your attention. Save these; if you think it appropriate, you can put their names on a spreadsheet (such as Google Sheets) with notes.
As your eyeballs scan resumes, look at their last three jobs. How long were they there? What did they accomplish? What were their daily duties?
If they continue to hold your interest, drill down from “scanning” to reading. Look for obvious negative and positives. Red flags may include employment gaps, evidence of decreasing responsibility, a career that has flattened or is moving in the wrong direction, short-term employment at several jobs, and multiple shifts in their career path.
Continue to review your selected resumes against your criteria and each other.
Found someone you like? Look them up on LinkedIn and Google them and see what you can learn about them.
Telephone screen potential candidates.
Bring in strong candidates for a face-to-face.

Again, you need to ask yourself if you really have the time. If so, then have at it! But if you’re like most busy executives, using an experienced outside expert will tremendously shortcut the process which will save both time and money. Most importantly, it will help you find those harder to find talented people who rarely respond to job openings.

This post originally appeared on Bill Jaffe’s blog at http://blog.federalsmallbizsavvy.com/stages-of-growth/finding-talent-in-a-flood-of-resumes/ and was reprinted with permission.