Some companies are always hiring. Hiring managers do much of the same activities day-to-day, and often staffing companies are used to augment positions or entire departments. How do similar companies scale within similar industries when recruiting from the same talent pool?

We’ve found that scalable hiring in crowded markets comes down to a few key topics.

Do any of the following statements describe how you’ve been handling recruiting for new hires?

• All job inquiries are being sent to you via a jobs@ email alias, and they are piling up in your inbox. We like to describe this phenomenon as INBOX Recruiting.
• Speaking of that inbox, among the resumes and cover letters, are there questions and even complaints from frustrated job seekers who are waiting to hear back after an initial meeting? You’re holding off answering because you can’t get a clear idea of how the hiring team wants to proceed.
• You’re tasked with posting job openings and updating listings on several sites and job boards. At times, just keeping track of what job posting is running, and where, can bring on a headache.
• You do your best to pre-screen and bring quality candidates to your hiring managers, but you very rarely get any feedback as to how the interviews went, or a clear strategy forward.
• And don’t even talk about trying to schedule interviews! You wish that you could outsource that part of the process since coordinating times around meetings and travel can sometimes require the exchange of a dozen emails.

Navigating the Talent Market

If you’re in a race against time, you may be tempted to do whatever it takes to fill your open positions as fast as possible and hope for the best. It’s true, short time-to-hire records look good on a resume. In competitive markets, however, you’ll be facing the uphill battle of retention. You may have enough tenure to have learned:

• You can’t expect the first applicant to be the best to help your company grow and flourish, or even stay on pace with its competitors. Leverage staffing firms to be able to compare multiple top candidates, or for job category or industry-specific recruitment.
• The person – who is just looking for a paycheck, not a fulfilling career – won’t be an ideal fit at all, and you’ll have to start the whole process over again in a few months

What your company really needs are performers – the employees who make exceeding expectations a habit. Their energy is contagious.

Hiring for Scalable Team & Roles

Premier Talent Partners has defined a consistent interview and feedback process to drive well-structured hiring decisions quickly. Leveraging existing applicant information, our hiring managers agree on the criteria for evaluation up front for each position and feedback is provided against that in every interview. Hiring managers evaluate career path and functional skills for the role, Interviewers look for team dynamic as well as functional skills, and Exec team members dig deep into inherent cultural fit. Once interviews are complete across a pool of candidates, the recruiters and hiring teams can easily have a well structured decision on who the best candidate is, and move quickly to offer.They are the doers, the thinkers and the dreamers who stand out and motivate others to drive success. The challenge is to find these performers and actively recruit them before someone else does.