Leadership - Look Where No One Else is Looking

Part of being a good leader is building a great team. This implies judgment and understanding what functional skills and personality traits are needed.

When you're looking to find and hire great talent, you ought to think of hiring as a marketing exercise. You should seek to stand out from the crowd. In fact, you shouldn't even be near the crowd.

Most employers and average job hunters all congregate in the same places. There are a few dominant online job boards everyone goes to. Craigslist, Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder - they look different but work much the same way. Employers go to these destinations to post job openings and descriptions because that's where all the job hunters go. Job hunters go to sift through all the job postings because that's where all the employers are posting.

The problem with these systems is that they are designed for you to conform to a process. You cannot help but look average, just another employer in the monstrous crowd.

If you want superior candidates instead of average candidates, do something different. A few suggestions:

1. Blog about new job openings - If you don't have a company blog, go start one now. If you do, the regular readers of your blog will be great candidates or will know great candidates they could forward the openings to.

2. Check your data - Who buys a ton of your stuff? Who is a loyal customer? Bring them in for informal chats. You might find a devoted employee in the select group.

3. Check your customer service department - Who is always complaining about your stuff? Who is a problem customer? Who keeps giving your call center folks a hard time? Bring those people in, they may have some solutions in mind, give them a chance to prove they're right.

Comments

[Allan Young]

Martin,
Thanks for visiting our blog.

I visited Corsum's website in turn and was delighted to read your short bio.
What a great track record!

I love the language you use on the website. Happy to see a real
practitioner teaching entrepreneurship to students.

Cheers,

Allan Young

www.allantyoung.com

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:25 PM, wrote:

[Marty O'Neill]

A couple good ideas. I was speaking with a principal of a midsized company today and they are seriously considering adding to their leadership team, but they don't have a blog so they have to find ways to create that channel of recruiting through other means.

Thanks for reminding me to remind them to get their blog moving.

[Strategic Growth Advisors]

Thanks SAMBA team for the helpful post and I will never look at a difficult customer in the same light ever again.

I really liked how you integrated the "problem customer" in the last part. I never realized that they may be potential members of your workforce.

I mean, who would hire a person who keeps bugging your phone with complaints and gives your call center personnel a minute or two of haranguing?

Keep those great articles coming!

[Toni]

I really enjoyed reading this blog post and I found great value in it. I hope others will stop to read this too and see what I mean!