Attracting Top Talent

You sell your company to the candidate as much as the candidate sells themselves to you. 

      One thing that successful legal firms have in common is their ability to attract and satisfy top talent.  A well-qualified and happy professional team is one of the most important assets that a contractor can possess.
      Highly qualified people may occasionally enter the active job market as a result of dissatisfaction with their current employer.  However, many firms find that the person needed to fill a key position is not responding to advertisements and is not listed on job boards.  In such instances, a candidate for the position who is not actively looking may surface through the firm's networking efforts or through use of an executive search and professional recruiting firm.  The goal of this piece is to give insight on how to attract talent.
      It is possible to attract the top candidates, but it is not easy.  The hiring company must adjust its thinking to match and understand the candidate's perspective.  It must accept the fact that many candidates are not actively looking to make a change.  A firm's failure to accept this is a major obstacle to attracting top talent successfully. 
      Recruited candidates have unfulfilled needs, otherwise they would not be open to exploring other opportunities.  Very few people are completely satisfied in their current jobs.  In dealing with recruited candidates, it is important to understand what motivates them so that a firm can tailor its presentation to meet the candidates' specific needs.
      How a firm treats and presents itself to current and potential employees is important.  Employees have needs greater then just money.  The need to feel "in the loop" and need encouragement.  They want job security and sympathetic understanding of problems.  These actions drive positive emotions that drive the majority of decisions.  Here are some suggestions on how to create the right interactions and emotions to attract top talent:

• Empathize with candidates by understanding that they have invested time to interview.  Interviews are not easy to fit into a busy work week and require clandestine behavior with current employers.
• Have the key individuals available for the candidate.  If the candidate can sacrifice time and effort to interview, then the best firms can make their key personnel available for questions, perspectives, and opinions.  This conveys to the candidate that the both the role and their potential are important to the organization.
• Ask open-ended questions and encourage the candidate to speak freely about their background, interests, goals and feelings.  Most decisions are made on emotion, so you want to understand what emotions are working for and against you.
• Focus on the positives of your company rather than the negatives of their current company.  Focusing on the negatives of their current company can evoke a defensive response ingrains the positives into their perspective.  It is more productive to focus on all the things that make your firm great.
• Make sure the candidate leaves the meeting with a good feeling.  Feeling and emotions are very strong in the decision making for a new position.  If the candidate left with a good feeling, then they are likely to return.
• Make a complete offer that includes benefits, relocation, vacation eligibility, variable incentives, travel allowances and more.  The best firms address all of these questions in the beginning so that the candidate can make an informed decision.
• Put a limit on the time a candidate is allowed to consider the offer.  The more time that passes, the more things that can go wrong.  Responses should be within one week.

If you follow these items, your chance of attracting the top talent in the industry is increased.