"Spend your days driving a honkin' dual-tandem, 700 hp eco-machine through the most beautiful city in the world."

This was the winning job posting for a creative job posting contest we recently ran. This one was for a bus driver for the city of Vancouver, Canada.

There’s an old adage that you should treat candidates as customers. Somehow this has been forgotten in the current era of high unemployment and slow job growth. I’m going to reframe this idea and suggest that if you want to hire the best people possible, treat everyone as if they were a passive candidate. This is vital for candidates who are actually passive candidates. More important, treating everyone with the respect they deserve, including those who are active candidates, will fundamentally improve your overall quality of people you hire.

I recently reread Michael Gerber’s business best seller The eMyth and found that many of the principles he suggests for growing a business apply directly to the corporate recruiting department. You might want to follow some of his advice if any of your recruiting processes are not working as efficiently as you’d like. One reviewer had this to say about the book, which pretty much sums it up:

In a recent ERE article I made the contention that if you wanted to convert a corporate recruiting department into a competitive internal executive search group, you had to first develop the hiring process recruiters would use, before you hired the recruiters. This is primarily attributed to the fact that the external executive search business model and most of the processes they use are fundamentally different than, and often in conflict with, a corporation’s.

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

In earlier articles in this series, I made the contention that the average talent level of most companies hasn’t increased in the past 10 years. I contend that this is largely due to a follow-the-crowd or “blame some bureaucratic rule” excuse.

When the supply of top candidates falls short of demand, you’ll need to rethink how you find, recruit, and hire top talent. The following checklist will help. Under conditions of talent scarcity, if you do the following steps as described, you will hire more top talent and close each search faster than ever before. Eliminate or compromise any one of them and talent quality and your personal productivity will suffer. This process is described in detail in my book, Hire With Your Head, but I thought this checklist would be a useful summary.

What’s a hiring mistake?

Let me start off this article by saying that I’ve been working with top candidates, top hiring managers, and top recruiters for the past 30 years. As a result of this we’ve developed training tools based on how top candidates make job change decisions, how top managers who can attract and recruit the best talent make their decisions, and how top recruiters out-produce their average peers by factors of 100-200% or more.  Many of these ideas, tools, and techniques are described in my book, Hire With Your Head (Third Edition, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007).

Over the past year, I’ve been making the case that the best people – the top-third of your future workforce – won’t look for jobs, nor decide which one to take, based on the primary sourcing processes you now use. Making matters worse, traditional behavioral and competency interviewing are not designed to differentiate between the best and least best of your fully-qualified candidates, even if you can find them. To address these issues, fundamental changes are required to improve the overall talent level of your company as the economy improves.