Hire Power
Veteran Vancouver headhunter Caroline Stokes shares her experience on what it takes to draw the best candidates to your team
“Talent is the biggest driver of success, and a recruiter's job is to get the talent,” writes Caroline Stokes in her new book, Elephants Before Unicorns: Emotionally Intelligent HR Strategies to Save Your Company. The self-described human capital entrepreneur did marketing and PR for firms like Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Nokia Corp. before moving from the U.K. to Vancouver in 2006. Seven years later, after a stint as a B.c.based executive search partner and coach for the London office of Australiaheadquartered Natural Selection Group, Stokes launched Forward, a headhunting and coaching firm with clients that include Electronic Arts Canada and Microsoft Canada.
How do you find the right people for an organization?
Start by figuring out where the organization is going, what problems it needs to solve and what sort of people it needs to solve them. That requires lots of conversations beyond the usual, Let's put an advert up and then interview a whole bunch of candidates. People get very frustrated when that typical process happens because you're getting 100 applicants that aren't applicable. Does the job description really resonate with where the company is going and what the opportunity is?
What's the best way to approach a candidate about a position?
Most people, if you're talking to somebody who's a perfect candidate, have no interest in moving on. You've got to captivate them with an opportunity that is truly compelling. We're not talking about title and salary. How are you connecting to their why and the mission for the organization? I like to ask, How would you like this conversation to start? You immediately get them focused in the mode of what is it that they want. This is about the candidate. Get them engaged from the very beginning.
How do you integrate new hires?
On day four, we bring all of the stakeholders in the organization, as well as the new hire, together and ask: Where is the company going? What is the company vision? How is this new hire going to be a part of that? About day 50, I do the midterm check-in with the same questions. We don't do any reflection on what has happened or what bumps came along the way because it's not a shame and fingerpointing exercise.
What about retention?
One-to-ones on a regular basis to identify what the challenges are, what the opportunities are, areas for development and so on—that's how you retain people. Open dialogue, open communication, lots of collaboration.
Any tips on keeping people engaged over the long term?
As I explain in my book, “A surefire path to employee disengagement is to stifle their interests in tasks that fall outside their job descriptions.
`You can't do that—that's a marketing thing.' Or `We don't need you to lead that training; that's what we have a training department for.' Effective people leaders see their employees as varied, complex individuals. They expect team members to do their jobs, but they're always interested in their employees' unique interests and passions, and they strive to draw these out within the context of their assigned tasks.” –F.S.