How do you find your next talents?

Where are the talents? This is the question that all recruiters are asking themselves right now. Many companies are recruiting and, in fact, more than 300,000 positions are still vacant in the second quarter of 2022. This situation affects even more digital jobs and positions that require highly qualified expertise. At issue: the shortage market. Some businesses have taken the opposite view and changed their recruitment strategy to adapt to the market. To know where to look for their next talents, they first define their search perimeter.

Define the research framework

Before any research, it is essential to build a recruitment strategy that is consistent with the company's goals and overall strategy. You will therefore need a clear roadmap to define your research scope.

Define the needs of business teams

If you are in the recruitment phase, it is probably because one of your teams (or yours, maybe) asked for more talent to support them. But to identify the right candidates, you'll need to assess the team's situation and identify their needs.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• Does the need concern specific expertise or does it require a project manager who can lighten the burden on his future team?
• Have there been any departures that require the recruitment of one or more substitutes? Or do these needs involve the creation of jobs?
• Is the team concerned in a position to manage the new talent (s)? Or on the contrary, does she need a completely autonomous talent?
• What are the goals set by the team? What are the expected results at the end of the year? How will this new talent be able to contribute to the achievement of these goals?

This non-exhaustive list is already a good start to understanding internal needs and identifying the strategy to adopt.

Delineate search criteria

Once you have collected the needs of your team, you will need to define a search perimeter. The benefit of this action is quite simple: you will not have the same needs as another company, nor will you have the same context. Also, two talents with the same expertise will not have the same impacts on your team. Indeed, their personality, vision and professional ambition will be different and will not bring you the same benefits.

To do this, and even before drawing up the job description, you will have to create a brief to meet all the expected criteria. This document will make it easier for you to rule out a majority of candidates who do not meet your expectations.

In fact, you are the only one who can decide between a candidate according to the following criteria:

• the nature of the expected role (strategic or technical)
• The level of mastery of the expected skills
• his seniority on the job market
• the personality and values of the candidate
• his professional goals and how they can contribute to the company's ambition
• the potential benefits for your business and its career development
• immediate availability or a flexible need depending on the quality of the profile
• total flexibility or a long-term commitment
• etc.

You should therefore be clear in your search and then with the selected candidates. Also, determine the points of attention that you cannot ignore and those on which you can be more flexible. It is complex, especially in a tight market, to require applications with all the criteria listed. Keep a search field broad enough to identify profiles who may be able, as they take up a position, to meet your initial level of requirements.

Adapting your research to the market

Once you have defined your search criteria, the nature of the expected profile is much easier to understand. But before soliciting talent on the market, did you study the applications internally? Depending on the position, the best candidates may already be in your company. What is called “internal mobility” can even save you up to 50% of the costs generated by external recruitment. This process is also simpler for project manager roles.

For more technical profiles, you will certainly have to source the market. In this case, make sure that your criteria are consistent with the profiles you are going to identify. It often happens, especially for job creations, that the initial criteria are not aligned with the reality of the market. Whether it concerns the level of seniority, the amount of remuneration and/or the number of days you work from home, you should be prepared to adjust these points. Otherwise, your recruitment will become a real challenge!

Where to look for your next talents?

To identify where to source future candidates, you will need to define your pre-selection strategy: how to source, with what tools, on what platforms, who will be in charge of the search. This will allow you to optimize your selection process and focus your research efforts on what is most effective for you.

Collaborator network

Before communicating externally, you can already tell your employees that positions are available. Your employees may be interested in the position, which will save you valuable time and budget on your recruitment. Moreover, the success rate for such recruitments is 67%. Enough to reinforce the loyalty and commitment of its employees!

But your employees will also be your best allies in finding profiles adapted to the offers available. Their professional network can be transformed into a great talent pool: their former colleagues, family and friends, their former schools or training courses are all potential ways to find the ideal talent. To thank them for their commitment, you can even set up a referral bonus. After all, your employees are your best ambassadors!

Job boards & CV libraries

Les platforms Ofjob offers are especially useful for reporting your current search. There are also numerous job boards: Welcome to the Jungle, Indeed (...). It's a good way to get candidates looking for work to come to you. The growing number of these job boards can be explained by the plurality of fields of activity and professional expertise. Indeed, looking for your IT needs, for example, on a platform specialized in this type of profiles will be more effective and you will have more chances of finding really suitable candidates. Also, if you want to optimize your search time, this process is particularly useful for bringing traffic to your offers without being particularly active. However, these platforms are only effective insofar as the profiles on them are precisely in your scop.

Conversely, if you have more time to devote to your research, you can also consult CV libraries and look for the rare pearl there. In particular thanks to Boolean searches, you will be able to filter profiles according to your search criteria. We thus find multiple pieces of information: seniority, availability, range or TJM expected, sector of activity, professions or intervention roles... The advantage of this practice is that it allows you to refine your search and to sort by yourself your selection among the profiles currently available.

There are thus job boards and CV libraries for any type of profile or by type of expected contract (CDI or mission).

Social networks

Les professional social networks are real gold mines for your recruitments. However, be careful to take care of your employer brand. Indeed, candidates will be able to access both your offers, but also to all of your content. It is therefore important to take care of your posts to make your company attractive if candidates visit your page. Thus, you can deepen your research on networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook or even Shapr.

The principle remains fairly identical to that of job boards. You can filter profiles by even more specific criteria using Boolean search. These networks also have the advantage of showing you a wider choice of candidates, especially those who are already in position. If the latter are actually not present or not very present on job boards, you can search among these profiles who may very well be open to new opportunities, without being active. Through the direct approach, you will thus be able to get closer to candidates who, at first glance, did not seem available.

Moreover, take advantage of the fact that candidates have the same visibility challenge as you. Some talents, especially freelancers, are looking to gain fame in order to find missions more easily. They will therefore be more present and it is even possible that their profile will appear naturally in your news feed. So stay on the lookout for the activity of your network.

Recruiting experts

Finally, you can just as easily delegate your search to experts. Recruitment agencies, headhunters and other matchmaking services have developed their expertise to support you in their search. Indeed, they can simply search for the ideal candidate for you or, on the contrary, advise you before your search.

Here are some of their benefits if you are having difficulty in your search:

• They will help you better define the framework of your search, refine your brief and the job description.
• They will know how to identify profiles that can really correspond to your needs.
• They know the market and the profiles currently available
• For some, they benefit from an active community with available talent

But to find out if you need to use this type of service, ask yourself the right questions:

• How much time can I spend looking for talent?
• Do I have time to deepen my research or is the business need urgent?
• Do I have the internal resources to do the research?
• Is there the in-house knowledge to find this particularly technical expertise?
• Have I already used this type of profile?

If your answers indicate a lack of time or resources, then indeed, these services will be more than beneficial to you. Take advantage of the expertise of these qualified experts to ensure the quality of your recruitments. If you want to use freelancers for the first time, for example, these experts can even share a lot of advice with you for after the research.

So are you ready for find your next talent ? It is never easy to identify the profiles that will truly match your business. Even though there are many places to find them, some job skills require slightly more resources than expected. As at the moment, the shortage market is particularly reducing the field of research. New questions then arise in the face of talent drain: Freelance or permanent contract, which talent to choose?