While the labor market boasts a better volume of quality talent now compared to years past, you might be stuck with few or no open requisitions to offer choice candidates. If you feel like you’re in a Catch-22, you’re not alone. Several strategies can help you make the most of available talent and burnish your employment brand at the same time.
Even the strongest candidates have accepted that 2009 is not the year they’re going to make great leaps forward in their careers. As a recent Wall Street Journal article discusses, candidates are evaluating options beyond their qualifications to land a job. People are opting to take temporary or project-based consulting jobs and considering pay cuts and title demotions. We must be careful, however, not to cross the line when determining these candidates’ worth. When jobs become more plentiful again, we don’t want top talent remembering us as the company that drastically undervalued them.
Consider how short-term recruiting wins will affect your employment brand in the long term to identify mutually beneficial solutions. Below are two ideas to consider, along with related benefits and risks, in order to help you get high quality talent in the door while providing candidates with career enhancing opportunities:
1. Candidate takes a temporary or project-based consulting gig.
- Benefit: Hiring these candidates for a short-term assignment helps your organization secure proven performers for your most critical projects while providing development for your permanent team. This candidate continues to receive income, keeps her skills fresh, and avoids the dreaded resume gap – but also avoids attaching themselves to a lower salary. Your employment brand benefits from buzz about your continuation of at least some hiring.
- Risk: Freelance candidates may exit (too) quickly upon finding a permanent position elsewhere, and not all projects are suited for temporary hiring. Discrete projects should be well-defined and well-scoped in terms of timelines, which is not always easy in today’s relatively volatile market.
2. Candidate takes a pay cut or title demotion.
- Benefit: There is the potential to save money by getting “more talent for less.” Teams that hire under these circumstances (instead of waiting) could be well-positioned to respond to increased business volume once the economy bounces back because they will already be well-staffed with experienced talent.
- Risk: Consider this option carefully to avoid harming your employment brand in the long run. However, if you can predict which business units are likely to bounce back first, talk with the hiring manager to determine whether the candidate would be near the front of the line for a promotion once recovery begins if the new hire quickly exceeds performance expectations. Make sure to communicate the appropriate protocols and performance expectations to the candidate as well so that mutual expectations are set in advance.
Focusing on identifying mutually beneficial solutions can help you benefit from available talent in the short-run while building – not breaking – relationships with key talent for the long-run.
Written by: Elle Littlefield
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