1. Only 1 Way to Recruit Talent
For a thought experiment (and to encourage creative conversation), I recently asked a few
recruiting friends, “If you were left with only one method or tool for recruiting talent, what
would you use?”
I’ve listed a few responses below and included some dialogue regarding pros and cons of
each. Hopefully this discussion will help recruiters and recruiting leaders focus their energies
on those tools that actually bring value to their organizations.
This list is presented in no particular order.
Employee Referrals: Traditional employee referral programs tend to fail because they don’t
excite employees. Too often referrals are advertised on the intranet, posters in the break
room, or distributed via internal mass emails, so this communication just becomes
background noise. These programs don’t engage the vast majority of your employee base.
If recruiters, however, only had a referral program as their sole launching pad for filling
positions, they could have solid success. Instead of advertising the program, recruiters would
pick up the phone and proactively ask for referrals from employees on a regular basis. From
that starting point, recruiters could have rich and thorough conversations with referrals from
their current employees who may be the right fit for a position or point them to the right
candidate. This high-touch methodology would certainly turn up passive candidates that none
of your competitors are actively pursuing. The sheer size of your employees’ first and second
level connections could fill a talent pipeline for a long while.
Existing ATS: In general, most companies underuse their current database of candidates.
Compounding this reality is the fact they’ve paid a lot of money to attract candidates to their
application process in the first place. For large, well-established organizations, an ATS could
mean access to millions of candidates. The biggest challenge then becomes effectively
mining the database, but left with only one recruiting approach, relying on an ATS could very
well be the best option. If used wisely, by creating talent communities and folders, an ATS
can be a great stand-alone recruiting tool. Positions not filled directly by candidates housed in
the database, could lead to referrals and hires down the road.
LinkedIn: Having a dedicated recruiter for LinkedIn searches, introductions, and resulting
conversations can result in attractive talent. Since LinkedIn allows recruiters to quickly locate
candidates who appear to be a close match to their needs, this tool has a great advantage over
several options listed here. However, recruiters tend to start these conversations cold, and this
barrier can create resistance to success. For an organization with a low volume of high-niche
positions, LinkedIn could be the best go-to tool.
Search Engine Sourcing: Starting a search with the empty box of a search engine can be a
daunting first step, but top-notch sourcers can unearth contact information and initiate
conversations with talent that no one else is engaging. The weakness of this approach is the
energy and time it takes to find candidates. Although much of the search engine process can
be automated across several sites, the process still has flaws since connectivity to these
candidates is usually pretty weak (as opposed to a referral) so you may have to turn over a lot
of rocks to find an interested candidate.

2. The Phone: Not to be overly simplistic, the old-school recruiters might think it’s best to just
start making cold calls to competitors as their starting point. Since fewer recruiters are
pounding the phone these days this could be a fairly effective, if not time-consuming,
activity. For companies with a high volume of openings this might not be the most practical
approach.
Job Boards: This is an obvious choice to discount as a main/only source to find talent. Not
only does post and pray not produce the best candidate pool, it also is the only expensive
option listed here. However, I would say it has one advantage over all the others above: ease
of use. For small companies without robust ATS’s that are mainly filling low-level positions,
this may actually be the best option, especially if they don’t have dedicated recruiting
support. Most companies are much more complex and require more assertive tactics to fill
their positions.
I would love to hear other recruiters’ thoughts on what tools/methods they would use if they
were left with only one way to fill positions. Additionally, the common thread in most of
these techniques is the ability to engage a candidate and then ask for referrals — this is the
relationship nature of recruiting. Those recruiters that are strong on the relational side of the
business will always