Top 10 Recruiting and Hiring Lessons We Learned in 2012

December 17, 2012

We’re looking back on the most impactful recruiting and hiring lessons 2012 had to offer. How many of these have you taken to heart?

Our Top 10 Recruiting and Hiring Lessons from 2012

Following last week’s review of Our 10 Most Popular Sales Insights of 2012, we’re turning our attention to your company’s most valuable (and hotly contested) resource: talent.

If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a new War for Talent going on, and these lessons — on topics from online tools to the role of benefits and your company culture — may just give you the edge you need to stay competitive and build the best team possible in 2013.

There Are Six Roles You Absolutely Need to Nail Down

When your company makes the transition to the expansion stage and gets ready to hit the gas to growth, you want to be sure you have the right team behind the wheel. The need to fill new roles to address new challenges, and in this post OpenView’s Lindsey Gurian lays out the six most crucial along with the characteristics that mark the ideal candidates.

 

LinkedIn’s Days as the #1 Online Recruiting Platform May Be Numbered

Sure, LinkedIn may be the online recruiting platform for now, but as Linsey Fryatt writes in this post for VentureBeat, the networking behemoth may finally be facing some innovative and disruptive new challengers. Fryatt highlights Geekli.st as one of the alternatives receiving a lot of hype, with a more community-driven approach and a list of A-list early adopters. Could this be where online recruiting is heading in 2013?

 

A Job Offer with a Dull Title May Not Smell As Sweet

Want to see your inbox flooded with high-quality applicants and the top talent you have stick with you for years to come? Part of the solution may be as easy as assigning your positions more compelling titles. In this post published on ERE.net, HR expert Dr. John Sullivan explains why exciting job titles “may have the highest ROI of any single recruiting and retention tool.” After all, the cost is, well, zilch. Read on for creative examples of companies applying this lesson to fantastic results.

 

You Won’t Find the Best Tech Talent on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter

Still sticking to the “Big Three” social networks for your online recruiting outreach? With landing a top-end developer becoming more and more like finding a needle in a haystack, doesn’t it make sense to switch to a smaller haystack where you know the needles hang out? Okay, so that metaphor may be a bit of a stretch, but as Scott Rothrock, co-founder of RemarkableHire writes in this post for Mashable, you’ll have much more luck securing tech talent by getting proactive and taking your search to the niche social sites where the best and brightest spend their time.

A Good Developer Is Hard to Find, But Does It Have to Be?

You may notice a theme here — tech recruiting has gotten incredibly competitive and supply simply isn’t keeping up with the exploding demand. The overarching lesson here is that you can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results. In addition to Geekli.st and the resources Rothrock provides above, another new service worth checking out is Gild, a service that functions like a Klout for developers. Arik Hesseldahl gives you the scoop in this post from AllThingsD.

The Future is All About Culture: Get Ready for Recruiting 3.0

With the shortage of top tech talent, it’s no surprise companies are working to highlight any and every competitive advantage. In this post for TLNT, Ron Thomas, Principle at StrategyFocusedHR, describes the greatest campaign for a senior executive he’s ever seen. The lesson Thomas takes away? Company culture is going to be what the future of recruiting is all about. Read on for tips on bringing Recruiting 3.0 to your organization.

Your First Sales Manager Needs to Produce More than Just Revenue

sales managerIn this post Colleen Francis, founder and president of Engage Selling Solutions, provides 10 tips for companies hiring their first sales manager, and reveals that not all of the benchmarks they should be measuring will be revenue-based. Read on to discover the right experience and characteristics you should be looking for in this critical hire, and learn from Colleen’s advice on how to go out and get the best candidate possible.

 

To Recruit Like Today’s Top Tech Companies You’ve Got to Have the Right Tools

hiring toolsWhat sets the best tech companies apart when it comes to hiring top talent? Here’s a secret: they all have access to the best tools. In this post, John Greathouse, partner at Rincon Venture Partners, provides a list of SaaS hiring tools that can help you level the playing field by lowering your hiring costs, shortening the process, and successfully targeting the best of the best.

 

There’s No Such Thing as the Ideal Inside Sales Candidate

Kevin Gaither, VP of Inside Sales at uSamp, gets one particular question a lot: What does the ideal sales candidate look like? And how can I find, recruit, and hire them? Unfortunately, he’s got news for you: the “ideal” candidate doesn’t exist. There are, however, specific characteristics that are prime indicators of success. Call of the snipe hunt and learn how to identify the key components that make up a true winner.

When It Comes to Benefits, It Pays to Think Outside the Box

When the competition for talent is tight, but so is your budget, what’s a growing company to do? In this post for Inc., Erik Sherman offers examples of innovative companies turning to creative benefits to give themselves a unique competitive edge. Find out how a little creativity can help both your recruiting and retention in 2013.

We want to hear from you!

What recruiting lessons did you learn in 2012? What hiring tools and best practices will you be utilizing in 2013?

OpenView, the expansion stage venture firm, helps build software companies into market leaders. Through our Expansion Platform, we help companies hire the best talent, acquire and retain the right customers and partner with industry leaders so they can dominate their markets. Our focus on the expansion stage makes us uniquely suited to provide truly tailored operational support to our portfolio companies. Learn more about OpenView at openviewpartners.com.