If you post it, they will come? (Or why posting and praying is not a strategy)

If you’ve ever been in the market to buy a house, you know that sometimes the best homes are the ones that aren’t on the market yet. And finding one just before it becomes available—before you have to deal with offers, counter-offers and bidding wars—can seem like finding gold. 

This analogy can easily be applied to finding top talent for your company’s most important positions. 

Why “posting and praying” is not a strategy 

The fact is that if you’re simply posting a position online and hoping “they” will come, what you often get is a slew of applications from candidates who are also applying for multiple positions—including to your competitors. This means you’re likely to immediately be in competition with other companies, and you could end up paying more for a candidate who’s not even the best fit for you. 

If you’re looking to find candidates via a LinkedIn post, you’re, in effect, waiting for the stars to align: The right person must happen to be online at just the right time, then happen to see your post and not only have the time to click on it, but also respond to it. 

Reality check: The best candidates are often busy doing their jobs, so they may or may not end up responding to posts like this. 

On the flipside, savvy companies are always on the lookout for the candidates who aren’t daily scanning job boards. They want to know who the best potentially available candidates are—not the most readily available candidates. 

And honestly, this takes work. It takes knowing the market and the pool of candidates within each. It takes having connections and cultivating connections. It requires sweat equity and a lot of time. 

The value of a recruiter 

Clients come to us because they want the best candidates possible. According to a recent article in YFS magazine, “Trained recruiters use their time more effectively and will get you better results.” 

And at The Bridger Group, this means we take the time to identify every qualified candidate out there in your niche—whether they’re actively looking to make a move or not. We then reach out to each one of them. By doing this, we know we can find the best possible candidates out there. We then pitch your company and your story to them, and while they might not all be looking to leave, for the right opportunity, many just might decide to make a move. 

Let’s return to the house analogy. 

In your search for a new house, you could simply opt for scanning a list of houses already on the market and already available. 

But what if you drew a circle around the neighborhood that you really, really want to live in and then knocked on the door of every single one of those homes to tell your story to the owner and ask them if they might be willing to sell their home to you?   

The result just might be that you find the perfect home, in the perfect neighborhood—a home that you would not even have known existed until you took the time to ask. 

This is the kind of work a recruiter can do for you. We take the time to knock on every single door until we find the right fit for you. 

Want to talk to a recruiter about adding top talent to your team? 

Contact us today to get started!