How to squeeze the most juice out of your recruitment partners
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Talent pools are tightening and fast. With a greater focus on grid capacity needing to be made for renewables and the rapid development of innovative projects in emerging markets, certain skills are becoming more and more difficult to source and secure.
Why not turn to hiring with recruiters and partner with a reputable recruitment agency that will guarantee the process is a success. If you keep reading, we’ll even tell you how to get the most bang for your buck when you select and engage with a knowledgeable recruitment firm.
Why us?
Operating in the niche market of renewable energy recruitment means that we have had to build a multidimensional team of experts. Our recruiters don’t have a background in sales, they have postgraduate degrees in engineering, the sciences, business, finance, law, marketing, and business development. This coupled with their extensive experience in the renewables and sustainability recruitment industry, has equipped AltGen with the expertise to effectively interpret and develop deep insights on the market.
Communicating early on with your recruiter is key.
We find that clients who engage with us at an earlier stage of the budget and resource planning phases have far more success in meeting their hiring milestones. Niche industry knowledge can yield valuable insights into the details of the skills availability landscape and the certain roles that an employer can leverage to assist them in planning and budgeting more strategically.
Insights into particulars like restraints of trade, long notice periods, and relocation requirements where skills are scarce for example, are all details that AltGen’s recruiters collect from the very first screening session of a candidate and which we build into our repertoire of knowledge. The value of this information goes a step further than this – the nuances of motivators are a key component of understanding the market and what the push and pull factors that attract and retain talent are. Our onboarding processes for both clients and candidates are extensive, we do the deep-dive research so that you don’t have to.
Something as simple as sharing your anticipated annual hiring plan (or looser objectives) with our recruitment team well-ahead of hiring deadlines can help to deliver great candidates – on time 😉 – ensuring that clients can cherry pick the best talent in industry. In most cases, top talent may be in the throes of thinking about a career change. It’s best to catch them before they enrol in recruitment processes and the competition rises.
Although the renewable energy industry requires a certain level of urgency, we’re still in the business of people – people don’t like to be rushed. Candidates need time to organise their lives, and as employers, you need to feel in control and confident about your hiring decisions and meeting those hiring goals.
Leverage our industry insights to ensure that you are communicating the role as clearly and accurately as possible. Have you been looking for a BDM, or are you actually looking for someone entirely different? We are here to advise you and encourage dialogue about what the skills are looking to move for, and what to look out for when it comes to creating a job description that not only helps your firm to meet its project and pipeline objectives, but to attract and retain those skills too!
Food for thought whilst talking to your recruiter:
- Is it possible to make use of transferable skills for this role?
- What skills are most scarce in my industry?
- Which roles should I been planning for already?
- What do movers and shakers want to sink their teeth into and how does that dovetail with what we need?
- Can we hire one professional or two professionals down the line to achieve our goals, how is experience and skills adapting to a changing energy environment?
Why using AI to develop your hiring strategy won’t work
Effective planning strategies save you operational time and give you the space to achieve your project targets at minimal cost. One of your most trusty tools in your planning strategy toolkit is undoubtedly a hiring strategy. The industry has seen a noticeable shift towards the use of AI technology in the hiring process to source, screen, interview prospective candidates, and (you can see where we’re going with this) to develop hiring strategies. This shift has not necessarily yielded better results. This is indicative in the fact that there is still a demand for recruitment agencies.
“There’s an art to recruitment. It’s not just about matching candidates to jobs; if that was the case, the would have died out a long time ago. It’s about being able to accurately read a given situation to see what a client really needs, even if they don’t see it themselves yet. It’s about being able to bucarefully calibrate all stages of the recruitment process to ensure the right result for all parties.”
Alice Weightman of Hansen Search
(Source: Link)
In line with Weightman’s thinking, we would argue that there is more to a hiring strategy than statistics and numbers, and the data you need to make informed and sustainable hires is not necessarily available on the internet. What you need is first-hand information from prospective candidates and potential industry partners. That information can only be gleaned through direct interaction with these parties.
That’s where we come in.
While you are providing our recruitment team with as much information as possible about the role, we aim to provide you with as much information about candidates as possible.
The details that you give us, help us frame your thoughts for you. In other words, knowing precisely what role you are looking to fill, allows us to advise you on what skills would realistically and really be best suited to fill it. But that’s not all. During this process, you have the opportunity to ask your recruiter for industry specific information that only they have. For example, you can ask your recruiter for advice on salary benchmarking for a specific skillset. Their direct and in-depth engagement with candidates means they know what’s happening on the ground. The answer to this single simple question has the potential to assist you in establishing your hiring budget for the year!
Developing your employee value proposition strategy:
Attracting passive candidates in a highly competitive market is becoming increasingly difficult, and with it, building a strong employer brand is becoming increasingly more important. Investing in your brand image makes your company three times more likely to make a quality hire.
Knowing where to start can be difficult. As the bridge of communication between candidates and clients, our recruiters have the golden nuggets of information that will help your company hone in on your ideal hires. Having established personal connections with each and every candidate, our network of quality skills are more likely to confide in our recruiters than their prospective or past employers. We know why candidates are moving, what they are moving for, and how the competitive landscape for skills is evolving.
Next time you are on the line, lean on your recruiter to help your firm more effectively achieve your hiring objectives. Food for thought…
- How do candidates perceive your brand?
- Do they have a perception of your brand at all?
- How are companies retaining their talent and what are the motivators driving candidates to leave their firms?
- What kind of benefits are trending?
- Should I be offering a revised salary, benefits and commission package or am I on-par with industry standards?
- Have I given our firm enough time to achieve the hiring milestones in accordance with our sales/project pipeline?
- How has the interview and onboarding processes changed in industry?
- How do I ensure that you as the recruiter secure that my firm has first choice on exceptional talent as and when they looking to move?
- Any scarce skills you want us to keep a beady eye out for?
- When do you want us to be in contact with you and help you to effectively project manage your resourcing goals? In short, let us do the heavy lifting for you!
