Jobhop Jobhop's blog : Digital Talent Won’t Wait For Slow Employers

Employers regularly talk about “the lack of digital talent” and how they can’t find the right people but then do nothing to hook and reel them in.

This is the dilemma, the UK has a huge shortfall of digital talent, currently there are many employers chasing the same few digital candidates.

O2 did a study which reported that Britain will have 750,000 unfilled digital jobs by 2017! That means every Tom, Dick and Harry will be fighting for digital talent to go and work for them, if you want them to work for you then you better up your game.

You need to go from mediocre employer to rockstar employer pretty quickly, otherwise all the great candidates will just bypass you and go to your competitors.

Let’s assume that your company culture is hunky dory and that social flows whilst your employee advocacy grows. If this isn’t the case then you need to sort that out first otherwise attracting great digital talent is never going to happen.

If you’re certain that your company culture has bragging rights and your employees are your ambassadors then the challenge is to move fast. You want to move so fast that you’ve got candidates for potential job vacancies a long time before the vacancies become available.

Create communities

If you know that the company is going to be expanding, or you know that a certain type of person will be required in the future then don’t wait until it happens, prepare for it now.

Start engaging with the types of people that you would want to employ, get to know them, let them get to know you. Filling positions with great talent will become a lot easier and faster because you now know them and they know and trust you.

Scrap the CV

You come across a great candidate and they seem quite interested in your company, there’s a good flow between both of you. You then stop the flow abruptly by saying “send me your CV please” You’ve gone back to being a slow, mediocre employer. The fast rockstar employers have read the candidate’s online profiles, had a skype chat and booked in an interview, not once did they ask for a CV. The fast rockstar employer knows that there’s no time for a CV, if they don’t act immediately then their competitor will.

Respond quickly

You’ve acted fast, you’ve had a successful interview with the candidate but then you go and ruin everything by taking a week to get back to them. Of course it wasn’t your fault, you had to interview someone else and then the decision was quite a tough one. But your highly skilled digital candidate is offended, they now see your company as slow to act, and that’s not a type of company they’d like to work for. They don’t need your job, they’ve got a queue waiting to employ them.

Your ideal digital candidate could be snapped up within hours of coming onto the market, your speed of hire is massively important if you want to beat your competitors. Remember that many top candidates never come onto the market, the minute they change something on their online profile the rockstar employers have sniffed them out, that’s how fast you have to be.

Don’t get a reputation for being a slow employer, it could kill your business.

JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.

Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk

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