In targeting top professionals who are already enjoying great success in their current position, you need to get them excited so that they are willing to open their mind to other opportunities. Since recruiting is essentially a sales skill, there is simply no way you can “sell” to someone if all your doing is informing them of all the things you want from them before you even have their interest. Having said that, there are people who look at job descriptions all day and have no issue with all the demands listed within job descriptions but you won’t want them on your team.
At Bangkok Executive Search, we don’t use job descriptions as everyone knows what they are…a long series of duties and qualifications required by the company. The reason we don’t need them is because we are very targeted in our approach in finding the perfect candidate for our Southeast Asian clients. Furthermore, we already know in advance that the people we are going to contacting regarding the opportunity have the necessary skills and experience for the role.
Once we speak to the people we have identified as ideal candidates for the role, we begin to sell the company and the opportunity. What companies need to realize is that top performers do not have a need to find a job, they already have a very good one at the time we call them. What we do at Bangkok Executive Search is create a need and a desire to learn more about the opportunity. The ability to create this “need” comes from alot of pre-call planning as you can’t just call a top executive without already knowing something about them. We look into things such as current company background (are they doing well, has there been lots of turnover, what are people saying about the company, are there any rumors that could be affecting revenue or the ability to attract talent, do they pay well, etc.), what future opportunities within the company are available to the candidate and what is a realistic timeline for any future promotion, is there alot of travel, etc. Once we know all of these things, we are able to call the candidate with a custom tailored pitch that gains their interest because we are targeting things relevant to them.
In comparison, a job description is written for the masses and comes across as impersonal. It also violates one of the fundamental rules of sales…know your audience. If a company writes something for everyone, it essentially has no audience as it will not have any relevance to the needs and desires of top professionals. As an experienced search firm in Southeast Asia, we know that unemployed people are looking for jobs, which is why a “job description” is such a disastrous tool.
Southeast Asian companies should also consider their own goods and services and why people need them. It’s actually really simply…those goods and services offer a solution to a customer need or a desire. Can you imagine a company trying to sell something if it only spoke to the reasons it would be good for the company if you purchased them? “We want you to buy our new running shoes so that we can be profitable and our executive team can get their quarterly bonuses!” is not a good advertisement or a reason to buy. So why would you try to sell the a job to the people you want with such a lousy approach that clearly does not work?
