Get the Talent You Need: 5 Tips for Any Market

We sat down with Tim Smith, Managing Director of Growth & Strategy at The Imagine Group, to talk about one of the biggest challenges employers are facing today: attracting and hiring great talent in a market where strong candidates have options. In this article, Tim shares five practical ways companies can rethink their recruiting process, create a better candidate experience, and ultimately put themselves in a stronger position to win the talent they need.

Solid candidates continue to have options, which makes it harder and more expensive to hire the talent your business needs. You can turn that challenge into an advantage, because most companies still hire poorly. The following five tips will help you evaluate your recruiting process and deliver an experience that wins candidates over.

1. 1. Be organized.

Keep a current list of open positions and know the details of each one. Every opening should have a focused job description that explains why the role matters. Then document the candidate journey from start to finish. Who participates, what is their role, and what gets communicated at each step? Confusion reads as dysfunction, and candidates assume the job will feel the same way.

2. Be prepared.

Read the resume before the conversation, not during it. Look at their public profiles and shared connections. Then commit to immediate feedback. Schedule the internal debrief the same day and contact the candidate promptly, even when the answer is no or not yet. In a market where ghosting is at record levels, simply closing the loop puts you ahead of most of your competition.

3. Change your attitude.

The candidate is not your adversary. They are not an inconvenience. They are your future. Start by welcoming them, walking through your process, and setting expectations. A defensive or nervous candidate cannot show you who they really are, and you lose the ability to evaluate clearly. You are also being evaluated. Even if this person is not the right fit, they know someone who is.

4. Screen in, don’t screen out.

Ask exploratory questions that look for reasons to hire rather than reasons to reject. This applies to your software as much as your people. If an automated tool is making the first cut, make sure a human reviews the borderline cases, because keyword filters miss capable people every day.

5. Hire a professional.

Look honestly at your internal team’s strengths and capacity. A professional recruiting partner maintains pipelines you don’t have, screens in ways you can’t, and searches in places you shouldn’t. The cost of a partner is real, but so is the cost of the vacancy. SHRM’s latest benchmarking puts the average cost per hire at roughly $5,500 for non-executive roles and nearly $36,000 for executive hires, a number that has jumped more than 20 percent since 2022, and that is before you count the lost productivity and delayed revenue of the open seat itself. Offering a top-notch hiring experience is not complicated, but it does take focused action and an honest look at your approach. What would a candidate say about yours?

At The Imagine Group, we help organizations build stronger teams through a recruiting approach that goes beyond simply filling an open seat. From identifying and engaging top talent to screening, evaluating, and guiding candidates through the process, our team brings the expertise and reach needed to make hiring more effective—and more human.

If your organization is ready to rethink the way you hire, let’s imagine what’s possible with the right talent behind you.

Categorised in: Blog

This post was written by Meghan Mileham