Typing that made me think of the 80’s band Aha – ahhh Morten Harket.. Anyway, back to business! Searching for candidates these days is no longer a situation of posting an ad on Jobserve or wherever and waiting for those candidates to come to you. As mentioned in a previous post, it really is a candidates market and so it is the job of a recruiter (corporate or agency) to hunt for the best candidates to fill their vacancies.
There are various methods of doing this and one of my favourite is Linked In (also previously mentioned!) You have to upgrade your account to a “Business Account” in order to email candidates directly rather than having to rely on the introduction method. One company I am looking at right now is UBS having heard that they are outsourcing the work of some of their development teams to Switzerland. Assuming that not all of those developers want to work in Switzerland, I am using LinkedIn to try to track them down! If you know of (or are on) the team/s in UBS that are being outsourced to Zurich – feel free to let me know!
Another method for finding candidates that I think is really cool is to create a “hot list”. That is, speak with your colleagues and get them to list those people you that they would love to work with (Pamela Anderson is obviously not the kind of preference that we’d consider!) and then contact those people to tempt them to your company throughout the year. Unless they have told you to go away, contact them every few months, find out what they are doing, what they are interested in and what could tempt them away from their current employer.
