When recruiting athletes, an Olympic team is not just going out a checking a database.  They are proactively scouring the countryside and engaging in team marketing.  The good news is that team marketing and talent scouting are not concepts exclusive to sports.  Your organization can do much the same thing.  Before you decide that this is something that you want to do it is important to realize that there will be both opportunity costs and budgetary decisions to be made.

The first opportunity cost comes in the form of time.  You and your team will have to spend time outside of the office.  And by team I don’t mean that you are just going to be sending your recruiter or admin out.  If you want to bring them along with you then great, but your team – you, your star players, and maybe even a few of your second string players need to coordinate your efforts when it comes to talent scouting and marketing your organization.  Oh, one more thing – your marketing team may have some good advice but they are usually not going to be able to accomplish what you can so don’t event think about delegating this to them either (unless your team is marketing and that’s a different story).

Once you have a team you can get started.  The good news is that by getting out of the office with your team members you won’t lose anything except for time.  The bad news is that you will lose time.  By contrast, if your organization hires bad people or doesn’t hire the people that you need then you will all lose even more time.  Just remember that your actions today determine your success or failure tomorrow.  Do you really want to hire a staffing agency that will warp your message and focus 100% of their attention on the low hanging fruit?  The success of our Olympic team and of college and pro sports teams isn’t an accident, neither should your organization’s success so get over the initial time loss.

Now remember that talent scouting does not mean that you go to an event with the notion of coming home with a hire.  The process of talent scouting in person isn’t something that happens overnight.  You have to commit yourself to it and to getting to know members of the community.  You also have to realize that some of the best people are going to come from referrals made by others who you might not be potential candidates (ever).  And believe me, if you go into a group and don’t get into the subject matter that the attendees are talking about then you are in for a different experience.  You will be bored, uninspired, and so will your conversations.  People will not want to talk to you.  With that said, you need to invest some time as an individual in becoming a scholar on the subject mater, even if this means that you are an amateur scholar. 

One personal example that I can share is with the Ruby on Rails community here in Washington, DC.  I read two books on Ruby on Rails programming and development practices and read countless blogs before I ever attended a Ruby on Rails user group.  That was about three years ago.  Today when I walk into meetings I am still reading up on Ruby on Rails and the community.  It can mean the difference of whether or not you can have a conversation or just recruit people.

So far I’ve talked primarily about talent scouting.  Let’s change the subject for a moment.  If hiring team members with Olympian abilities was as simple as herding people then resume databases and Linkedin would get the job done.  The hardest part isn’t figuring out who to talk to, it is winning them over.  Now I’m not talking about how to win people over in some sort of generic play by play method or process.  There are probably a few things to be said about having some sort of process (I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly), but what is important here is having conversations with the people who you want to win over and listening to what is important to them.  If you listen long enough you will start to learn that what people think is important usually is not.

What people want is often reduced to money, commute and growth.  For the sake of brevity I’m leaving out a few other big box categories.  If you approach people with this mindset you may win over the people who are looking for jobs because they just got fired by their third boss in a row or who are ready to jump ship for the third time in three years.  You will not win over your next star team player that way (not on that basis alone).  So the message here is to listen to what people want and decide if your company can offer that to them or not.  If it can then don’t wait until they have jumped into your ship to implement these measures – do it now.  Great minds think alike and your own team members will probably appreciate the same things that your future team members will.