How to Headhunt Talent

In Just 4 Easy Steps

Author

Benjamin Morone
May 29, 2024

Welcome back to the Hiring From Europe & LatAm Newsletter, it’s Ben.

In today’s newsletter, we’re going to go over:

  • How to Headhunt Talent

  • Some great content about hiring

How to Headhunt Talent 👤

It’s easy to get a bunch of B-players and placeholder talent if you put up a job post on LinkedIn or other job board. Like anything in life, if it comes too easy it is not generally valuable. The best talent won’t just land in your lap, you need to actively hunt it out. Yes it takes time, but it is totally worth it. After all the difference between a 8/10 employee and a 9.5/10 employee is massive.

This is exactly how you can start head hunting the talent that you want.

  1. Analyze Your Company

    Before starting the search for your next hire, you need to analyze your company characteristics such as head count, industry, revenue and culture. Reason being is that we want to find talent that is in a company of a similar size (or slightly bigger), industry and culture. This will help minimize the ramp up time since the candidate will not have to learn your industry, or get used to working in your company’s team size.

  2. Generate Company List

    Since we have the headcount from the previous step, we can open Sales Navigator and search for companies with our desired headcount, industry, and role.

  3. Generate Candidate List

    This is the section where you’ll start to narrow down who you want. In this example we are going to be hiring for a project manager and we will use LinkedIn to search for them. In order to really find the exact titles we want, we will use a highly targeted search method called LinkedIn Boolean Search. By using Boolean operators, you can create complex search strings to include, exclude, or combine various keywords and criteria.

    Boolean Operators:

    AND

    Narrows the search by including profiles that contain all the specified terms.

    Example: Marketing AND "Project Management" will return profiles that include both "Marketing" and "Project Management."

    OR

    Broadens the search by including profiles that contain any of the specified terms.

    Example: Developer OR Engineer will return profiles that include either "Developer" or "Engineer."

    NOT

    Excludes profiles that contain the specified term.

    Example: Manager NOT Sales will return profiles that include "Manager" but exclude those that mention "Sales."

    Quotation Marks ("")

    Searches for exact phrases or terms.

    Example: "Product Manager" will return profiles that include the exact phrase "Product Manager."

    Parentheses (())

    Groups terms and operators to control the order of operations in the search.

    Example: (Engineer OR Developer) AND "Project Manager" will return profiles that include either "Engineer" or "Developer" and also include "Project Manager."

If we utilize the boolean search operators we will generate a list of thousands of applicants. From here we need to filter by country and the companies from step 2.

  1. Outreach to Candidates

    This is almost the exact same process as cold outreach on the sales front. We will be cold outreaching to the list of candidates with a message asking if they are “open to new opportunities.”

    We’ve tested a lot of different messaging techniques and scripts, but the one that consistently gets results contains “Are you maybe open to new opportunities?”

    Once you have an interested candidate, set up a time to meet and brief them on the role. If they are interested, then turn the call into a screening interview and proceed down your normal recruitment path.

Great Content Related to Hiring:

How We Can Help

  • There’s over 100 videos on our Youtube channel about all things recruitment

  • If you’re curious about where to find remote talent, we have a free guide that shows you exactly where to look.

  • If you’d like help finding the perfect fit for you team, click here to learn more.