Find the Best Project Management Candidates
Project management recruiting is part art, part science. You want to fill the vacancy with the best person for the job. And these days, it often doesn’t matter where that person is based.
In theory, that should make it easier to find the perfect hire for your project management team. But in our experience, it makes it harder. Your pool of people just expanded across the world… and some of the best potential candidates aren’t even looking for work.
Today we’re talking about project management recruiting. Here are the 5 best ways to find project management candidates and your next top performers.
1. Personal recommendations
Ask your current experienced staff to suggest candidates from their networks who might be a good fit for your business. It’s always good to get a personal recommendation for someone to fill your vacancy.
Many firms offer a hiring incentive fee to employees who introduce successful candidates. If you are going to do that, make sure you’ve set the terms and conditions appropriately. For example, you might want to say that the incentive is only payable once the new hire has completed their induction period.
2. Social networks
There are plenty of candidates looking for jobs on social networks, especially LinkedIn. If you have the time, you can use a keyword search to identify candidates in your local area who are looking for work. Reach out to those who have profiles that reflect the expertise you are looking for.
This can be a time-consuming approach. LinkedIn has a specific recruitment tool that you can use to integrate with your applicant tracking system. This might be a good option if you have substantial hiring needs, but it might not be a good fit for finding one or two candidates.
It’s also an increasingly competitive market… for candidates. Top candidates are regularly pitched for work by recruiters who want to encourage them to jump ship and move to their businesses. LinkedIn’s research says that engaging passive candidates is going to be an increasing important skill in the years to come because the best people aren’t actively job seeking.
3. Recruitment agencies
If you are too busy to trawl social media looking for the perfect hire, a recruitment agency can do it for you. They typically charge a fee for their service equivalent to a percentage of the employee’s salary for several months.
Check the terms carefully before you sign up to an agency arrangement because you could find yourself incurring fees even if the candidate is placed in a different role in your business, or chooses to leave.
Many recruitment agencies take a broad approach and are used to finding candidates for a variety of industries and professions. As you are talking to different agencies, try to get a feel for which of their recruitment consultants has the best knowledge of the project management field. You’ll have more confidence knowing that they understand the needs of your business and the exact delivery and tech skills you are looking for. The more they know about what’s important in project management recruitment specifically, the more they’ll be able to match your candidate brief to someone on their database.
Outsourcing project management recruitment to a third party doesn’t free up all your time. You’ll still need to find time to adequately brief the agency so they can match you to candidates. And, of course, you still have to meet and interview the shortlist.
4. Online job boards
Remember the days when jobs used to be posted in the business section of the newspapers? Today, those broadsheets have been replaced by the internet. There are job boards aplenty, many seemingly aggregating job adverts from other sources.
Posting an online recruitment ad is easy and cost effective. You’ll reach hundreds (potentially thousands) of relevant, available candidates. The only challenge is dealing with the inevitable influx of applications.
You can make your application process a little bit tricky, for example asking candidates to complete a form instead of simply sending their resume. This will discourage people who are simply sending their resume to any job that looks vaguely relevant and gives you fewer applications to sift through. However, you still have to have time available to review applications, select a shortlist and take candidates through the whole journey to finally hiring someone.
5. Staff augmentation
Another challenge with project management recruiting is that often you only want someone to join the team for the life of a project. Perhaps you are setting up a PMO. Perhaps you won a new contract and the program needs creating. Whatever the reason, the nature of project work is that it comes to an end.
Project management staff augmentation is a flexible way of adding skilled resources to your team without having to go through the hurdles of creating a permanent position.
Whether you are looking for a project manager for a particular assignment, a technical wizard to set up your enterprise tools or someone to build out new services for the PMO, augmenting the team with best project management candidates is a low stress way to meet your goals.
Ten Six can supply you with skilled staff to take the headache out of finding your perfect hire and let you focus instead on delivering successful results.