Add This One Word To Every Job Description

Add this one word to every job description:

Scout.

The success of your organization depends, in part, on finding, attracting, hiring, and developing individuals with the right mix of knowledge, skills, abilities, motivation, and values alignment. 

But before you can attract, hire, and develop a future workforce, you have to find them. Some organizations rely entirely on their human resources department to source – scout – any and all potential hires. This mindset or way of operating unnecessarily restricts the number of eyeballs looking for future teammates. Finding potential candidates becomes the responsibility of one or just a few people. Yikes.

Instead, organizations should develop a culture where every employee is on the lookout for their next great teammate. I’m not advocating for every employee to be a recruiter since there is a science and art to recruiting. They can, however, scout – observe and gather information on – vendors, suppliers, customers, clients, students, and even “competitors.” The information gathered by employees can then be shared with human resources to make their sourcing and recruiting efforts more efficient and effective.

When an organization empowers every employee to becomes a scout, it increases its capacity to collect more information on a larger pool of potential candidates, which can lead to more insightful talent acquisition decisions. It also signals to employees that they have an important role to play in helping to build their future team.

Every employee a scout.

[Originally published on LinkedIn on September 27, 2020: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/add-one-word-every-job-description-bill-leonard-mhrm/]