This article is a little different from my usual but was sparked by an incredibly exciting event in my professional career: hiring my first official direct report!

Though direct management experience will be a first-time experience for me, I’ve spent a lot of time researching, learning about, and putting into practice some best-in-class hiring practices. From taking courses in recruiting to interviewing in others’ hiring loops to networking to help colleagues find new talent pools, I’ve gained a lot of great tips along the way that have made me super proud of the candidates I’ve sourced for my own direct hire.

Start with Referrals

This is an awesome way to quickly start seeing candidates. Don’t be shy to ask previous colleagues, current colleagues, and beyond if they know anyone qualified for the position. Be even more proactive and peruse the networks of colleagues you trust using tools like LinkedIn. Asking for introductions can often be easier than asking someone to pull a name out a hat for your role, so get creative and go hunting for them.

It’s important to note that while referrals are an amazing way to beef up a candidate pool and they often come with glowing recommendations from the colleagues that refer them, recruiting and hiring solely in network can be detrimental to hiring diversely. Not only will you likely source most of your candidates from a small group of companies, which can lead to cultural baggage being brought to your company, but you also open yourself up to recruiting from racially, culturally, gender homogenous networks.

Referrals are an awesome start to the process, but you must be cognizant of the effort placed by individuals to create diversity in their own networks. To combat this, it’s important to further expand your pool of candidates and keep an open mind to all candidates rather than overweighting a referral.

For me, this meant constantly bugging every coworker I knew to look in their networks as well as using my LinkedIn to find 2nd degree connections with people I trusted. This helped me pick up around 25% of my candidate pool, and set a starting point for what skill sets to search for in other candidates.

Network, Network, Network

Hiring doesn’t start when the job post goes up. A good hiring manager is consistently networking to find quality candidates for their next role. Admittedly, this is one of the toughest ways to recruit good candidates, as it falls on the hiring manager to put themselves out there. However, it’s one of the easiest ways to diversify your network against the homogeny that is often persistent in corporate culture.

Join groups that support categories that are underrepresented in your field, your industry, and your company. If you are a member of one of these underrepresented groups, this can be an amazing way to get resources you may not have access to in your own corporate environment as well as elevate others like you. If you are not a member of one of these underrepresented groups, it’s an incredible way to share your own resources with these groups as well as more quickly diversify your own network. Simply diversifying your own network can lead to personal benefits through diversifying thought, ideas, creativity, and perspective in your own work.

This is probably one of the most long-term and difficult solutions to implement, but the return is exponentially higher when it comes to not only expanding your pool of candidates but also expanding your horizons. The most important factor is building and maintaining these networking relationships long-term.

Given the pandemic, this is where I personally could use the most work, though, I was still able to bring in about 10% of my candidate pool from a few connections I’d made through student organizations I’d joined while back in college. Personally, this was something I had more of a pulse on while in school than professionally, and I’m hoping to get back to that now that I’m more confident in my own career trajectory.

Market Yourself

Companies far too often put themselves in the driver seat on the hiring landscape while the best candidates have competing offers from multiple organizations. If you too want to hire the best (and you’re not a Fortune 100 company), you need to be marketing yourself to talent that is not actively looking for your company.

View your position as an opportunity for your candidate to make their next move, improve their skills, and work for a great company. What do YOU have to offer a candidate? What skills can YOU help a candidate develop? What skills are a must have in your job description? Who is your ideal candidate? Who is a candidate you could hone into the perfect employee? What does your company have that others don’t?

Once you can confidently pitch what YOU bring to the table (yourself as the hiring manager as well as your company), you are ready to find quality candidates and hire the right one. It’s important to put on your marketing hat, hone your pitch, then start doing the ground work to find candidates, whether that be through LinkedIn, job boards, an internal recruiter, or a recruiting firm. Center around what you’re looking for and what you have to offer, and go find the candidates that you think can get you there. Be sure to personalize! The best candidates are getting plenty of messages from other prospective companies.

This is where I thrived in adding new candidates. I deep-dived on LinkedIn to bring in about 50% of my candidates from this group. I tried to target top tier candidates that may be a step above what we were hiring for, candidates just below my qualifications that I could easily teach the skills they were missing, as well as candidates perfectly qualified given their current experience that should be looking for this role as their next role. My goal was to match organic applicants and referrals with this pool, which involved personalizing messages for around 10 individuals for every 1 candidate I hoped to add. This was not an easy feat, but it has contributed to some of the most pleasantly surprising applicants in my pool.

Conclusion

To get the best talent, you must see the best talent while you’re hiring. These are just a few ways to hit the ground running and make sure you’re casting a wide enough net to keep diversity in mind and find the best possible candidate for your role.

The best companies are those built on diversity and this starts with the way in which we hire talent. As a hiring manager, you are the owner of your talent pool, and you have the power to be part of a recruiting process that gives people from multiple backgrounds, genders, races, sexual orientations, experience levels, and beyond the seat at the table. Prioritize doing your own diverse recruiting – though the work on the front-end may be costly, the quality of employee you will hire by seeing a larger, more diverse pool of candidates will pay for itself in the long-run.