The Right Formula for Proactive Recruiting with Eric Dahan of Open Influence

Do you have a target list of the people you desire to hire?

It is easy to plan the roles you need to hire but the “who” is what matters most.  A very simple hack is to just create a spreadsheet and every time you hear of someone good, add them to your list. 

Now here is the important part… reach out and seek to understand. Simply reaching out and listening to their desires is all it takes to attract a well positioned player for your company. 

Our guest today: Eric Dahan, Co-Founder & CEO of Open Influence

A premiere influencer marketing company with clients that include Disney, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Under Armour, among others. The company is also a leader in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence within the ad industry thanks to its predictive analytics tools and entire influencer taxonomy, which contains over 10B data points. Eric is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and Inc. 30 Under 30 honoree.

Eric has hired over 100 people for Open Influence and has a strong proactive program in place.

Today we discuss:

Why you should always be interviewing
How to run a proactive hiring campaign

Challenge today? (Reactive hiring and approach to talent)

Cascade risk of people getting burned out and demoralized
Takes time to train new people
An ounce of prevention 
Avoiding the “oh shit” moments

Why is this important to the company?

From a p&l standpoint, building a more lucrative  business
Retaining the best and brightest that they have worked so hard to to build up
Attracting, building, training and elevating the best people

Rick’s Nuggets

People are harder than ever to attract
Building a passive talent pipeline allows you to constantly raise productivity

How do we solve the problem? (Creating a proactive approach and system to hiring)

Planning
This is the structure
Getting the team to buy in
The why

Accomplish more by delegating

Create a strong feeder of young candidates
In network referrals
Inbound, through website
Industry niche focused
Building relationships with professors in college

Elevate and create a management layer
Empower managers to
Giving a bit more time to go out and find people

Budget for strong hires
Role creation for strong talent
Elevating from within

Hired HR director to help with recruiting and building out better processes

A lot of time saved with onboarding
Point person for planning & vetting 

Rick’s Nuggets

Dedicate 1 hour a week to talent development (first 20)
Adopt a policy of opportunistic relationship building 
ie: hackathons, hosting events

Understand the person’s pain & desire
Start interviewing 2 months prior the role becoming available
Value alignment is key! 
Judge on values, not skills 

Key Takeaways -Value:

Think about the ideal structure and what is going to make you scale. What is the break point? How do you make sure you bring it to life?
Think of hiring as something that you will always have to do
To really scale, make hiring continuous

Guest Links:

Eric Dahan: LinkedIn

Company: Open Influence  Facebook  Twitter  Instagram  YouTube

 

This show is proudly sponsored by Criteria Crop