How to Find, Attract & Evaluate Talent in Niche Industries

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Mar 09, 2020

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The United States’ current low unemployment rate is great for employees but makes recruiting & hiring difficult for employers. What does this mean for companies in niche industries? Finding, attracting & evaluating talent requires more effort. Lauren Lewis, a partner at StaffBuffalo, shares her suggestions for doing this effectively.

How to Find & Attract Talent

Gather & Store Information on Potential Candidates [2:05]

Store applicants’ resumes and contact information in a database. Although they may not be a fit for any of your current job openings, they could end up being a good fit for a future opening.

This applies to passive candidates that you’ve reached out to as well. What are the next steps they’re looking to take in their career? What are their salary requirements? What motivates them? What is their ideal commute? Taking note of their answers to these questions will help you determine the right contacts to reach out to for future opportunities.

Highlight Your Company’s Culture & Benefits [3:55]

How do you get your ideal candidate excited about a job opportunity in a niche or “undesirable” industry?

You need to highlight what makes your company different from others in the industry. Often times, company culture is the differentiator. The talent that’s attracted to your company’s culture despite the niche industry will help drive your company forward.

For example, recruiting talent in the debt collection industry can be especially difficult due to the nature of the job. Make sure that applicants & individuals you reach out to have the background and characteristics to match your agency’s culture. This means that if you have a competitive and consumer-focused culture, you’ll want to select a candidate that is motivated by competition and has customer service experience.

Company benefits are also very important for attracting talent. According to Lauren, these are the benefits she gets asked about the most by candidates:

Health and Dental Insurance Coverage
PTO Amount & Accrual
Flexible Work Hours
Remote Work Options

How to Evaluate Talent Before & During The Interview

View Candidates’ Social Media Profiles [6:00]

Interviewing can take up a lot of your time. Fortunately, there are ways of vetting potential employees to make the process more efficient.

Lauren suggests browsing potential candidates’ social media profiles to learn more about their personality and interests. Based on this, you can determine whether they have the potential to be a good fit for the company culture.

Identify Soft Skills [8:15]

In nearly every job position, communication is an important soft skill. Rather than asking a ton of questions during the interview to determine this, look at how the potential candidate communicates with you before interviewing them.

Look at the frequency, content, responsiveness, and tone of their communication with you across different methods.

On the day of the interview, you can continue to identify a candidate’s soft skills. Timeliness, appearance, and attitude are all indicators of different soft skills to look out for during the interview.

About Our Guest

About The Author

Alex Villafranca

Alex is the CEO, co-founder and Head of Revenue at Arbeit, a better outbound communication software that makes businesses more profitable.