Your Local Hiring Market is Going to Disappear! Bradley Clark of RecTxt

Local hiring market is now gone!  Guess what! Today, your best people will be hired outside your geographical location.

Our guest today: Bradley Clark, Co-Founder & Product Strategy of RecTxt

Bradley Clark, who is both a recruitment leader and an actual entrepreneur himself. He’s the Co-Founder of Rectxt, a text recruiting platform, and after a long consulting career working with organizations like Samsung R&D, Boeing Labs, Plenty of Fish, Best Buy, he’s now leading recruitment at Article. 

Being on both the front line and talking to a number of companies and recruiters, with COVID and Work from anywhere -  he’s seeing this rapidly emerging trend of where top local talent is getting scooped up from outside the market. 

Today we are discussing:

• Why your local talent pool will continue to dry up
• How to counter this trend and give your company a competitive edge

Challenge today?

• Candidate experience is consumer behavior. People do have a lot of buying power right now. With remote, you are able to buy anywhere right now.
• Hiring local talent is now more competitive. Remote work will decimate your local hiring market. Already seeing it happen. Organizations say - work anywhere! Precedence to work anywhere led by tech giants.

Why is this important to the company?

• The best people in your local area, are going to be out of your market
  • Transactional market/process will out bid you!
  • Disrupt smaller markets
  • Local discount is over

Rick’s Nuggets

• Work from home has opened the flood gates

Adjust your mindset and start adjusting your processes:

• Focus on growing your own talent
  • Finding ways to build your own people
  • Making them committed to you
  • Rewards & recognition (your cool office, and office based perks are no longer valuable, mental health is important)
• Focus on Keeping them
  • Engagement 
  • What the work looks like and the meaning of that work
  • Flexibility & shift to output based
• Interview process as a promoter rather than a bouncer
  • Mindshift change
  • Rather than no… who do I say yes to?
  • Speed & decisiveness
  • Pre-interview process
    • Understanding what the problem really is that they are trying to solve.
    • What skills are needed to solve that problem
    • Define what the person is really needed to do
    • You need to be able to identify the “what and why”
• Interview process
  • Focus on the “how & when”
  • Selling the problem, how it is good for them
  • Identify people that want to be a Big fish in a small pond
  • Be decisive
• Communication
  • Improve both the Speed of communication and keeping an open channel of communication. Get off email, this is why we created Rectxt. 

Rick’s Nuggets

• Whats in it for me (not you) needs to be all you are con

Key Takeaways:

• Understand they’re no longer competing locally for top talent, so they’ll have to change to compete (business can’t be the same as always)
• Interview well with knowing what you want, then be decisive 
• if/ when possible grow your own talent, then do everything you can to keep them

Guest Contact:

LinkedIn: Bradley Clark

Website: RecTxt