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

Hire Power Radio Show

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