The irony of the automation market’s dependence on highly skilled humans is not lost on today’s employers. Finding that needle-in-a-haystack engineer or technician seems to get harder with each passing year. As the technology demanded by facilities managers becomes more refined, so too must employers’ recruiting efforts.

Among the secrets to finding quality people are persistent focus and smart marketing.

Straight to the Candidate Nerve Center

Many frustrated building automation companies have fallen victim to the siren call of broad-market online recruitment services. Discouraged by a lack of qualified candidates actively seeking jobs, they figure, “The more people I reach, the better my chances of finding the perfect fit, right?”

Wrong. And here’s why.

While it’s true that blasting a job opening out to an entire globe of jobseekers will yield a massive amount of resumes, it’s also true that very few will even come close to meeting your company’s needs. The man hours it takes to sift through stacks of unqualified applications isn’t just irritating; in today’s efficiency-first environment, it’s costly.

Niche services like BirdDog (see below), on the other hand, provide an intensely targeted approach to recruiting. By creating online job postings and consumable content tailored for a specific sect of the job-seeking market, these niche services deliver news of your open positions right to the virtual doorsteps of the most qualified candidates. 

With niche talent acquisition, hiring managers are able to effectively slice-and-dice audience segments to promote their open positions – as well as their employment brand – to the most relevant job candidates. Who, in-turn, can easily submit their resumes.

What’s more, today’s niche recruitment services go beyond the “online job board” model and offer candidate sourcing and scoring services for BAS-industry hiring managers with too little time or staff to produce the all-important candidate “short list.” 

Complicating matters for some BAS employers are the regulatory responsibilities they have to their communities and the federal government. Municipal and federal projects come with rules governing equal opportunity and affirmative action plans. Niche services like BirdDogJobs have built-in programs that ensure BAS employers are making (and can prove they are making) a good faith effort to attract and hire a diverse workforce – something that becomes very challenging when hunting for employees from inside such a small pool.

Becoming an ‘Always On’ Company

We have a term in the industry that describes how smart companies approach their talent search. It’s called “Always-On Recruiting.” What this means is that a company is always building its talent bench, even when it does not have a current job opening. The advantages of this are many. But most importantly, having your own pool of pre-qualified and interested candidates cuts down on the stress and the necessary resources of filling those inevitable last-minute staff openings.

In addition to working with the type of niche talent services described above, BAS companies that run an always-on recruiting program have mastered the art of marketing.

These companies don’t simply wait for their ideal candidate to stumble across their listing in the want ads or on a static website. They’re proactively going after top talent with consistent networking.

There are two low-cost, high-return ways always-on recruiters are networking. First, they have given their company career webpage a makeover, and second, they are connecting with potential candidates through tools like social media. 

Company Career Page

You’ve seen the tab on nearly every BAS company’s website. It’s usually found along the top of the page, and it reads something like “Jobs” or “Careers.”

Likely a lot of thought was given to this tab. But what most companies don’t realize is that the majority of people interested in the content of this page will never even click on it. That’s because jobseekers typically find their way to a company’s career page through a search engine, like Google, or from an online job board linking back to the career page.

This means the company career page is very often the first impression a prospective employee will have of a company.

Understanding the importance of the company career page is the first step toward achieving your goal, namely to represent the company as an attractive employer with respect for its employees, clients and community.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Social Media

Social media is the fastest growing communication outlet, allowing companies to meet potential employees right where they are. And, with tools like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, the messages a company sends out – anything from a link to its most recent project successes to a job opening – is only delivered to those people who have opted-in to receive them. This means your marketing messages are less likely to fall on deaf ears.

Because these tools are real-time applications, hiring managers can instantly customize and advertise their open positions in a way that attracts exactly the type of candidate they are looking for – more effectively and economically than their counterparts who are still relying on traditional advertising methods.

Of course, BAS companies should understand that launching a social media effort is a promise to their target audiences that they will deliver brand-spanking new information frequently. Why else would a job-seeker want to “follow,” “like” or “connect with” a BAS company?

With economic and legislative pressures forcing building automation experts toward continuous systems improvement, finding top talent has never been more important. The companies that develop sound recruitment strategies built on a niche focus and smart marketing have the best chance at finding tomorrow’s leaders today.

Doug can be reached at dmitchell@birddogjobs.com. More articles like this can be found at http://blog.birddogjobs.com.

How BirdDog Tracks Down the Best

With talent stretched so thin in the BAS sector, you need every advantage you can find.  The BirdDog CAMS system saves pain, paperwork and stress.

Our “always-on recruiting” solution is called CAMS (Candidate Acquisition & Management System). CAMS provides a powerful suite of tools -- all from one simple dashboard.

From here, hiring managers can complete each of the following.

• Post jobs to our family of niche job boards.
• Cross-post automatically to 40+ engineering job boards and associations, including ASHRAE, NSPE and ESCN. This creates wide exposure to qualified candidates in one post.
• Manage submitted applications by scoring them, assigning next activities and reporting on your new candidate pool, making your hiring “paper trail” completely paperless.
• Build a bench of qualified candidates that you can come back to when new openings arrive. Why start your search over again every time? 
  
• Alert job seekers with a click when you have new openings. It’s easy to upload your own Personal Outreach Lists, which can include your social networking or email contacts.
• Mitigate risk by having archived documentation of your applications, notes and hiring process, including diversity information, which is automatically captured and tracked. 
  
• Cultivate a rich flow of talent through a customized company career page. Let your managed career page do the talking for you, get ranked in the search engines and show off your firm’s qualities. 
  
• Manage your Candidate Sourcing Results. We’ve had great success with our first partner in the BAS sector, BuildingLogix, which has used our FASTrack Source and Score program to hyper-accelerate the candidate acquisition process. Simply login to your CAMS dashboard and schedule interviews with the best candidates.
  

Explore BirdDog today through live or recorded webinars, videos, or a brief chat with our team. We have a BSME Employer Specialist on staff who can develop the right solution for your needs. 

Just visit www.BirdDogJobs.com/Employers to learn more or give us a call at 888.482.7021.

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