Recruitment Should Start Before You Have a Vacancy
Why understanding your specialist talent market before you need to hire can make the entire recruitment process more effective.
Most recruitment conversations begin with a vacancy. A role becomes available, the job description is written, the advert goes live and the search begins. By that point, however, the organisation is already reacting to a need.
For straightforward roles, that may be perfectly manageable. But when a position is highly specialised, business-critical or difficult to replace, waiting until the vacancy exists can put unnecessary pressure on the entire process. The strongest candidate may already be working for another organisation, the relevant talent may be concentrated in a small number of companies, and the people with the right technical experience may not be immediately obvious from their job titles.
This is why I believe recruitment should often start before there is a vacancy to fill.
Not by trying to recruit people before the business needs them, but by understanding the talent market early enough that, when the need does arise, you aren't starting from scratch.
Know where your future talent sits
If you know that your organisation is likely to need a particular combination of technical expertise, leadership experience or industry knowledge over the next year or two, there is value in understanding where that experience currently sits.
Which organisations employ people with the background you need? How large is the potential talent pool? Where are those professionals located? What experience have they developed? Are there adjacent backgrounds that could provide transferable skills? What might make the right people interested in considering a move?
You don't need to be hiring someone today for that information to be useful.
In fact, it can be considerably more useful when there is no immediate vacancy. Without the pressure of needing someone to start within a particular timeframe, there is more opportunity to understand the market properly and think about what the organisation may need in the future.
This is particularly relevant within the seed and agriculture industry, where specialist experience can be closely connected to particular crops, breeding programmes, technologies, markets and organisations.
A talent map is more than a list of names
There is an important distinction between talent mapping and simply building a database of potential candidates.
A useful talent map provides context around the market. It helps an organisation understand where relevant expertise sits, how deep the available talent pool is and where potential challenges may arise.
Perhaps you discover that there are fewer people with the experience you originally expected. Perhaps the strongest talent is concentrated in another geographical market. Perhaps the most relevant candidates have different job titles from the one you initially searched for. Or perhaps you identify adjacent experience that could be highly transferable.
All of that can influence how you eventually approach a hire.
It may even change the way the role itself is defined.
That is one of the advantages of understanding the market before writing the job description rather than discovering its limitations after the recruitment process has already begun.
The advantage of starting early
The biggest advantage of proactive recruitment isn't necessarily speed. It's choice.
When a role becomes urgent, the options available to a hiring team can narrow quickly. There may be a fixed location, a particular start date, pressure from an existing team or an important project waiting for the appointment to be made.
Under those circumstances, it becomes much harder to step back and ask whether the original brief is realistic, whether the target market is large enough or whether there are other approaches that could work.
Starting earlier creates more room to understand those questions.
It also gives you the opportunity to build relationships with relevant professionals before you need to ask them to consider a specific role. Someone may have no interest in moving today and still be an excellent prospect for a future opportunity. Their circumstances, priorities and ambitions may change over time.
For senior and specialist professionals, that relationship can be just as important as the vacancy itself.
Your competitors are part of your talent market
For specialist organisations, the relevant talent market is often relatively identifiable. You know which companies employ people working in similar crops, technologies or functions. You may know which organisations have particularly strong breeding, R&D or commercial teams.
Understanding those organisations can provide useful insight into your own future recruitment requirements.
Looking at competitor team structures and the experience within those teams can help answer questions such as where relevant expertise currently sits, which functions are growing and where there may be people with experience that could be relevant to your organisation.
This isn't about trying to replicate another company's structure or targeting people simply because they work for a competitor. It's about developing a clearer understanding of the talent landscape in which your organisation operates.
For businesses working in specialist areas, that knowledge can be extremely valuable when it comes to future hiring.
Don't wait until the vacancy becomes urgent
One of the challenges with specialist recruitment is that the people you ultimately want to hire are unlikely to become available at precisely the moment you need them.
A highly experienced plant breeder, crop geneticist, R&D specialist or senior commercial professional may be performing well in their current organisation and have no immediate reason to look elsewhere. That doesn't make them irrelevant to your future recruitment strategy.
It simply means the conversation may need to happen before there is a vacancy.
Proactive talent mapping allows organisations to understand those markets and identify relevant professionals without necessarily expecting an immediate move. Over time, that creates a much clearer picture of the talent available and the factors that may influence whether someone would consider a future opportunity.
When a role eventually does become available, you're then approaching the market with considerably more knowledge.
Recruitment shouldn't always begin with the job description
There is a tendency to think of recruitment as a linear process: identify the vacancy, write the job description, advertise the role and find the candidate.
For specialist hiring, I think the process can be much more effective when the market comes first.
Before defining exactly what the ideal candidate looks like, it is worth understanding what the market can realistically provide. Which skills are readily available? Which are scarce? Where does the relevant experience sit? How flexible does the organisation need to be around location, sector, crop or background? And what will make the right professionals interested in moving?
The answers don't necessarily change the role. But they allow the organisation to approach recruitment with a much more realistic understanding of what it is asking the market to provide.
The best time to understand your talent market is before you need it
At Bambu Executive Search, understanding the talent market forms an important part of our approach to specialist recruitment across the global seed and agriculture industry.
Our work spans seed and plant breeding, crop genetics, R&D, technical and commercial recruitment, giving us a focused view of the organisations, functions and professionals that make up these markets.
For organisations planning future growth, developing new teams or anticipating a difficult hire, understanding the market before the vacancy exists can provide valuable context. It can highlight where the relevant talent sits, how realistic the requirements are and how the eventual search should be approached.
Because when you eventually need to make an important hire, the best place to start isn't necessarily with the vacancy.
It can be with understanding the market that vacancy will compete in.