Recruiting is crucial for an organization; if you cannot hire well, your productivity, innovation, and growth will all suffer. There is no question that smart recruiting benefits the bottom line of the organization as well, and even non-profits want to make more money so they can do more with it to benefit those the organization serves. Here are some tips for smarter recruiting that can help your organization attract and retain the top talent the organization needs. 1. Proactively develop talent pipelines. Social media is one of the best ways to connect with prospective candidates. Spending just an hour or two each week looking for connections and interacting with your existing ones can grow a talent pipeline filled with prospective candidates ready for the next open position when it comes. 2. Consider ROI of hiring a specific candidate. It is common practice to hire the second-best candidate for a given position rather than spend thousands of dollars more on the top candidate, but top candidates may be more than worth the extra money if they can create value and bring more money into the organization. Top candidates can often give a return many times the additional $10 or $20 thousand in salary. 3. Use a team of interviewers and aggregate scores. Google found that four interviewers was the perfect number to weed out biases. Adding the interviewer’s scores and focusing on the highest score should yield the best possible candidate in any given wave of interviews. 4. Incorporate referrals. Studies have shown that employees hired through referrals are more effective than other hires. The reason is that referrals have a better cultural fit overall than other hires since they are selected by other employees who can gauge their fit before referring them. 5. Use performance-based interviewing and data. Interviews are useful, but they do not really show the most important things about a candidate. One alternative to a traditional question-and-answer interview is to pose a challenge to candidates (even passive ones) and invite them to give a plan for how they would handle it, as well as examples from their experience where they have done something similar. Using job tests is another way to be more objective about candidates, and this approach has been shown to more accurately predict employee retention than other methods. 6. Use a strong talent management and recruiting solution. Talent management solutions manage the recruiting/retention process using software that streamlines and in some cases automates the process to make it easier. Thrive TRM is a talent management solution that can create reports, allow groups to follow a candidate through the interview and hiring process, and integrate with applicant tracking software to take screened resumes to the next level in the process. Thrive TRM makes recruiting smarter by making it faster and more foolproof. Discover solutions that will make your executive searches faster, easier, and more effective.