If you want your event to be the best in your market, you need the best people behind it.

Recruiting event staff, however, can be challenging. While attracting applicants might be fairly straightforward, they might not be of the high calibre you’re hoping for – and sorting the wheat from the chaff can prove difficult.

Meanwhile, your competitors are also vying for the cream of the crop, so how can you gain the attention of the top candidates? To reach those professionals with the most experience, talent and creativity, follow these eight tips and make sure you recruit the very best.

1. Understand your skills gap

Before you start actively recruiting, it’s helpful for you to understand the skills you really need. What’s missing from your team? Perhaps you really need someone good at writing copy, who can speak German or is proficient in a certain CRM system?

Make a wish list of capabilities and rank them in importance – this will help you both when writing your job advertisement and when assessing candidates. Being clear about what you want can reduce the number of non-relevant applications you receive and give you a better chance of finding your “unicorn”.

2. Create an employee persona

Just like you write buyer personas to understand how to target event attendees, creating an employee persona will help you reach out effectively to the talent you seek. What is the likely age, background, experience level of your ideal hire? What are they doing now? What sort of opportunity are they looking for and how are they trying to find it?

Know exactly who you’re talking to and address them directly in your job advert. The advert should act as a self-refining sieve, gently eliminating unsuitable candidates as it progresses. By the end, only those who tick all the boxes should be left.

3. Generate excitement with your job advert

We’re sure your company isn’t dull and ordinary, so don’t write a dull and ordinary job advert. Recruitloop.com recommends starting with a catchy (but not misleading) job title and three bullet points that communicate the most eye-catching benefits of the job.

However, placing the main focus on the challenges of the job, rather than the rewards, will attract those with drive and ambition. And while you should generate excitement through your job advert, an important point is not to exaggerate the role – you want candidates who are enthusiastic about the reality, not the hype!

4. Use internal recommendations

If you were looking for a good restaurant, you’d probably ask people you trust for recommendations, right? So why not ask your team when looking to make a new hire? Your best people will have an innate understanding of what you’re looking for in an employee and whether they know of anyone who fits the bill.

“A players” tend to know “A players” and may be able to recommend friends and former colleagues, or identify contacts in other companies who they believe could be worth trying to poach.

5. Work on your brand

If you want to attract the best employees, it stands to reason that your company needs to have a reputation as a good one. That reputation is normally conveyed through your brand, so work on strengthening it via social media, in industry press and through candidate-focused content.

Telling your company story and communicating your vision/mission through blogs, case studies, photos and videos is the ideal way to engage prospective employees in your brand. Encourage existing employees to produce their own content for platforms like LinkedIn demonstrating what they do and why they love it. Testimonials from motivated and satisfied employees provide the social proof your brand needs to attract top talent.

6. Create a hiring experience that matches your brand

If your brand is young and cool, potential employees might be surprised to face a formal panel in a bland meeting room. It’s important that the image portrayed in your marketing materials and job advert is actually carried through to office life. In turn, this “personality” should be evident to candidates – from the initial communications they receive, through to the interview process and onboarding.

Don’t forget that you need to sell your company to the potential employees as much as they need to sell themselves to you. Create a strong elevator pitch for your company and work hard to win them over – for the best candidates, it’s a buyer’s market and they will look for an employer that really stands out.

7. Use activity-based interviews to help assess competencies

To assess candidates for particular skills, don’t rely on simply reviewing CVs, as this is often not a reliable indication. Instead, introduce practical tasks that allow them to demonstrate their competencies.

For example, you might ask a candidate to prepare a sample event budget, write an RFP (request for proposal) or create a piece of marketing material for your event. This can help you assess how they perform under pressure, as well as test their understanding of your company.

8. Ask tough questions

According to Entrepreneur.com, if you want to hire a superstar, here are three questions you should ask all potential candidates:

  1. What do you like about our business and what would you change?

This is a tricky question, requiring tact – how will the candidate verbalise what they don’t like, or will they take the easy option and say everything is perfect? Ideally, you want someone who can identify a weak spot but then focuses on the solution.

  1. Tell me about a problem you faced in your current job and how you fixed it?

Again, this question seeks to identify the candidate’s problem-solving abilities. Asking for a real life example shows how hands-on they’ve been in their current role and lets them showcase their creative thinking skills.

  1. What’s the one thing you’ve accomplished in your career you’re most proud of?

The point of this question is to help you understand what makes the candidate tick and how they define success. Does it align with your own ideas of success? Will they be motivated to achieve the things you want them to?

Conclusion

To secure the best people, you can’t afford to be complacent; competition for top talent is fierce.  Take time to identify exactly the kind of person or people you’re looking for and make yourself as attractive to them as possible. This should help you narrow the search and secure your ideal hire.