What does your future employee pipeline look like?

This post originally appeared on Accounting Tomorrow, where Inovautus Consulting regularly contributes articles on marketing and sales for accounting firms.

Are you looking for employees at the supervisor, manager or senior level? Join no less than a dozen other firms in your market that are doing just that.

Great talent is hard to come by and it’s getting tougher—especially at the mid-level. Firms today are looking for their next generation of leaders. Reactive recruiting for candidates as they need to fill roles no longer works.

Today, firms must have a proactive and consistent approach to recruiting and marketing for their future employees and leaders. Here are 3 things you should be doing to build your pipeline of prospective employees:

1.    Build your ideal candidate profile. Just like in sales, you need to know who you are going after or you may end up with people that don’t quite fit.  Your profile should identify more than just technical skills, it should also identify behavioral traits and values that will align with what makes individuals in your organization successful.

2.    Who are your top 10 candidates? Identify who you want to pursue or build relationships with. Much of this research can be done online, through LinkedIn, or through individual interactions. Just like with prospect lists, you will only have limited information available to you. However, it should be enough to get you started.

3.    Build relationships. You need to actively pursue these candidates by building relationships with them over time. Social media is a great tool for this. It allows you to connect with them without being overtly aggressive. LinkedIn and Facebook can be great tools. Don’t forget to periodically take those communications offline. Annual phone calls/meetings can be good touch points to keep the relationship going and lines of communication open.