Using Job Goals to Boost the Candidate Experience and Hire Better

Attracting Top Performers

Understanding and defining the goals of a job before you hire helps you better assess a candidate’s potential for long-term success and attract the best people. Using job goals during hiring helps you attract and engage more A-players, because, by their very nature, they want to truly make measurable impacts from their first day and always want to start a job with clear, measurable goals.

The goal of your recruiting process should be to attract top performers and start building strong relationships with them — engaging them with your company from the first touch. It’s crucial because A-players have a vision of what they want to accomplish, both in their personal lives and in their careers. They want to know if your opening will offer them the opportunity to do their best work, and they want to understand how they will be measured along the path.

Goals also create a transformative connection between employee and organization. Compensation, for all its importance, is a transactional connection: You achieve tasks, and we provide money in exchange for those tasks. But when an employee buys into the goals and mission of a business, their performance is typically much more impactful.

The process of defining the goals for a new hire can also be extremely useful for the hiring team. For managers, goals help to clarify the purpose of making this hire in the first place, particularly if it’s not part of a pre-existing hiring plan or backfill. For recruiters, goals provide an additional dimension of understanding about what’s really needed to succeed in the role. Learn more about this in our article “Outcomes-based Recruiting: Leveraging Employee Goals for Better Recruiting.”

This article demonstrates how to incorporate goals into your recruiting process to improve your reviews for long-term success and better engage with top-performer candidates.

How Goals Drive A-players

For the same reasons that clearly defined and tangible goals lead to better recruiting and hiring, they are also motivators for top performers. In both cases, it’s about guiding people and your organization toward success.

How to Use Goals in the Recruiting Process

For any position you hire for, in addition to defining the job title, salary, and competencies, you should also:

1. Define the goals
2. Communicate those goals throughout the recruiting process

You should include the job’s goals in the job description, postings, conversations, emails with candidates, and other communication during the recruiting process.

How Goals Resonate with A-players

David McClelland, a pioneer in workplace motivational leadership, says each of us is motivated by three main needs: achievement, affiliation, and power. For A-players and top performers, the dominant driver will most likely be the need for achievement. This is closely connected to goals — in life and on the job.

McClelland’s research says that five attributes of the A-player explain why they respond when you provide them with clearly defined goals.

In short, having defined goals from the onset of a recruiting process can help attract A-player candidates. The next step is to maximize the use of goals in the recruiting process.

Making the Best Use of Goals in Recruiting

To make the best use of goals in recruiting, you need to define the job’s mission, goals, and time-sensitivity before you create the job description and begin looking for candidates. If you put too much focus on the job’s tasks and responsibilities, and not enough focus on these three aspects, you’re more likely to capture worker bees than A-players.

Step 1: Mission of the Job

The first step is defining the mission of the job. As noted by Geoff Smart and Randy Street in The Who Scorecard, the mission of a job is its “core purpose, boiled down to its essence so that everybody understands why you need to hire someone into that slot.” Any job created and assigned a salary band needs to have an explicit mission and purpose to it.

Step 2: Goals of the Job

The next step is defining the desired outcomes, or goals, of this job. You want to set specific expectations on the work to be done. You also want to communicate to the candidates how they will be measured, being sure to say that the measurement of their success will be clear and specific.

To learn more about how to use goals for better performance measurement, see our articles:

• “Getting Started with Goals: Increasing Performance and Engagement”
• “Creating Goals: A Simple Guide for Managers and Employees”

Step 3: Time-sensitivity of the Job

The third step is defining the criticality of the job, so you can prioritize it in your recruiting process. Determining the job’s time-sensitivity relates to the job’s mission and goals. For example, the job could be for a highly talented software engineer with a unique skill set needed to help quickly complete development of a crucial new product. On the other hand, the job’s mission and goals might indicate that the job is among those that your company routinely fills or is not necessarily mission-critical in the immediate term. Why do you need this job now, as opposed to spending your recruiting revenue and time on another job?

Step 4: The Job Description

Once you’ve defined the mission and goals of a job, you move to creating the actual job description. You can learn more about job descriptions in our articles “Building Job Descriptions That Sell” and “Recruit Better with Roles”.

Job descriptions are a mix of:

• Tasks (what the employee will do every day)
• Competencies (the desired behaviors of the role to achieve the goals)
• Goals (what needs to be achieved to be successful in the role)

If you want A-players to be interested in your job openings, you need to define the tasks and competencies — but the goals need to be well defined. They are your opportunity to stand out and differentiate your organization from the competition.

Goals in Recruiting: A Sample Checklist

Backtime yourself two weeks from the date you want a job role to be posted. In those two weeks, the hiring manager and HR need to collaborate on a number of touch points. This helps ensure a smoother process once the job role becomes a live application for candidates.

An example of the two weeks before a job role posting is below. In the next section, you’ll find an example of a job posting with goals that you can use as a sample to develop your postings.

Task	Responsible Parties	Stage
Meet to discuss open role or new headcount; define deadlines throughout process	Hiring manager, HR	2 weeks pre-job posting
Define mission of job; why is this role needed now?	Hiring manager	2 weeks pre-job posting
Determine goals of the job; what does this hire need to achieve in the role?	Hiring manager	1 to 1.5 weeks weeks pre-job posting
Define measurement of those goals; how will the new hire know they have been successful?	Hiring manager	1 to 1.5 weeks weeks pre-job posting
Put together job description and posting based on above elements	Hiring manager, HR	1 week pre-job posting
Prepare talking points for HR screens, re: mission and goals of the job	Hiring manager	2-3 days pre-job posting
Post job description and begin sourcing for role	HR	Beginning of sourcing stage

Goals in Recruiting: A Sample Job Posting

Use this example of a job posting with goals — for a senior customer success manager — as a sample to develop your postings. The goals — job objectives — are highlighted.