Resist Filtering Through 300 Resumes. Deploy Bilingual Talent.

Face it. Recruiting anyone for a position is an intensive process. You must develop and tailor the job description. Form a search committee to interview the candidates. Advertise the posting. Boil 300 resumes down to a manageable 10 that you will phone interview. Down to the top 5 candidates to invite to interview. Only to find out you may be left with 3, because 2 candidates are no longer interested and have accepted job offers elsewhere. On top of that, those candidates went in and failed to prepare for the interview, or not. In the end, you may not have any candidates who are bilingual. Some organizations may try to deploy their 2-3 staff on hand that are bilingual to share the position with their colleagues and close friends. For some employers this might work.

Deploying your existing bilingual staff, depending on the size of their network and the time they have been allocated to the task, may be one of the smartest and most cost-effective choices available to some organizations. Some organizations provide incentives to their bilingual staff to help identify and recruit more bilingual staff. Folks that are not only fluent in Spanish, but have a keen understanding of their communities cultural nuances.

The more organizations can deploy their bilingual staff not just entry level but their top bilingual staffers to events, conferences and online communities, the better the possibilities of enticing high-caliber bilingual talent. Turns out this may be cheaper than advertising the position. Turns out there’s a better way than reading through 300 resumes and forming a costly and time consuming search committee.

When asked, you know what to do.