Nine basic hiring practices from Edward Nevraumont

Via Marginal Revolution, a list of hiring practices from Edward Nevraumont, an advisor at a private equity firm: 

Most of the time you can win candidates by getting the basics right:

1. Reach out to people, don’t wait for them to come to you.
2. Build relationships before you need them.
3. Develop followership (so people that work with you once will want to work with you again).
4. Get candidates excited for the job before you start screening them.
5. Make your workplace a good place to work for smart and talented people (which is NOT the same as making it a “good place to work” generally, or anything from the HR/PR lists.)
6. Be the type of manager that top talent will want to work for.
7. Ensure that you have someone selling the candidate once you know you want to make an offer and start the selling process before the offer is made.
8. Be polite.
9. Be fast.

If you take care of these type of basic things, you will out-compete almost every rival — without the need for experimental interview techniques that push people “off script.”

I broadly think this is correct, but I really think it is numbers 1 and 2 that are really important for small organization. In other words, if you're running a faculty search for Harvard, you could post the ad on a 3X5 card in a random bathroom in Cambridge and get all the candidates you need. For the rest of us, I really believe that recruiting (especially targeting specific people) is important and probably a much better route than simply posting an ad, and wading from a sea of CVs. 

I also think that numbers 8 and 9 are difficult, but important. Making the process fast is appreciated by everyone, especially if you can get back to everyone, even just to reject their application.