Can you introduce Lincoln Strategic?

Lincoln Strategic is a human resources and recruitment consulting firm with an exclusive focus on the mining and metals industry. We work closely with mining companies, engineers, technology providers and investors across all project phases and in all mining jurisdictions to help build and optimize their technical, operations and board leadership teams. We were initially established in process engineering, but very quickly realized our clients would realize greater value by leveraging our relationships and general market knowledge. We now provide a comprehensive suite of staffing, headhunting, and market research and, increasingly, human resources consulting services. Our value-add is our domain expertise – basically mining is all we know because it’s all we do. We’ve historically resisted diversifying and, thus, diluting our market focus because having an intimate understanding of our client’s world allows us to deliver better results. We’re an inch wide, but a mile deep.

What are your observations on the limited availability of talent companies are competing over?

We’re experiencing a collision of an overheated mining market, talent pools that are getting shallower by the year – itself a combination of training and demographic factors - and a resistance or inability of companies to both incubate talent internally and to truly professionalize their recruitment functions and initiatives. It’s the latter that companies can truly control, with the right mandate, focus, and, of course, partners. While there is an increasing talent shortage, I think companies give this too much credit for why they can’t recruit the right people.

How can mining companies do a better job appealing to candidates?

In our experience, the top criteria for candidates to be happy in any role are challenge, responsibility and, crucially, leadership quality. Work/life balance is more important than ever – a global pandemic tends to refocus priorities – and compensation, while important, is less critical than many companies think. The companies that enjoy the best recruitment success have focused on crafting their messaging to prospective candidates around these criteria. Also, we advise our clients to accept that talent is more transient than ever and to get creative about formal commercial arrangements with their candidates.

How is both Lincoln and the industry leveraging technology to operate more efficiently and attract more candidates to the field?

Proper data and technical management are crucial to any organization’s recruitment effectiveness. Companies that have a dedication to data-based recruitment are far more successful than those who aren’t – the right back-office system allows organizations to better capture candidate information, categorize their “A+” prospects and track them through their careers, manage and improve their relationships, increase their reach, and enable faster and more efficient recruitment in general. It also helps them to benchmark and forecast their hiring, make better business decisions, and adjust their recruitment efforts to the market and to stakeholder and client expectations. Ultimately, though, technology is only as good as the quality of the recruitment process and the users themselves. Lincoln Strategic is no different – our data and technology is the beating heart of our business.

How does Lincoln Strategic filter through candidates to ensure they are well suited for the job?

It’s not enough to simply match a resume to a job description – anyone can do that. Our job, ultimately, is to provide our clients with the kind of data they need to make informed, confident hiring decisions with as little finger-crossing as possible. To this end, we deploy a multivariate evaluation methodology that starts with a clear delineation of the scope, deliverables, and success factors for the role our clients need to fill, identification of the specific problems that our clients are experiencing and how the right candidate will be expected to solve them. We then define the ideal candidate profile: certainly, skills and experience, but also behaviors, cognition, values, and drive. On these fronts, we expect a great deal of involvement, self-awareness, and introspection from our clients. We then objectively measure each candidate against these elements using success-based interviewing, a very powerful assessment tool called Predictive Index and, of course, thorough reference checks. It’s a process that’s a bit more involved that what many companies are accustomed to, but it works.