The recruitment process differs from one company to the other. Various factors influence hiring decisions, including the company culture, industry, recruiting team, and work location. Recruitment could even change depending on seasonal needs, the urgency of the hire, and open roles.
However, despite their procedural differences when hiring candidates, companies across the board can benefit from certain recruitment strategies that help them attract and retain talent.
If you are struggling to find people with the right talent to fill your vacant posts, perhaps you need to look closer at the areas you focus upon.
Following the “Great Resignation” in 2021, recruitment is likely to be somewhat tumultuous in 2022, represented by brutal competition for talent, strong hiring demand, and a restructuring of the employee experience to meet the expectations of prospective candidates.
It’s vital to remember that recruiting top talent in 2022 is no longer just about a fat pay packet and perks. It’s essential for your company to create a great first impression on the prospective candidates, develop a robust employer brand to stand out from the crowd of other employers, and have an innovative, out-of-the-box recruitment approach.
To facilitate your job, we bring you the top nine recruitment strategies that companies across the world have used to hire top talent. You can note these ideas and try leveraging them by adding them to your own toolbox.
1. Review Your Recruitment Metrics
Before you hurry and get busy revamping your recruitment strategy, you should take stock of what’s presently working and what’s not. It’s equally crucial to spot areas for improvement.
To do these, the first step is to assess your recruitment metrics. Typically, these include:
- Applicants-per-opening
- Application completion rate
- Time-to-hire
- Offer acceptance rate
- Cost-per-hire
- Cost-of-vacancy
- Quality-of-hire
- Employee retention rate
As recruitments become more data-driven, having accurate recruiting metrics to enhance long-term business impact has increased significantly. According to PwC, direct HR costs account for 28% of a company’s overall operating expenses.
With such a substantial amount of money at stake, it pays to increasingly focus on your recruitment metrics and even calculate their ROI to gauge their effectiveness.
By looking closely at the metrics mentioned above, you will be able to track your company’s hiring success and optimize the recruitment process. When used the right way, these metrics help assess the recruiting procedure and decide if your company is hiring the right people.
Reviewing your company’s recruitment metrics will also let you set reasonable goals and establish strategies to help you accomplish them.
2. Start Using Recruitment Tools
If you aren’t using any recruitment tool at present to make your hiring process simpler and faster, you should consider investing in such tools to save effort, money, and time.
Not sure why should you do it? Let’s consider some facts and figures.
According to a 2019 article in Glassdoor, American recruiters take about $4000 and 24 days on average to hire a new employee. Hiring timelines for European recruiters are longer than their US counterparts. This is primarily because of European labour laws and the resultant market dynamics.
Longer statutory notice periods (and associated laws), more vacation time, and higher benefits requirements of employees in Europe compared to those in the US are other factors that make the hiring process longer.
You shouldn’t be shocked to find that it takes 3 to 6 months (or sometimes even longer) to recruit a new employee, especially for senior positions. The cost of hiring is also steeper in Europe, a major reason being the long-drawn process.
The recruitment becomes trickier when you try to hire senior executives as there’s fierce competition for getting the top talent within the fold. This is especially true in high-demand areas with a limited talent pool, such as Quality and Compliance, Medical, Regulatory Affairs, and Market Access.
From applicant tracking, candidate short-listing and testing, automatic grading, streamlined reporting, onboarding, insights into employee life cycle, and effective employee management, recruitment tools can do them all and even more.
Whether you engage remote employees or adopt hybrid workplaces, you need to start using end-to-end employee recruitment tools that suit your workflows and streamline the recruitment of the best candidates for the vacant positions.
3. Make Your Job Advertisements Better
If creating job advertisements means using a template and copy pasting words or phrases without a second thought, you need to pause and think. Wondering why?
Because how you phrase your job advertisements matters a lot. The words you choose, how you position them, and your overall tone and language are all crucial elements that determine the kind of candidates you will draw.
But what does it mean to make your job advertisements better? Logically, your job advertisements can either tempt a diverse talent pool or not. Thus, with a carefully, well-planned job advertisement, you will have an excellent opportunity to improve your hiring process right at the initial stage.
If creating advertisements for multiple job vacancies seem tedious (it should!), you can utilise augmented writing tools that employ predictive analytics and your in-house data to create ads that align with your company culture and let you draw the right talents.
When your job advertisements are created right, they help reflect your company culture, thus appealing to a wider and more diverse talent base. This way, people who don’t think they will fit your company culture won’t apply. This, in turn, helps speed up the process of finding the right fit.
4. Optimise Your Career Page and Make It Engaging
By ensuring you have a well-crafted careers page, you can help candidates look for the open positions best suited to them. This page can also be a great resource for promoting upcoming open roles and vacancies and sharing relevant content.
For instance, you can use this page to provide information on your company’s core values, career growth and opportunities on offer, and employee testimonials via short podcasts or videos, to name a few.
Your careers page could also include an FAQ section to help prospective candidates get answers to almost all their questions before applying. Leveraging the power of chatbots on your careers page is another option worth exploring.
These chatbots can help job applicants learn more about the company in an interactive and engaging way. For instance, when a candidate lands on your careers page, the chatbot can pop up and ask if the person has any questions regarding the company.
Depending on what the candidates ask, the chatbot will show them a tailored response and could even direct them to links with further information on the company culture, benefits, and the hiring process.
5. Encourage Employee Referrals
Did you know these?
- According to 88% of employers, employee referral programs are the best source of applicants.
- Compared to website applicants, referrals are 4 times more likely to get job offers.
- 45% of referred employees stay for more than 4 years, compared to just 25% of those hired via job boards.
- 30-40% of all hires come from employee referrals.
Creating an employee referral program is a great way to find suitable candidates to fill your vacant posts. If you already have one, that’s good. If not, you should plan for it and create one as soon as possible.
If you are unsure of whether referrals will work or not, know that referrals bring several benefits your way, including:
- More engaged employees: Referrals are likely to be more engaged right from the beginning. As these new recruits already know at least one individual in the company, who can show them around and even share some insider tips and tricks, they will feel at home.
- Employees who fit your company culture better: Your existing employees only refer professionals they think will be a good fit, both for the vacant position and the company culture. Such pre-selection helps you get employees who are a better fit for your corporate culture and can even enhance it.
- Employees who typically stay in the long run: Referred employees are more likely to stay with your company as they are happier, become operational sooner, and are more productive than people whom you have hired through different sources.
If you need to create an employee referral program, you won’t have to break the bank. You just need to ensure your program has certain elements that encourage your present employees to refer someone in their network for the positions up for grabs.
Creating a user-friendly referral program with incentives (cash or kind) and recognition for employees who have successfully referred someone can encourage others in your organisation to refer candidates.
Keeping employees, who have referred someone they know, updated about the status of their referral is another way to make them continue referring suitable talents for your vacant positions.
6. Craft In-Depth Recruitment Content
You need to provide your prospective candidates with a rock-solid insight into your company that goes beyond the fundamentals. You can do it by creating comprehensive content about your company, its mission and vision, the journey from inception to date, the projects it has handled and the accolades it has won, etc.
You may even start writing long-form blogs about different topics you want your potential candidates to know about in order to get a better idea about your recruiting process.
For instance, with regular blogs (either on your website or third-party sites like Medium) featuring various departments where you talk about the projects they are working on, you can help candidates better understand the type of work they will have to handle once they land the job.
Your posts could even highlight employees and their achievements, covering not just their roles in the company, but even beyond, such as their hobbies, personal interests, passion projects, etc.
This will help prospective candidates get to know their teams and team members on a more personal level and decide if they want to be part of this team.
7. Expand Your Talent Pool by Using Headhunting Agencies
Whether you are looking to hire candidates from your neighbourhood, source talent from the length and breadth of the nation, or go beyond the national borders to entice global talent, a reliable headhunting agency can do them all.
Usually, such agencies have an extensive talent pool with pre-screened and pre-referenced candidates. They also have their own networks to leverage and find candidates you won’t get via job boards or social media advertisements.
For you, involving a headhunting agency means getting candidates who have already been assessed and vetted carefully.
Additionally, such agencies are experts in candidate selection. Recruiters onboard these agencies are professionally trained to evaluate candidates and use best-practice methods to distinguish real specialists from good interviewees. They also bring a vast experience to the table you can benefit from.
Apart from helping you expand your talent pool, a good headhunting agency can also speed up your recruitment process. Instead of spending hours attracting the right applicants and then going through numerous profiles and applications to locate a few qualified ones, you can let the agency do the heavy lifting for you.
This way, you can shorten the time required to fill your open job positions and ensure you get the top talents – be it local, national, or global.
8. Build a Talent Community and Tap into Passive Candidates
A talent community refers to those candidates who have displayed interest in your company and perhaps even attended interviews at your company. However, for some reason, they weren’t a good fit for the vacant positions at that time.
Instead of driving these candidates away, never to be seen again, you can stay in contact with them. You can tap into this pool of passive candidates when a more appropriate role opens up by letting them be the first ones to know.
In case you have some excellent candidates in your talent pool whom you want to encourage for an interview, you could send them email invites.
It’s crucial to remember that whatever be your company’s size, you can’t always have open roles for the top talent. But it shouldn’t mean you lose out on elite talent.
You need to find ways to keep in touch with them so that when the right time arrives, you can entice them into interviewing with your company and get hired.
Encouraging these candidates to sign up for job alerts is a good way as it helps them be the first to know about open positions that fit their experience and interests. This way, your company can keep warm leads informed and within its talent community, thus ensuring it always has interested applicants in the pipeline.
You could even allow interested candidates to sign up with your in-house talent pool by providing their name, email, phone number, and career of interest. This will help you deliver tailored emails to these professionals that are loaded with information on your company culture and open roles, as and when they crop up.
9. Don’t Shy Away from Social Media Recruiting
Though many companies scoff at social media recruiting, you shouldn’t join the bandwagon. Social media recruiting can indeed be an excellent way to make your company’s talent pool bigger. A 2021 CareerArc study revealed that 92% of employers use social networks (along with professional networks) to find talent.
For several companies, social has emerged as the go-to option for finding appropriate candidates. Though many companies used social media before, the pandemic increased their numbers significantly. You can post job openings on various social media platforms, say on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook together with a direct link to fill out your application form.
This will help your job openings get noticed by even uninterested people, who may know people suited for the positions and pass the ad on. Sharing a new vacancy on your company’s social media page is another great way to let your employees and social media followers know about it.
These people can share the post with their networks, thus expanding its reach exponentially, thereby making it more likely for you to discover the perfect candidate.
You could even use social media to build and nurture a passive talent pool by making posts showing off your office premises, sharing the achievements of your current employees, and adding snippets of your workplace culture, among others.
From using an omnichannel messaging approach to leveraging videos for social engagement (such as video posts, Facebook Live videos, Instagram Reels, etc.), you can use several other ways to find the right talent for your company through various social media platforms.
Final Words
Winning the race to attract, hire, and retain top talent is going to be a lot tougher in 2022 than it was earlier. However, it doesn’t mean you should quit.
Instead, you should use effective, innovative, and even out-of-the-box recruitment strategies to get the right talent into the fold. We recommend you use the above strategies for speedy and successful hiring.
What else would you add to the list?
This article was written by Sonali