The success of an organization depends on the quality of its employees. Various attributes of its employees play a crucial role in shaping different aspects of theorganization. These include their dedication, attitude, focus, temperament, alignment with organizational values, skills, etc. All these attributes have a bearing on the organization’s efficiency, productivity, customer efficiency, and growth. Finding and hiring new employees with the right skills and attributes for their vacant roles is always challenging for organizations. They can successfully address this challenge by adopting top recruitment strategies.
What are effective recruitment strategies?
Here are the leading recruitment strategies to attract and hire highly qualified and right-fit candidates. Adopting these strategies in 2024 will enable organizations to achieve success in their candidate recruiting and hiring endeavors. These strategies will also help them save time, money, and hassles in their candidate-finding and hiring process.
1. Build a clear employer brand
Your company brand is not only crucial for reaching potential customers, but it is also a central element of any effective recruitment strategy. Your brand impacts candidates’ perception of your company as an employer. Also, it shows them why they should (or should not) work for your company. Employer branding should reflect your business mission, vision, culture, and values.
When creating your hiring materials, consider these questions:-
- Why will someone want to work for your company?
- Does it support a diverse workforce?
- How many current employees will recommend your company as an excellent workplace?
After getting the answers to the above questions, you must check out your business’s About Us page, social media profiles, and advertisements. You have to ensure their content aligns with your branding and recruitment plan. The content should convey your company vision, mission, etc., and engagingly tell your brand story.
The content will help make your company brand look trustworthy, reputable, and familiar to the candidates. This branding, consequently, will attract them to work for you.
2. Create job posts that reflect your organization
You should be well-versed in the art and science of writing clear, thorough, and concise job posts. Your job post is one of the first impressions that a candidate will have of your company. It gives you an early opportunity to establish a reputation for being professional and organized while showing off your company culture and employee value proposition. For example, in every job posting, you can post the links to web pages of your company’s culture, values, code of conduct, diversity, and inclusion. This will help applicants know what
your company is about. Adopting this strategy will help you attract qualified candidates better aligned with your company values and goals.
This creative employee recruitment strategy will help you acquire more qualified candidates best fit for a given role. Also, you must perform a final editing pass to confirm that your job descriptions are by your company’s branding elements like color, logo, and typography. This is required to convey professionalism.
3. Use an applicant tracking system
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a software tool that uses the power of AI recruiting to automate the process of posting jobs and finding qualified applicants. This usually includes one-click job posting to multiple sites, sorting of applicants, scheduling interviews, automated onboarding, and more. Using an ATS will thus help save your hiring managers’ time andyour company money. Also, it will help to speed up your recruitment process.
There are comprehensive HR software suites that contain some ATS features. One such suite is BambooHR. You can use standalone ATS options if you only need an ATS or need to elevate your applicant tracking capabilities. JazzHR is one such standalone ATS option.
4. Utilize social media to target talent
Social media recruiting leverages social networks to source talent, advertise jobs, and communicate with potential candidates. Many brands have successfully found quality talent through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. To achieve success through them, you must create a presence on the channels that make the most sense for your company.
It is also essential for you to focus on sharing content on social media that reflects your company’s values. For example, if your organization supports charity, you can post photos and videos of a successful charity campaign you recently conducted. Your current employees can also share job vacancies on their social media networks. The vacancies can reach people in their network who may be potential candidates for you.
To demonstrate that theirs is a desirable workplace, many companies encourage their employees to share behind-the-scenes content about their company. You can use this strategy to find and attract great talent among people familiar with and following your brand on social media.
5. Use niche job boards
Depending on the kind of jobs you are hiring for, finding talent on large job market sites may take a lot of work. If your company belongs to a smaller, more defined category, consider looking into recruitment marketing on niche job boards. These are smaller job sites devoted to a particular niche industry. They often have a community of job seekers and recruiters. Dice, which is dedicated to technology jobs, is an excellent example of such job sites.
There is a distinct advantage of using niche job boards for talent search. Making them a part of your hiring and recruiting strategies will help you automatically weed out most potential applicants who are not the right fit for your roles. By posting your positions on job boards of professional organizations, you can expect a better-quality lead in most cases.
If you want to cultivate a diverse talent pool, you can benefit from job boards that increase visibility for people of color, women, and other marginalized groups. Posting your jobs on these boards will help you reach prospective employees who may not otherwise see your job openings.
Using an ATS with many job board integrations can make finding and posting positions to such specific job boards easier. This will thus help speed up your recruiting process.
6. Pay to push up job postings
Paying to promote your job postings should be a part of your HR recruitment strategies. This is because it can effectively increase the number of qualified applicants who see your job openings. The paid job posting promotion option is beneficial for more popular job boards such as LinkedIn and Indeed. The sheer number of other posts will immediately push your job ad down and out of sight of candidates.
Do you have an extra budget? Then, you may get help from paying for job ads on social media sites. By paying for ads, you can target those profiles that match the candidate personas you are trying to reach. This can result in an increase in the number of qualified candidates who make it through the pipeline.
7. Reconsider silver medallist candidates
Many candidates in the past may have applied for a given role in your company but did not get selected for hiring at that time. They were not the right fit for the role then, but they may be perfect for a different job opening in the future. By this time, they may have acquired new skills to benefit your organization.
If you have been using an ATS for quite some time, then your hiring team should have an extensive database of resumes of candidates who applied for your past job openings. These candidates are called silver medallists. By using keywords and screening rules, your team can search through this talent pool for candidates qualified for your current roles, even if they were not a good fit in the past.
By following this strategy, your company’s recruiterscan successfully recruit and hire the best talent. Also, they can save significant time and effort in recruitment.
8. Engage passive candidates
Passive candidates are those candidates who are currently employed and are not actively looking for a job. Engaging in passive recruiting involves personally reaching out to such candidates. It should be one of your company’s employee recruitment strategies. This recruitment method shows that you are genuinely interested in the talent of passive candidates and are sure to grab their attention. With the help of social media and personal connections, you can identify potential candidates and raise awareness about your company. There are also some applicant tracking systems that can prove helpful to you in this regard. By harnessing the power of machine learning, the
systems will help your talent acquisition team quickly find passive candidates qualified for open roles.
9. Pay attention to college recruiting
College campus recruiting should find a place in your company’s recruitment strategy plan, as it can help you discover emerging professionals in a particular industry. At the same time, it can also help your company align with internship hiring opportunities and campus connections. You can adopt various ways to grow your college candidate pool. Some of them are attending job or career fairs and getting your company featured on campus job boards. Moreover, you can volunteer to speak at events related to your industry.
10. Take part in industry events and job fairs
Attending local career events and job fairs is one of the best practices for recruiting new employees that you need to adopt. The events and fairs will help your company connect with job candidates from broader backgrounds. It may be the case that such events are not held in your local area. Then, you can offer to host them, which will also allow you to connect with fellow businesses in the area.
Using an applicant tracking system with a mobile hiring app makes it easier for your team to add candidate information and upload resumes onsite. So they can move a job seeker through the recruiting process as quickly as possible.
11. Hold effective interviews
The interview process is a two-way street. When you are interviewing your candidates, they are also interviewing you. Whether you are meeting them remotely or in person at your office, make them feel comfortable and less stressed. This is required to create a positive candidate experience for the interviewees. It would help if you remember that you are looking for professional qualifications and values alignment in the candidates.
When interviewing qualified candidates, your team must be aware of unconscious hiring bias. Due to the bias, they may unfairly overlook an otherwise qualified candidate. Your team should standardize interview questions to avoid this unconscious bias when interviewing diverse candidates and making your final job offer selections. Also, it should have an objective rating system in place.
Creating a positive candidate experience and avoiding bias during interviews must be a part of your recruiting best practices. Following them will help you successfully get qualified and diverse candidates that will enrich your workplace and help your organization grow.
12. Implement an employee referral program
Employee referral programs enable existing employees to refer qualified candidates for open positions within your organization. These programs generally offer rewards such as cash bonuses or gift cards to encourage employee participation. Some applicant tracking system platforms have an in-built employee referral tool, making it easy to gather and reward employee referrals for their commendations.
Employee referral programs help the recruiting team to source qualified candidates with minimal effort. Some leading companies like Accenture offer substantial bonuses to their referring employees for the positions that they get hired. The bonus is up to $20,000 for hot jobs that are difficult to fill. The bonus for other jobs is between $1,000-5000. Referral programs also often enhance the most important recruiting metrics. These include cost per hire, quality, time to hire, and retention rate.
However, referral programs can sometimes hinder DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) recruitment efforts. This happens when employees only refer candidates from a similar demographic or background. To promote diversity in the referral program, you should increase the reward value forthe referrals from an underrepresented group.
Using an employee referral program saves you significant costs, time, and hassles in your recruiting process. Thus, it should be one of the best practices for hiring employees.
By adopting these effective recruitment strategies recommended by Xyber IT, a reputed IT staffing agency in the U.S., organizations can significantly improve their recruitment process. Also, they can make the process more efficient and smooth as well as less costly and time-consuming. Moreover, they are able to successfully get quality and qualified hires and retain them for long. The strategies also help to enhance the candidate experience and make it more engaging in the pre-, during, and post-recruitment phases.
Connect with Xyber IT, a reliable IT staffing partner, if you are looking for a better, faster, and more rewarding recruiting experience for your business or organization. The agency is prepared to take care of your diverse staffing needs and give you an elevated experience beyond your expectations.
