From communicating your company’s values through job ads until onboarding the candidate in your organization, the kind of recruiting strategy plays a vital role. The Recruiting Strategies that you use can either strengthen your employer branding or break the image.
The Job market is extremely competitive these days. Individuals want to be part of such companies that offer them a holistic experience and exposure to grow. It has become customer-centric and good companies are challenging against each other for the war of talent.
Recruiters are always struggling to source and hire the right candidate. A right hiring approach and out of the box ideas can help recruiters attract and hire the top talent. So let us first identify as to why we need a recruitment strategy in place for hiring:
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As the business expands, new opportunities come, and companies win new contracts. They are in need to add more staff to meet the demands of new business contracts. Often when such situations come, recruiters are found slogging and contacting recruitment agencies to provide a quick hiring pool. Such hastes leads to hire mediocre talent and can prove detrimental in the long run when you want to sustain the business propositions. Such hiring often leads to employees joining with mismatched expectations and results in poor productivity and attrition.
If companies spend some amount of time and effort brainstorming and putting together a recruitment strategy along with a plan to implement then they would save a lot of money and pain later during critical needs.
Now that we have identified the importance and benefit of a proper recruitment strategy, here is the list of a few hiring ideas that can be instrumental ineffective recruitment.
Employer branding is an important factor that significantly impacts sourcing, hiring and retaining the candidates. It is all about how your company’s image is being showcased and perceived in the outside world. Gone are the days when getting a job was the only important thing. Having a good employer branding has to be the prior part of your recruiting strategies if you want to hire the best and sharp candidates.
Candidates have become selective about the company and culture they wish to work with. Even before applying to a job ad, candidates want to know the company’s culture and reviews. There are dedicated websites like Glassdoor, Indeed, etc. which share reviews on the company’s culture, salary benchmarks, and other associated reviews. So it is important to build a strong employer branding to attract the right talent. This can be achieved through several ways like social media modelling, culture setting, CSR initiatives to name a few.
Your active employees are your most prominent brand ambassadors. An effective referral program is a great way of cost-effective hiring thereby ensuring reflecting in quality hires. A good referral program should include employees referring candidates through their direct or indirect network but not take this as a manipulative opportunity to merely earn incentives.
The employees can be given incentives as per different grades after the new joiner completes certain fixed tenure within the company. These programs support in lowering employee turnover and also shortens the hiring time and effort. This benefits in providing a diverse pool of talent in the shortest time possible.
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Data backed hiring strengthens your approach and helps build better strategies to attract talent. Whether you use an Applicant Tracking system or not, but hiring has to be a structured process and not shooting in the dark randomly. There is a lot of data analysis that can be done to identify how your current strategy is working and if it needs improvisations. The various data metrics to analyze recruitment strategy includes:
A well-crafted Job Ad is the first impression of the prospective candidate to your company. For most of the companies, HR recruiter writes these job ads and hence a researched and accurate job post with complete details around the jobs is a prerequisite to creating positive branding of your company. e.g if you are creating a job description for a technical requirement, you need to be correct with the technical skillset along with clarity on job role expectations. Errors in creating job posts reflect your company’s hiring process look incompetent, careless and vague that can be discouraging for the candidates to apply to your company.
Make sure your job posts are proof-read, well, structured and appropriate to avoid your company generating negative views. A few tips in creating a structured Job Posts are:
Social media has seen tremendous change over the past decade and the Human Resource department is not untouched from its impact. The Social Media can be a huge support in hiring and recruiting especially passive candidates. As per a few stats, 55% of candidates find social networking more useful in their job searches. Advertising jobs over social platforms can raise awareness about your brand and help attract talent relevant to your requirements. A few tips to get started with the social media recruiting strategy includes:
Joining LinkedIn Groups: LinkedIn is the most prominent talent networking platform today and more than As recruiter, you should be part of relevant groups and networks to support your hiring by positing job openings or advertising relevant company updates to create awareness.
Quality Company Updates: Have a frequency of sharing the latest buzz or updates about your company. You can also share employee testimonials that help to generate positive feedback about your company. Such visibility on social platforms will help attract talent and support quick hiring.
Campus Recruiting is a great way to hire young and dynamic freshers who are full of enthusiasm and eagerness to join the job bandwagon. There are enumerable ways to build the campus recruit connect that will help you with a consistent pipeline of candidates. These include:
Companies like Facebook and Google are dream companies for every job seeker. It is not just the work but also the work environment and additional benefits that make these companies the hot favourite.
Employees look for companies where the work pressures do not impact their personal life. It is time that companies get over the traditional working standards of 9-5 jobs and are evolving their model to absorb greater flexibility. Flexi work hours, work from home, open workspaces, meal coupons, cab facilities, health insurance, family holidays, etc. are few ways companies are including as a perk package to attract and retain good talent.
Regular engagement activities like sports day, yoga sessions, marathons, food fests, etc. are also some of the ways to engage employees positively and foster a culture of the employee-friendly environment.
According to a few reports, digital media is a huge contributor to finding jobs today. Many technology companies that organize coding competition and hackathons to identify good talent and manage their headhunting in the quickest possible manner. This is a win-win situation for job seekers also as this gives professionals also a platform to showcase their skills and get handpicked by companies for employment.
It also helps seekers to identify your brand and know your company’s style and format of working.
If you wish to involve your current employees in the Recruiting Strategies process, organizing social and professional meet-ups to create platforms for interactions. If events are happening, send your key employees to participate and spread the word around your company. Loyal employees are your best advocates. The prospective job seekers can be invited to such met-ups as they gain insights about your company and can be reached out to discuss relevant openings.
As per stats, good talent gets off the job market shelf quite fast. There is an equal number of jobs in the market as the number of job seekers. The World has become a land of opportunities and so there is no dearth of the same. In other words, finding the right candidate who is actively looking for change is a matter of swiftness.
Candidates don’t go with just one job offer and are constant hunt to find the best fit even despite offers in hand. So it is about who attracts the talent better. So to handle such scenarios, a constant back up the pool of talent needs to be ready.
According to reports, a large base of passive candidates makes job shifts if approached with a lucrative opportunity. As per Talent trends survey report, a whooping three-quarter of the employed workforce are passive job seekers and would readily take up a new job opportunity, if approached through right mediums.
Remember passive candidates aren’t looking for a job. So traditional job boards may not help you reach them. The whole idea is to influence such passive job seekers through brand positioning strategies so that their interests can be created during any relevant open position.
Remember to flaunt your recruitment needs in the most tactful way that one feels that this is not the opportunity to be missed. You are selling your company as a brand for others to be convinced to buy. Be smart in your strategies and you will be easily able to attract the top talent.
Jyoti Kapoor