Finding and retaining the best talent in industries such as tech, engineering, finance, tourism and hospitality, education, and health has never been more challenging.
Nowadays, candidates tend to be very well-educated and driven, and have high expectations of their employers. At the same time, there is a wide range of organisations to explore across the globe. Mobility is easier than ever, and the shift to a working-from-home model means that many companies are able to hire remote workers. This opens up the market for new team members, and companies have to work harder than ever to attract and retain the best talent.
Talent sourcing has become more and more challenging. From competitive compensation packages to long-term career opportunities and company perks, the best candidates will look for an employer with the best all-around experience and potential for career development.
In order to appeal to potential employees that would best cultural fit your company, it is worth investing some time into developing a recruiting strategy. The recruitment process can be costly – it requires a lot of HR resources, careful planning and consideration. Having a strategy in place can help make the process smoother and swifter.
What is a recruitment strategy?
A recruitment strategy is a plan around sourcing, interviewing, and hiring new employees in your company.
If you are wondering how to build a recruitment strategy, the first step is to define your goals. What field or industry do you work in? What is the best way to network and prospect applicants? A recruitment or HR manager will need to stay on top of trends, the best job boards, new skills that are required for the role and other industry-specific developments. It is also important to understand your target candidates. This varies depending on the field and the level of candidate required. Some industries require very specific skills and training, while soft skills may be more important for others. This means also continuously improving the recruiters’ skills.
There are various ways to source candidates for recruitment. These include:
- Headhunting
- LinkedIn recruitment
- Advertising on job sites like Indeed and CV-Library
- Attending and having a presence at recruitment fairs
- Employee referral programmes
The next step is to decide which sourcing method would work best for you and your team. An employee referral programme can work very well in a large organisation with hundreds of team members, for example, but may not be the quickest way to reach a broad selection of candidates for a small company with a handful of employees.
That said, the people who know the company and its roles best are those that currently work there. So sometimes using internal recruitment is the most efficient way. They know the specifics of day-to-day business and often have the best judgement around the exact skills and training required to perform the job well. For this reason, reaching out to their own network of college friends and former colleagues can be hugely beneficial when recruiting new team members.
Prospecting candidates via LinkedIn is a great way to review a selection of people and their experience to date, but there is no guarantee that they are even looking for work and open to new opportunities. Some LinkedIn users set their status as ‘open to opportunities’, which can help narrow down your search.
Another important aspect of a recruitment strategy is conducting the interview process itself. How many interviews would you like to hold with each candidate, and what are the areas to consider in each round of interviews? Some employers like to split interviews according to skills, keeping one round for technical, practical and experiential qualities and another to focus on soft skills, general communication style and interpersonal skills.
Are you searching for someone highly skilled and with a lot of experience in their field, or are factors such as motivation and eagerness to overcome challenges more important? Some people are problem solvers, some people prefer to have a checklist to work through each day – think about the most fitting approach for your organisation and develop your recruitment strategy from there.
Improve your employer brand
Whether you are reaching out to potential candidates or they are contacting you through job ads, it is crucial to have a strong employer brand. Company culture, a strong ethos and a solid sense of identity make businesses more attractive to potential future employees. Explaining your company’s mission, ideally in a single sentence, to anyone in the recruitment process will position your company as an interesting and engaging workplace.
Similarly, a company that invests in its people and encourages growth and development will appeal to high achievers. If you aim to attract the best talent, make sure your brand is on point everywhere it is visible. This includes your company website and any social media presence, whether it is LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter.
Optimise your careers page and job ads
When it comes to optimising your website’s career page or job ads, be sure to showcase company perks for employees and provide a sense of what the company values are. A strong company culture can make your organisation stand out. Factors such as a flexible work-from-home policy, annual leave, office perks, team-building initiatives, and the potential for growth and to develop their personal skillset will appeal to the best talent in the market. Before starting any recruitment campaign, it is also worth ensuring that your careers page is well-organised, easy to navigate and understand – especially for anyone unfamiliar with your company’s inner workings – and that it reflects internal team structures and geographical location(s).
Job ads also need to be carefully created. They should be easily scannable for information while providing the key details about the role and seniority level. We have previously written about designing attractive job ads, with templates and examples.
Create a referral program
Many companies benefit from tapping into internal resources and connections. Your existing employees’ network is potentially huge, especially in a larger organisation with over 100 team members. Encourage your teams to reach out to great candidates among their connections – they could be friends, family or former colleagues from previous jobs. Offering a bonus or other type of incentive for referred candidates that are successfully hired can effectively inspire your employees to reach out to highly skilled people in their network in relation to particular open roles.
Build a talent pool
Another great time saver in the recruitment process is building a talent pool. Anyone who has applied for a job with your organisation is, most likely, very interested in working there. Keep a record of the CVs and applications you receive so that you can dip into this pool whenever a new role arises. The easiest way to manage your talent pool is using an ATS – it keeps all the resumes in one place and makes sure that storing the data is in accordance with the laws and regulations (e.g. GDPR). Maintaining a backlog of interested candidates can make the process of sourcing for new roles faster, plus, it provides an additional channel – alongside jobs ads, prospecting via LinkedIn and employee referrals – for you to benefit from during a recruitment round.
Improve your recruitment analytics
Any HR manager who works in a large and growing company, or needs to keep on top of multiple recruitment areas, will benefit from monitoring recruitment metrics.
Measuring recruitment KPIs is an absolute must for creating a successful recruitment strategy. Metrics such as retention rate, time spent in the recruitment process, onboarding new employees and rate of hiring candidates provide helpful insights into the effectiveness of your hiring strategy. If the employee retention rate is low, perhaps you need to revisit your job ads and interviews to ensure your candidates’ expectations are realistic. If a huge portion of candidates are not hired, looking into the reasons for that can be helpful. It’s possible that one sourcing channel is more effective than another.
Monitoring recruitment analytics lets you hone in on the areas that are working well, optimise your overall process and become more efficient at identifying and hiring the right people.
Optimise the whole experience using recruitment software
Recruitment workflows can be complicated to manage. Communication with candidates and arranging interviews alone can be time-consuming, especially if there are multiple interviews to arrange and various team members’ calendars to align. A recruitment software like Teamdash can be a huge time saver for tasks such as reviewing CVs and applications, scheduling interviews, using video interviewing, emailing candidates and monitoring recruitment-related metrics.
Reviewing factors like the number of candidates at each stage of the hiring process, time spent in the hiring process and the various roles for which your company is actively interviewing offers insights that can help you improve the overall recruitment flow and make it more efficient. It will also help any HR manager improve the candidate experience throughout the interview process. Every company wants to source and keep the very best talent in their industry. Recruitment software is suitable for organisations of all shapes and sizes. It can help you upgrade the entire hiring process so that you can focus on finding the best of the best to join your team.
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