Every business wants to have the best talent, and to achieve this, companies create effective recruiting strategies. Identifying, hiring, and retaining talent is a process of recruitment. Now, with the inception of advanced technological innovations, companies use more than one method of recruiting talent. In this article, we will discuss some of the best practices and ways to enhance your recruiting process and improve employees’ experiences.
Table of contents
- What is a Recruiting Strategy?
- Importance of Recruiting StrategiesĀ
- Benefits of Recruiting Strategy
- Best Recruiting Strategies in 2023Ā
- Create a Strong Employer Profile
- Clearly Define Your Brand MessageĀ
- Optimize Career Pages
- Create an Employee Referral System
- Prioritize Diversity In Hiring ProcessĀ
- Keep Target Candidates in Mind
- Leverage Social MediaĀ
- Set Categories for Job Roles
- Be Transparent in your Communication
- Use Reliable Job Portals
- Invest In Recruitment Automation Tools
- Re-Visit Old Employeeās Resumes
- Recruiting Trends 2023 and Beyond
- What to Expect from the Recruitment Industry?
- Streamline Your Hiring Landscape in 2023
What is a Recruiting Strategy?
A recruitment strategy is an action plan to recruit the best talent for your company. It comes with various processes and methods to hire talent for your open vacancies. The most common method of doing this is posting a job on a job portal, on the company’s website, or on the LinkedIn platform. Companies with good HR systems get a hold of this process. In the absence of HR, companies might hire a recruiting agency to select the most suitable candidate for the open role.
Also, this strategy involves the channels and platforms to attract talent. Ways to identify the candidate and attract them by assessing their experience and qualifications.
Importance of Recruiting Strategies
Having a strategy in place before executing any project is crucial for seamless function. Planning an ad strategy helps businesses define the purpose of hiring and take actionable steps accordingly. When you have a roadmap to achieve something, it will make your experience easier and more focused. Also, it helps you avoid distracting from your purpose. With an effective recruiting strategy, you can attract and retain the best candidates.
So, every company must have a concrete recruiting policy in place to reduce employee turnover and attract suitable candidates.
Benefits of Recruiting Strategy
Attracting Top Talent
One of the many benefits of implementing a recruiting strategy is to attract quality candidates. You know the process, requirements to hire the top talent and you can achieve that with the right strategy. When you have a clear purpose for hiring a new candidate and clearly know the requirements, you can attract quality talent.
Saves Cost and Time
When the HR team focuses on targeted hiring, it saves time and money per hire for the business. In targeted recruiting, only serious applicants are screened. This saves the cost of hiring an employee. Many businesses use third-party recruiting companies to hire the best talent but it is a costly matter. When you have a clear vision about the role you are hiring for, youāll not end up hiring third parties.
Help Identify Missing Skills in Company
With an effective hiring strategy, your talent teams can identify missing skills in your organization. They focus on hiring people with targeted skill sets.
Improves Branding
When everything is written with focus and planning, it makes your hiring process more professional. When you write a focused message that aligns with your business goals and tells why you want to hire, you capture the attention of applicants. This way, it improves your brand’s reputation in the market. This can be achieved when you have the best recruiting strategy in place.
Best Recruiting Strategies in 2023
To devise any strategy, we focus on the company’s priorities, demographics, and industry. For recruiting, these are all must-haves to consider, but most companies that want to grow need quality talent. This can be achieved with a robust recruiting strategy.
The hiring process, methods, and places must align with your business goals and structure. For this, you don’t have to recreate the strategy every time. However, you must stay up-to-date with industry trends.
Create a Strong Employer Profile
With everything now digital, make your company profile more professional. You need to focus on using key elements in your profile to drive more candidates to view your business as a trusted one. Write clear and vivid company information or give an overview of work ethics. Use your company as your profile picture and banner.
Clearly Define Your Brand Message
People are likely to explore jobs with reputable brands that they trust and are familiar with. If you have gained the public’s trust, you must capitalize your writing. For example, write a compelling yet descriptive āAbout Usā page so that it delivers the right message to the applicant and tells them what to expect. The mission and vision of your company must resonate with the requirements that you mention in the new job opening. To get this done, analyze why people would want to work with you. Keep this in mind and describe how your company is suitable for them to work.
Updating all profiles and website content for the About Us page should be part of your recruiting strategy. Like employers, candidates also screen company profiles to make the final decision.
Optimize Career Pages
Whether it’s a website’s career page or a social media platform, you need to make it understandable and friendly. To allow more candidates to reach your website and profile, you need to keep your career pages up-to-date. To achieve that, you must optimize your pages by:
Making it User-Friendly
Make sure to optimize your career pages for all devices so that users can navigate easily. It must have an easy structure and navigation icons to help users find the information they are looking for. If old job openings still appear on your page, don’t wait to remove them.
Write Clear Details About the Open Positions
When a candidate lands on your career page, they expect updated job openings with detailed descriptions. You must clearly update vacancies and include details about responsibilities, compensation, working days, perks and benefits, and expected future openings. To attract talent, keep the information accurate.
Use Images
When you make job opening announcements on social media, keep the visuals attractive. Use images that say something about your announcement. Make sure to use high-quality images.
Create an Employee Referral System
You must make an employee referral program part of your hiring strategy. This program helps employers find credible yet reliable sources for open positions and candidates who are a good fit for the company. To implement this program into your strategy, you must create a culture of referrals. Invest in training so that employees feel valued and will recommend your company to their networks. Encouraging an employee referral program in your company can help you find and hire talent quickly and save you money on hiring costs as well.
Prioritize Diversity In Hiring Process
For an effective hiring strategy, you need to prioritize diversity and inclusion in your processes. People appreciate companies that prioritize diversity in their workplaces to improve productivity and growth. Make sure to remove any adversaries related to biases. Doing so will give candidates a good image of the business, and they will see you as an equal-opportunity employer with a people-first culture. Enforce this strategy throughout your hiring process.
Keep Target Candidates in Mind
New or entry-level job roles are mostly assigned to Gen Z, also known as the iGeneration. People born between the late 1990s and 2012 fall into this generation category. If your job requirements have this target audience, you need to craft your strategy accordingly. For example, Gen Z is more tech-savvy, so be a digital wizard and cast a spell with a compelling description. When you are targeting Gen Z, you need to:
Create an easy application process
To cater to their needs, you can use tools to make the application process smooth and hassle-free. Considering their short attention span, you don’t need to linger on the process; rather, keep it exciting and engaging.
Use Visuals
Gone are the days when people used to spend half their time reading long job descriptions. Gen Z and even other generations want more visuals when applying for a job. To do that, you can create visual quizzes to get an idea of the applicant. They are experts in conducting and giving virtual interviews. So, you can offer these opportunities to the candidates.
Leverage Social Media
Like customers, you can even attract a good pool of talent from social media. For that, you need to create a strong employer profile and make regular posting a consistent habit. This will keep your profile in the eyes of the audience, and promoting content every now and then will help you reach many eyeballs, which will result in more engagement and following.
When you have an established social media presence, it is likely that your job posting will also reach the maximum audience. So, you must leverage social media for hiring processes. For that, you need to be proactive in responding to the candidate’s queries. An ideal social platform for recruiting is LinkedIn, make it your friend for hiring processes.
Set Categories for Job Roles
When we talk about smooth navigation, we mean defining segments and categories for each role or job opening. You need to set categories on your career page to ease the application process. For example, break down different job roles into their respective categories. If your company has an open position for a āsoftware development role’, it must be found in the IT category. Similarly, if it’s an HR role, your main category should be administration. So people looking for HR jobs will navigate to the āAdministrationā category to search for related job openings.
Be Transparent in your Communication
Treat your applicants as your customers. It means that if you want them to have good vibes about your company, be transparent. You don’t need to make vague statements and promises about your company. Instead, keep the facts straight and transparent, and only offer what you can. This is how candidates will expect the exact same things from the company.
Also, it is always great to be generous and responsive to the applicant’s queries so that they will continue applying to your company. If someone rejects your offer, don’t react in the first place. I thank them for their time and efforts to make a good impression. This way, they might recommend that position in their network, and you may find the suitable candidate for your job role.
Use Reliable Job Portals
Besides social media, job portals are a hub for finding and hiring the best talent. If you use niche job portals for job posting, expect a flood of applications as millions of people check job portals every day. Some company job postings appear as premium and are usually at the top of search results. These companies pay to appear at the top and target the right candidates. Whereas you can also post a job post for free, but you might not get the desired ranking and placement of the ad.
Use job portals that are specialized in certain categories or niches. Read reviews from the client to get an idea of how the platform works for attracting candidates. Choosing the targeted portal will automatically weed out irrelevant applications.
Invest In Recruitment Automation Tools
When we say automation, we mean handing over all our recruiting processes to the tool to handle for us. Automation plays a great role in processes like sourcing, advertising, tracking, and onboarding. But the actual role of automation is to use AI to attract the right talent for your company. For this, you need to add requirements to the tools to scrutinize the best talent.
There are many automation tools you can use to speed up your hiring process and focus more on people than paperwork. Choose the right tool as per your company’s needs.
To Source
The tool helps you match skills and requirements desired for the job role. This is how it helps you find the best ones.
To Engage
It is important that your company engage shortlisted candidates with follow-up material like emails or messages. To avoid candidates applying for some other job, you need to keep them engaged, and automation tools can do that creatively.
To Screen
Recruiters screen candidates after shortlisting them. These tools help companies run background checks.
To Track
Using ATS organizes candidates personal and professional information and categorizes them as per their skill sets. This helps the company predict the future success of the candidate.
Re-Visit Old Employeeās Resumes
You can also consider past candidates in your recruiting strategy. This approach has been really helpful for companies that do not want to risk their operations due to inexperienced management. You can consider revisiting your past employees resumes, as they are well acquainted with the company culture and management. You know that employee very well, so it saves you the cost of hiring and onboarding new talent all over again.
Connecting with past employees may also benefit your business, as they gained additional and diverse experience working with different companies. They can use that experience to make your business even more successful.
Recruiting Trends 2023 and Beyond
The talent acquisition has changed the dynamics of hiring candidates. We have listed the top trends in recruiting that will shape up the industry in 2023 and beyond.
Work From Home Will StayĀ
The horror of the pandemic has changed the processes and requirements connected with recruitment. Now, remote work is considered an important part of the hiring process. 90% of workers look for a job that offers provision and opportunities to work from home at least some days of the week.
Employers are and would consider having this benefit incorporated into their recruiting strategy to attract the right talent. After the pandemic, employers were not sure how to boost productivity among employees. Allowing them to work remotely has put that burden off and ensured their safety first. Getting used to this work model has proven to be an additional dose of productivity, which drives employers to stick with it even for some parts of the business.
Even though the situation has now normalized, the need for this work model is growing and is expected to take over in the future. For this, employers will have to offer efficient tools and methods to their employees so they can work and respond in real time.
More Focus on Diversity & Inclusion
To take remote work to the next level and make the most of it, employers value diversity and inclusion. This work model offers opportunities for employees of different races, ages, colors, and regions to work in an unbiased environment. Unbiased recruiting helped companies attract billions of dollars in revenue and enhance productivity to achieve the desired results.
In 2023, advanced measures will be taken to cope with this unfair behavior in recruitment. New techniques will be put in place to mitigate systematic biases in the companies. Companies will place more stress on promoting diversity and inclusion in their job descriptions to make their offer transparent and open to all.
Mental Health will be a Big Focus
The mental health and well-being of the employees will be one of the key focus areas of the businesses. Due to fierce competition and limited opportunities, the burnout rate among employees has seen a significant increase lately.
The aftereffects of the pandemic have been cruel to some businesses, resulting in mass layoffs. It has left limited opportunities for potential talent to take a role. The culture of delegating the workload to the existing staff has triggered a sense of burnout in employees. This has impacted performance and productivity of employees.
Considering it as an important part of the recruitment strategy, companies will focus on it to attract top talent.
Attracting Talent Through Gamification
Having considered the short attention span of people nowadays, employers will encourage gamification. In the remote work model, employees often feel isolated when not connected in person. As a result, it makes work more of a burden than a piece of information to enjoy and work on. Also, virtual training doesn’t incite employees anymore unless it has engaging content.
Gamification is the answer to reducing employee burnout and increasing engagement. The purpose of gamification is to inspire and engage employees with interesting content that is enjoyable and also aligns with the company’s objectives. For example, using different game mechanics in task management to get rewards for reaching certain milestones This makes staff more productive and engaged.
Pay Transparency
Pay transparency has been a huge yet persistent issue for a long time. Despite the laws created to nullify its existence, countries and businesses have failed to implement it. It is expected that companies with an unbiased vision will support this law and introduce it into their HR strategy to attract the right talent.
This recruiting trend is expected to grow and take place in 2023, as some countries are in the process of enacting these measures to waive the gender pay gap.
What to Expect from the Recruitment Industry?
Having suffered from the chronic pandemic, it is time for proactive hiring rather than reactive. Recruiters must plan and strategize talent acquisition even before going live with a new job announcement. More skill-based hiring will be encouraged by recruiters and employers to improve work ethics.
Advanced tools for screening employees will be used to get useful insight about the candidate’s past experience. This will allow retailers to hire a talented workforce in the wake of the talent shortage.
Streamline Your Hiring Landscape in 2023
Recruitment agencies and employers have gone through different hiring challenges after the pandemic. Different methodologies have been adopted to cope with the horror of the pandemic. For example, unlimited PTOs, flexible working, and remote or hybrid work models Each has different requirements and implementations. However, following the right practices and trends will help recruiters streamline and optimize the hiring process. The key to enhancing your recruiting efforts is to make sure that you are more than just an interviewer.
Featured Image: Tanca