It is easy enough to think that hiring is merely the process of looking for talent and putting them to work. A lot of thought goes into recruitment strategies. Every organization’s HR department is responsible for creating a plan for recruitment that is efficient.
Recruitment strategies involve creating plans to attract talent, selecting the best of the lot, and ensuring the costs are within the organization’s reach. While doing all this, the talent acquisition team also has to keep the company’s long-term recruitment strategy and business strategy in mind.
Before we delve into the top 10 recruitment strategies, let’s understand what a recruitment strategy is.
What is a Recruitment strategy?
Recruitment strategies are created by laying out a step-by-step plan to identify, attract and recruit the top talent for the positions that you need to fill.
In the past, recruitment strategies were quite simple. An employer would post a wanted advert in a newspaper and receive a pile of applications. The employer could then be quite picky and choose the desired candidate.
The world has come a long way since then. Now it isn’t enough to let people know that there are openings on job portals or employment boards. Even hiring a recruiting agency is not sufficient. Recruitment strategies have to consider a lot more factors to ensure they do the best for the organization.
Here are the Top 10 Recruitment Strategies in 2021
-
Make Employee Experience a Priority
When employees talk about the organization they work for, their first impression is what comes to mind. Making sure your recruitment process is smooth, streamlined, and hassle-free is a great way to make sure you start your employer-employee relationship off on the right foot.
Even during the recruitment process, if a top-tier candidate feels like your HR team doesn’t have their act together, that could be enough reason for them to move on to greener pastures before joining your organization.
In the past, the situation may have been that employers were in control and just had to pick their desired employees; this isn’t the case anymore.
You have to treat your potential employees with the same care and respect that you would when handling your customers.
-
Set Recruitment Goals
One of the initial steps for successful recruitment strategies is to set clear goals. Understand what you want from your recruitment strategy, how it is going to affect your business, and what changes need to be made to the existing strategy.
One thing to keep in mind is to ensure that the goals set are measurable. This helps you understand if your recruitment strategies are going according to plan.
Here are a few ways to ensure your recruitment strategies goals are measurable:
Make sure they are specific and to the point.
Find ways to measure them precisely. For example, reducing the time taken to put a new hire into production is a great way to understand if your recruitment strategies are working.
Don’t aim for the sky. Make sure that the goals you set are realistic and achievable within the budget that has been set.
Set a deadline for the strategy and then measure it. Creating a time frame within which the desired results should be seen is a great way to ensure that the goals that have been laid out are adhered to.
-
Make Sure Your Employer Brand is Right
How potential employees see your company and its brand is vital in ensuring that you attract the right talent. Invest time and energy in creating the right brand image. Make sure it is the image that shows your culture as well.
Top talent is attracted to employers that have a great brand image.
-
Use Existing Employees to Attract Great Talent
Referral programs are a great way to get like-minded people to work for you. Asking your existing employees to help you find great talent is another one of the great recruitment strategies.
Employees wouldn’t refer people that could tarnish their image, so you are likely to get great talent referred to you by your existing employees.
Another way to attract talent is to let your employees talk about your company. Give employees avenues to express how it has been for them to work for you. Most potential candidates either ask a friend who works for the organization they are applying to or search for reviews to understand their future employer.
-
Use Social Media
Social media has become a powerful tool in today’s world. It is, without doubt, one of the best ways to let talent know that you are on the hunt for quality human capital. News spreads fast, and your chances of attracting talent increase vastly.
Social media also allows you to break all geographic barriers and advertise all around the world.
Using social media to search for talent is a great recruitment strategy. It is also smart to use social media to post your employee testimonials. You can create an Instagram page to showcase what your employees think about your organization, show off their career growth, their daily lives, and so much more.
Great workplace culture is one of the top influencing factors when it comes to potential candidates.
-
Jobs Posts Should Reflect Your Culture
We’ve talked about culture in the previous point because your company’s culture plays a huge role in attracting the right kind of talent. Be honest about your culture, if you are a no-nonsense, serious accounting firm, advertise that, and you will get the kind of people that are interested in that kind of work environment.
Make sure your job posts talk about what the work culture is like in your organization. It does not have to be a very detailed write-up. When posting jobs on job portals, your work culture could be reflected by using a quirky title or job description.
-
Use Job Portals
Another one of the most used recruitment strategies is posting wanted posts on job portals, or just browsing the listed candidates on job portals. More and more people are putting up their resumes and details on job portals in the hope of finding the right employer.
Take advantage of all that data so that you can select the best candidate for your company.
-
Stay Up to Date
It is important to stay on top of your game. This means that your recruitment strategies have to be up to date. Using archaic recruitment strategies means that your organization is less likely to be efficient in recruiting.
This also means that HR executives and management have to take the time and effort to keep themselves up to date. This means attending the latest HR seminars and recruitment seminars and understanding what kind of technology your competition uses.
-
Keep the Pool Open
Don’t be a seasonal hirer. You may not want a constant slew of resumes on your desk, but filling in an unexpected vacancy can be a nightmare if you don’t have at least a few options laid out.
Allow people to apply all the time, while this may mean that you constantly get resumes filling your inbox. It also means that the available pool of talent is just as vast. Create a section on your website for aspiring candidates to drop their details and let them know you will get back to them when you have something they are suited for.
-
Invest in the Right Technology
It is unarguable that technology makes our lives easier. The same goes for your recruitment strategies as well. Use the right tech to make sure that your HR department isn’t sifting through thousands of resumes but rather making decisions on who to hire and which vacancy best suits which candidate.
The latest HR tools and HRM suites use artificial intelligence, which means that your HR resources aren’t stooped over piles of resumes. The AI takes care of shortlisting the best candidates according to your specified criteria, while the HR executives focus on the more important tasks.
Using tech also makes it easier to maintain, process, and analyze data. This allows you to make well-informed decisions and improve your recruitment strategies.
Conclusion
Creating the right recruitment strategy and then implementing it effectively takes some practice. Understanding that effective recruitment strategies are vital to your overall HR strategy is important.
Using technology that helps you implement your desired recruitment strategies is a sure-fire way of increasing the chances of your plan working. When selecting the tech that you intend to use, make sure you understand what the HRM vendor brings to the table.
HRM suite providers that have experience implementing seamless recruitment strategies for numerous companies are the ones you should look at.
Take a look at Darwinbox! Their accumulated experience over the years makes them great at what they do.
Speak Your Mind