It’s been nearly 30 years since the first online job board came into existence! Digital recruitment strategies have since come a long way, and today, a powerful tech stack can supercharge your hiring processes. This guide explains how digital recruitment strategies improve the recruitment process. It also shares a 12-step roadmap for implementing a digital recruitment strategy.
Over the last few years, the battle for hiring talent has become more intense than ever before. HR professionals are now looking for a competitive advantage and several have found an answer in emerging technologies to source, draw in, screen, and eventually hire the most qualified candidates. Digital recruitment strategies have evolved from being an ideal add-on to an absolute must-have. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, HR professionals scrambled to find methods to attract and hire qualified candidates remotely/virtually. They are now looking to make investments in digital recruitment processes more holistically in order to realize continuous benefits.
Defining Digital Recruitment
The term ‘digital recruiting’ describes the use of technology to identify, evaluate, select, and appoint candidates for available positions. It includes employment websites, job discussion boards, social media and mobile recruiting, and online assessments.
Despite the fact that many organizations now implement one or more of these recruitment strategies, they have a long way to go before they can be deemed fully digital.
A digital recruitment strategy is an action plan outlining the measures and choices that your company will take to achieve its hiring targets using digital tools. The strategy must demonstrate how you intend to utilize tech and online resources for applicant discovery, screening, selecting, recruiting, and onboarding.
Digital recruitment lets recruiters interact with prospects more quickly and effectively in order to identify qualified candidates and extend job offers more efficiently and quickly.
A digital recruitment strategy is also critical as it enables remote hiring; it enables organizations to extend their reach above and beyond geographic boundaries for candidates, which can be a further advantage at a time when we are all facing a talent shortage.
Learn More: The Evolving Role of the Recruiter: Looking ahead to 2025
Traditional Hiring vs. Digital Recruitment Strategies
Recruiters and hiring managers invest a significant amount of their time in posting jobs, planning interviews, screening resumes, and gathering orientation documents. This is largely a digression from revenue-driving, high-impact priorities.
These responsibilities inhibit recruiting processes from becoming as fast, efficient, and cost-effective as they could be. Some duties, like interviewing and training, can never be better performed by machines. But with modern technology, recurring manual tasks such as document gathering, application updates, or candidate assessment happen more quickly and accurately.
This means you can transform the manual process into a system that is at least partially or wholly automated. That is what digital recruitment strategies are all about.
And as a result, your recruiters will be able to concentrate on tasks that call for human effort and judgment, like challenging job openings or organizational branding programs.
Learn More: Top 10 Recruitment Strategies to Attract Talent in 2022
8 Steps to Implement a Digital Recruitment Strategy
The long-term success of your digital recruitment strategy hinges on the strength of your digital presence. This includes refining your employment page, boosting your SEO rankings, or leveraging social media.
Here are some things to keep in mind while you craft a digital recruitment strategy at your organization:
Step 1: Optimize your careers page for mobile accessibility
Most digital recruitment journeys begin on the candidate’s smartphone, predominantly through social media platforms or job boards. If your careers webpage isn't mobile-friendly, you risk losing prospective applicants. An organization must ensure that its landing pages, job postings, and all other digital hiring assets are mobile-friendly, efficient, and easy to navigate.
Step 2: Build your social media presence
Social media has significantly streamlined the recruitment process. Just create your job ad, share it across various platforms, and watch for the applications to pour in. Ensure that your organization’s pages on these platforms are updated, post regularly, and ensure that your social presence is credible. You could include business anecdotes, individual or team details, and general industry guidance. This must be in sync with the ideas and thoughts of the individuals you wish to attract. Therefore, it is essential to conduct a preliminary investigation of your target audience. Using competitor research, determine the category of content that truly resonates with them. You can also conduct polls if you have a sufficiently large following already.
Step 3: Invest in an applicant tracking system (ATS)
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is used to streamline the recruiting process by preserving candidate applications and automating significant parts of the recruitment process.
Since its inception in the 1990s, the ATS has certainly come a long way. The first systems were primarily used to monitor candidates' resumes. Modern, next-gen ATS systems are capable of AI-driven resume parsing, seamless job posting, email handling, and candidate communication.
Step 4: Set up a hiring chatbot
A recruitment chatbot is a straightforward application that can facilitate interactions between your company and interested applicants.
Chatbots operate as a messaging system on your site and could respond to candidates' queries 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on frequently asked questions about a job posting, company details, etc. The chatbot can respond to questions about the current status of a job application and improve the overall candidate experience.
An artificial intelligence (AI)-based ATS or other HR software can help here, by automating the resume screening, communication, and shortlisting tasks.
Learn More: Recruitment Life Cycle: Importance and Stages
Step 5: Enable interview self-scheduling
In a fully digital recruitment process, an applicant may interact with a member of your team for the first time during the interview phase. It would help if you facilitated candidate self-scheduling for this to be as efficient and seamless as possible. Organizations can also set up a video interview process to further remove friction.
Step 6. Test the candidate experience
A great way to optimize your digital recruitment strategy is to apply for a job on your careers platform. This is the only way to comprehend the exact issues your applicants encounter when sending in an application. Observe where things feel 'flat' or slow and make notes. Watch out for opportunities for customization.This is important to demonstrate to your candidates that they are valued as unique individuals throughout a digital workflow.
Step 7: Collect the digital recruitment process with the onboarding system
You don't want your digital processes to simply end with "you're hired." Digital onboarding streamlines the transition from candidate to staff member and ensures that job seekers are onboarded smoothly after accepting an offer. You could automate the first communication you send out, which is usually an onboarding (or welcome) email.
Step 8: Keep your talent pool engaged
It is important to keep the talent pool engaged irrespective of where they are in the recruitment process. You can use technology to bolster your company's relationship with talent. The talent pool can be kept automatically informed of business developments, new opportunities, or application status. To facilitate engagement at scale, synchronize the interactions with your ATS and HRMS to send automated email and text notifications.
Learn More: Transform Your Recruitment Operations With Technology
Maximizing Recruitment ROI with Next-Gen Digital Strategies: Best Practices
Once you have a digital recruitment strategy in place, it is time to optimize the processes so you get the most returns on investment (ROI). Here are some best practices you can follow:
1. Using recruitment metrics to improve processes
Monitoring recruitment metrics will help you figure out the selection ratio, observe manager satisfaction or candidate job satisfaction, and evaluate the quality of hiring, and use the data to boost the efficacy of the recruitment pipeline.
2. Simplify the application process
Making the application process simple and short can help improve employee experience right at the beginning of the recruitment process. For instance, many companies fail to share the HR department's contact details. No matter how inviting your company might seem to a potential applicant who has just visited your company's website, the interest can fade away if there's no way for them to contact you before applying. Your digital recruitment strategy must include planning who prospective candidates must reach out to and how they will respond.
3. Ensure job ads are crafted well
The efficacy of a digital recruitment strategy is dependent on the job postings that are published. Incomplete or ambiguous job postings will not only deter qualified candidates but will also attract a large number of applicants who are underqualified for the available positions.
4. Maintaining transparency through automation
The lack of timely updates is one of the key gripes in a typical candidate experience. By streamlining candidate engagement via text or email by means of the ATS, you can inform candidates of their current status. At scale, automating tasks like application management, FAQ handling, or interview scheduling may conserve hundreds of hours of manual work.
5. Customize the digital recruitment strategies for your workforce
Every organization has a unique recruitment strategy centered around its primary targets. An idea that's worked for another company might not necessarily work for you. Reimagine or calibrate the recruitment strategy according to your organization's needs and objectives. For instance, a competitor may be using Instagram to recruit candidates, but if your target demographic doesn't particularly use Instagram, this strategy isn't right for you.
6. Be sure to respond to every applicant
Today, the expression "resume black hole" rings a bell with a large number of job applicants. It refers to the bleak chasm into which applications typically fall – never to be seen again. Numerous applicants receive no response after sending in their applications, which can be incredibly exasperating, and many of them voice their grievances publicly. This will have a direct hit on your employer brand. So, be sure to respond to every applicant, even if it is a simple automated email.
Learn More: Refine Your Recruitment Process to Attract the Best Talent
5 Key Benefits of a Digital Recruitment Strategy
Leveraging digital tools for your recruitment processes has several benefits, such as:
1. Cost optimization
A lot of businesses have embraced digital recruitment because it is significantly more cost-effective than conventional methods of employee recruitment. Listing the position, looking for candidates, communicating with them, and eventually interviewing them can all be expensive. Digital recruitment eliminates or substantially decreases these costs.
2. Access to a wider talent pool
Compared to conventional recruitment strategies, your talent pool will now be accessible at any time and from any location. The latest technologies allow you to locate, view, and interact with candidates from your smartphone, tablet, or computer.
3. Data for analytics and insights
AI and predictive HR analytics can help conduct pre-employment evaluations that share indications/signs of how an applicant is likely to perform on the job. This data can help hiring managers make more informed recruiting decisions. Recruitment analytics also makes it easier to optimize processes, such as which job boards you choose or the messaging to put out.
4. Better candidate experience
Digital recruitment strategies enable applicants to submit applications remotely at a time and location of their choice. In addition, they appreciate a streamlined, faster process flow. Candidates can also actively participate in the recruitment process, and will overall have a better experience when there’s no manual paperwork involved at every step of the process.
paperwork involved at every step of the process.
5. Process standardization
Digital recruitment strategies pave the way for standardized processes that HR teams can replicate across the organization. Recruiters can take a template to rapidly list a position, change job titles, share fields, delete fields, alter existing content, mask sections, reorganize fields, etc.
Conclusion
It's been 28 years since the first digital job board Monster.com unveiled the first online job listings in 1995. Since then, digital recruitment strategies have become the norm.
A robust recruitment software will not only support hiring but will drastically cut down the cost and effort it takes. Powered by AI, integrated workflows, and automation, these digital tools transform recruitment to provide better experiences for both hiring managers and candidates.
Ask for a Darwinbox demo to see this first-hand.
Speak Your Mind