Recruitment Strategy: How to Attract the Best People

Recruitment Strategy Guide

Managers, C-suite executives and business owners alike should know that in order for a business to grow, thrive and succeed, they will need to hire new employees to keep up with the demand of daily operations. Naturally, employers should seek to hire people who will generate the greatest possible value for their business. In today’s competitive job market, finding and hiring the most skilled people for a job is no easy task. Gone are the days of simply throwing a job posting up on an online job board, or putting an ad in the local newspaper and expecting that perfect candidate to apply within days of putting the word out.

Without a clearly defined recruitment strategy in place, hiring the best people for a job becomes akin to finding a needle in a haystack, and can end up costing your business precious time and resources. In this guide, we will talk about the ways you can develop a winning recruitment strategy for your business.

Recruitment Starts With Planning

Before you can reach into the pool of potential employees to find your next hire(s), you first need to understand both the immediate and future needs of your business. It is important to take the time to identify which areas of your business are struggling to handle the increased workload that your recent growth has caused. These should be the hires that you must address immediately. Recruitment agencies can help you by providing temporary workers who could even turn out to be great permanent employees given proper training and the opportunity to succeed in their job. However, it is best to have a plan in place to hire a permanent employee from outside of the recruitment agency in case these temporary workers don’t work out.

Once the immediate staffing issues are solved, it then becomes time to plan future recruitment needs. This is based on growth forecasts which will give an estimate of when new people need to be hired, what roles your business will need and how many of them you will need to hire. Having these plans in place will keep you from being completely unprepared in the event you run into staffing issues.

Focus On Your Employer Brand

Every business has qualities which make them unique. Your business could be doing something completely innovative, or you may have a very collaborative work culture, or your business could be seeking to solve a major problem that the world is experiencing. These (or any other quality which sets your business apart from others) are things which can be huge selling points for talented people who are looking to put their skills to good use.

It is important that these things become what your business is known for to job seekers. Make sure that your brand and message is attractive and enticing and get the word out in every way you possibly can, especially on social media. If you don’t have a well-established employer brand, recruiting agencies can help get your message out to job seekers while you work on increasing brand recognition.

Perform A Skills Audit Before Posting A Job

When you’ve identified the types of roles that your company needs to hire for, it is not enough to simply hire any applicant that comes through the door. You want to be sure that the new hire has the skills necessary to perform their job properly, or that these skills are trainable on the job. But how can you be sure that a candidate has the skills needed for the job if you don’t even know the kinds of skills that you need in an employee to be a good fit for the role?

That is where a skills audit comes in. By identifying the hard skills needed for the role, and matching them to your business objectives, you will have a clearer picture of the type of employee you are looking for, which will allow you to qualify candidates more easily. Additionally, it is important to identify soft skills that your organization desires so that your candidates can fit into your business culture more easily. It is also a good idea to consider candidates who have different experiences than your workforce, as they can bring in a fresh and unique perspective that can potentially help to solve business problems in the future.

Use Data To Review Your Strategy & Refine Your Hiring Process

In order to achieve optimal efficiency for your hiring process, it is important be able to measure how effective the process is. Otherwise, you’re taking shots in the dark with every new employee you seek to hire. You need to know how many applicants you get for each role you hire for, and how many of those applicants are qualified for the role. There are a wide range of metrics which can be used to measure the effectiveness of the hiring process, and using this data can help to identify ways in which your hiring process can be improved which increases the likelihood of hiring highly talented employees.

Using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) helps make the collection, visualization and interpretation of this data much easier, but even without one, it is a good idea to keep track of this data to make your hiring process a well-oiled machine.

Refine Your Interview Process

According to research conducted by LinkedIn, 83% of candidates said that a negative experience during the interview process could change their opinion about the role and company they are interviewing for. Avoid too many cookie-cutter interview questions, and instead focus on deeper questions which allow candidates to get a better idea of what the working culture is like. It is also a good idea to include questions which will allow them talk about themselves and connect their work experiences and successes to the role they are interviewing for. This will result in more engaged candidates that are more likely to accept an offer should you choose to hire them.

Active Recruiting: Don’t Only Use A Passive Approach

Sitting back and waiting for applicants to apply to your job posting will limit your pool of potential high-talent candidates. For example, studies show that 85% of people who are already employed are open to talking with recruiters about new opportunities. What better way is there to hire highly talented people than to target those who are already putting those talents to use and demonstrating their abilities?

You should also consider great applicants which you have interviewed in the past. You may have had to make a tough decision and not have hired them because you had a better candidate for the role they applied for, but now you’re hiring for a role that they would be a perfect fit for. Don’t be apprehensive about reaching out to past candidates as they could still be interested in working for your company.

Along those same lines, reaching out to previous employees who left on good terms and had a good experience working for you can help expand your pool of potential high-quality candidates. They have working knowledge of your business which means less time spent onboarding them, and they have likely also had time to learn and develop new skills and knowledge that they can bring back to your company. That makes these people among the best people to target for hiring.

Never Stop Improving Your Hiring Process

The hiring process is something that can always be improved, or altered to fit the changing needs and goals of your business. Because businesses often change as they grow, a recruitment strategy that worked when the business had 10-100 employees may not work when the company has grown to have 250+ employees. Also, every business, regardless of size is different, so there is no singular correct way to go about hiring new employees.

By understanding your business goals, objectives, needed skills, and how your hiring process has performed to date, you will be able to make more informed decisions on what roles to hire for and when to hire, what candidates will need to be successful, and ways that you can improve your hiring process to increase the chances of the right candidate accepting your offer. Priti Lad can help with developing a winning recruitment strategy to help you attract the best employees for your business. Contact us today to see how we can help!