Remaining static in business, in almost any sector, is one of the easiest ways to lose out to competitors today. This is especially true in the recruitment industry, as job seekers are constantly evolving and expect recruiters to adapt too. If recruiters do not rise to the challenge, they will miss out on hiring excellent candidates to those who have developed and modified their approach.
This begs the question, how do recruiters ensure that their recruitment strategies are not negatively impacting on their ability to hire high-quality candidates? The truth is there is not just one fail safe way of doing it. However, there are seven deadliest sins all recruiters should avoid.
Stay in Touch
Recruitment is becoming more like marketing. Recruiters need to look after their candidates as marketers do customers—nurture them and give them attention. This is one way to ensure that you you sustain candidate interest in your job offerings. However, it is no easy feat trying to keep those candidates engaged, so it is vital that you have access to the best tools.
You should also consider investing in a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) system. A CRM system that is tailored to your recruitment needs means you will have the ability to build sturdy relationships with candidates, which in turn ensures their interests. It also allows you to build a long-term talent pool. Multi-channel communications is a great asset to any businesses’ recruitment endeavors. It will help recruiters to source and engage with prospects across a wide range of channels, whether that is through emailing, tweeting or employee referrals.
Tracing Your Candidates
Confidence alone, in the effectiveness of your recruitment efforts, is insufficient when justifying your strategy and investment to your colleagues, and most importantly, your bosses. By employing the right recruitment technology, you can refer back to the candidate process and identify where you originally engaged with them. This way you can justify why particular areas need significant investment or not.
Technology can also further help you to treat candidates like customers. It can help you to develop the right candidate communications strategy. By knowing where and when you communicated with them and whether they applied and then accepted a position will draw your attention to your success and failures in engaging with candidates. The aim in recruitment is to influence candidates to apply and eventually accept a position, so by knowing where you have a positive impact, will highlight what to focus on in the next round.
No Current Job Vacancies
A common sin in recruitment is lowering recruitment efforts when vacancies have been filled. Success in hiring requires proactivity. The best and brightest candidates are often working elsewhere. Despite the fact that they are not currently looking for a role, positioning your brand in a visible manner will ensure that when they do look, they will think of your company.
Showcasing your company to passive prospects may seem to be difficult, but there are ways of making individuals who don’t currently care about jobs, care about your business. One of the best approaches to raising awareness around your brand is social recruiting. Actively posting meaningful, thought-led content on your networks will help build an engaged audience.
Employee referrals are the top rated source of high-quality candidates according to Jobvite’s UK Social Recruitment Survey. So by ensuring you have enabled your employees to refer their friends using social media means your job is made easier!
Strengthen Your Employer Brand
Neglecting your employer brand in any way will hinder your opportunity to recruit excellent candidates. If you fail to give any of your channels attention, that is one group of candidates that is potentially lost to a competitor, so ensure each channel is up to scratch!
Millennials, or ‘digital natives’ are extremely confident and able in navigating and using social media networks. So reflecting on your social media presence is integral to your recruitment efforts when targeting this particular demographic to join your company.
Any platforms that you use to attract and recruit candidates through needs to showcase a consistent approach. If you have a presence on multiple of social media networks, a branded career site and a main webpage, it is important that the branding and the messaging ties in together across the board. Inconsistency can put candidates off applying altogether.
Refreshing Tactics
It is not unusual to be afraid of change, especially so if traditional recruitment methods have worked before. However, it is time to bin those tactics in favour of more effective and less time-consuming approaches. There is heaps of research that highlights how social media and employee referrals are topping the charts for high-quality hiring.
Using the right recruitment technology underpins a successful recruitment strategy. However, HR suites may be insufficient for your needs as more often than not, they are not well equipped to be used solely for recruitment. Ideally, a robust platform for recruiting will provide you with the tools to source candidates adequately through a variety of channels, communicate in the best way and track efforts in real time.
It is also important that existing technology can function with new recruitment platforms, which often HR suites are unable to do. As such, it is often safer to to use SaaS-based platforms that provide an open API for integration and development.
Broadcast Your Success to the Execs
If you are using the latest technology and tools to recruit excellent candidates, you need to ensure that the executives in your company know that and that it is made clear to them that the investment has delivered a good return. Using a robust recruitment platform will allow you to accurately and regularly report the success of your sourcing endeavours and communication strategies. Keep on top of whether your recruitment methods have had any positive impacts such as saving money or time, revealing this information to the execs will get their buy-in, because facts are hard to argue with.
Do More Than Create a Career Website
To attract candidates to your careers website, it is integral that recruiters do more than just simply create one. It is vital that they understand the candidates, what they are using, how they are using it and what kinds of things they are looking for?
Regularly posting up-to-date and interesting content on social media can positively influence the audience to find out more about your company. It is essential that the format in which the content is broadcast is appropriate for the social network, for example, more professional corporate posts go on LinkedIn and lighthearted, casual content on Facebook. This way candidates will be swayed into visiting your career site.
When candidates are on careers website, minimise the number of clicks that is required to allow for a straightforward and simple experience when navigating. Optimising your career webpage for mobile viewing will mean that those candidates who are job searching on their smartphone will have a pleasant experience, rather than trying to scroll and zoom around the page.
By avoiding temptation and not committing these seven deadly sins, you can build a recruitment strategy that is void of complexity and is extremely successful in hiring high-quality candidates. By using the best, and most fitting recruitment software, you can find candidates, communicate effectively with them and enable referrals so employees can assist you in your hiring efforts.