7 Tips For Creating An Effective Recruitment Strategy

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An effective recruitment strategy is seamless for the two C’s - the Company and the Candidate.

As stated above, to create a recruitment strategy, you must focus on the components that make it effective in the first place. If your company lags in coming up with a clear list of expectations for a candidate, your recruitment strategy will fail despite using all the tools and technology.

Establishing the right balance between technology and the human touch makes for an effective recruitment strategy. You not only need to hire the right candidate, but you need to do so in less time. After all, the best candidates are off the market in ten days. Moreover, an effective recruitment strategy decreases the number of bad hires and increases employee retention rates.

Now that we know the significance of creating a recruitment strategy let’s look at seven ways to make it effective.

1. Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

94% of hiring professionals state that using an ATS has drastically improved their hiring process.

While the human touch is essential for effective hiring, it would be unwise not to use technological advancements to your benefit. After all, you want to hire the right candidate in the minimum time possible. An applicant tracking system will make the hiring process less tedious and more efficient.

A few features make an ATS a must-have for a company:
• Automates the entire hiring process
• Ensures seamless communication with a candidate
• All documentation in a single place

These are a few features that make ATS necessary in your recruitment strategy. From job postings to hiring the candidate, the system is packed with features to streamline the hiring process. To know more about it, go through this guide to ATS. It will help you understand how exactly it simplifies the hiring process.

If you haven’t already considered using an ATS, it is high time to consider skimming through the available options and choose the one that aligns with your company values.

2. Create and Market Your Employer Brand

Show the candidates why they should join you.

Undoubtedly, you want to attract the top talent. However, to achieve that, they need to know why they should choose you over other organisations. Hiring is a two-way street afterall. Here is when the employer branding concept comes to rescue. Top companies that invest in employer branding are thrice more likely to hire the right talent.     

our employer brand reflects your company’s vision and values. Ensure your website, job postings, social media, and career pages reflect them. Also, simply reflecting on these values is not important; you need to do so in an exciting way. Take the help of content marketing and influencer marketing, if need be, to make your employer one-of-its-kind.

3. Know What the Candidate Wants

Get it right the first time!

Ensuring an effective recruitment strategy means you need to get the right candidate the first time. This stands true for every hire. You first need to know what the talent is looking for to achieve this. Once you figure out the key aspects they want, consider if your company offers all or at least a majority of them.

We’ve listed a few areas that an applicant looks for:

Flexible working hours
After the pandemic, nearly every applicant looks for flexible work hours as a preferred option in their job. Flexible working options could transform your talent pool and attract highly qualified candidates.

Employee well-being

Promoting employee well-being is a great way to showcase your employer positively. A positive work culture that motivates employees to take care of their health is more likely to attract top talent. Organise health check-ups, offer medical insurance, meditation camps, etc.

Showcase a sense of purpose

Employees today want to work with a company with a strong sense of purpose. Be clear, consistent, and value-driven as a business to attract candidates that align with your business's core values. CSR activities are also a great way to show what your business values.

Once you know the candidate's desires, you can incorporate them into your strategy.

4. Take Advantage of Social Media

Gone are the days when you had to skim through hundreds of applications, call up potential candidates and shortlist a few for the interview round. Social media has made it easy to recruit employees today.

Use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to showcase your workplace culture. Doing so will automatically attract suitable candidates and give them a glimpse of what it’d be like to work with your company. Use trends and hashtags to encourage candidates to apply for a position through social media. Take the help of content or targeted ads to attract suitable candidates.

Social media lets you make hiring a fun and creative process. So make the best of it!

5. Boost Inclusive Mentoring Programs

An applicant today looks for a gender-neutral workplace. They want an open-to-all culture where everyone feels welcomed. After all, people thrive in a diversified environment where everyone comes from varying cultures. So ensure that your mentoring programs reflect this value.

Not only should you conduct mentoring programs that are open to all individuals, but you also need to showcase them to potential candidates. Provide access to career mentors for the employees. Mentoring is a very effective way of learning for both the mentor and the mentee. Other than providing professional clarity to the employee, mentoring also helps in their personal development.

Such mentoring programs and workshops are a great way to attract outgoing candidates who value learning and are keen to be picked for such activities. A mentorship is a nuanced approach to an effective hiring strategy. Organising and endorsing workshops, mentoring programs and providing HR tools such as mentoring software enable you to approach hiring from a holistic perspective.

6. Conduct Exceptional Interviews

It could be easy to forget that interviewing is a two-way street.

The interviews conducted back in the day were stressful. A typical interview scene would consist of a candidate sitting in front of four to five hiring managers, ready to answer all their queries. However, that is not the case today. Ensure you make the candidate comfortable and try to make the interview as candid and conversational as possible.

If your company has a fun environment, make sure you showcase that during the interview. Whether the interview is remote or in-person, your company’s core values must be reflected during the interview. Even if it is a group interview, ensure the hiring managers are liberal and genuinely interested in knowing the candidate.

Remember, an interview is an opportunity for you to know the candidate is the right fit for your organisation and vice versa.

7. Create Employee Referral Programs

Last but not least - the people lie at the foundation of onboarding. Your employees may likely be surrounded by competent professionals. While some employees may refer to some of their known ones, a well-curated employee referral program motivates them, even more to refer to the top talent they know.

Create an employee referral program that benefits those who refer competent candidates to the company. For example, provide incentives to employees referring candidates. You could even imbibe the value of diversity by offering special rewards to employees who refer diverse candidates.

Employee referral programs are a great way to make a recruitment strategy effective.

Wrapping up 7 Tips to Create an Effective Recruitment Strategy

Creating an effective recruitment strategy is not a one-time action. You must keep up with the candidates’ wants and incorporate them into your existing recruitment strategy. Plus, you also need to consider the company’s expectations of a candidate and revise the recruitment strategy if necessary.

Remember, a seamless candidate experience lies at the base of an effective hiring process. If the hiring process is not painful for the candidate, it’s a good sign you’re on the right track. Moreover, using the right tools will make the hiring process more efficient. So keep these tips in mind and devise a strategy that works for the company and the candidate.

Happy hiring!

Author Bio

Parita Pandya is an Engineer turned Writer. She usually finds herself writing for businesses.  When she is not writing, she is either strumming her guitar or penning her thoughts down on paritapandya.com.