We have curated a list of seven very actionable and creative recruitment strategies to help you reach out to the right candidates.
Recent surveys suggest that 40 percent of US employers plan to hire full-time skilled employees in 2019. This increased demand for skilled labor has intensified the competition for recruiters in the labor market, where the challenge of talent shortage persists. Although technology has simplified the recruitment process in multiple ways, it does not offer a solution to the primary challenge of the demand-supply gap for skilled candidates. Recruiters are in a constant battle to attract the best talent for their organizations.
So how can recruiters build a substantial talent pipeline in this competitive labor market?
The answer to this question is simple – recruiters need to spark their creative thinking. Traditional recruitment strategies like referrals, campus drives, and employer review sites are not enough given the current state of the competitive labor market. It is crucial for recruiters to unleash their creative spirit. And to get you started with this new approach, we have listed down the hottest creative recruitment strategies to ensure success in 2019!
But before we explore these trends, let’s understand the importance of corporate recruitment strategies.
Why Do You Need a Recruitment Strategy?
A recruitment strategy is a clear plan-of-action aligned to your company goals, which states what roles you will recruit for, when, why and how. It enables proactivity and clarity in your process to attract and hire the best-suited talent for your business.
For example, if you intend to hire a sales professional, the HR department will identify, attract, and target personnel with the right skills based on the process defined by your recruitment strategy.
7 Creative Recruitment Strategies You Need To Succeed In 2019
Now, let’s move on to understand how today’s market-leaders approach creative ways to reach out to the right candidates. We have scouted for the seven hottest creative recruitment strategies that you must implement in 2019:
1. Social Hiring Is Now Imperative
Statistics suggest that more than 90 percent of recruiters use social media to bolster their hiring efforts. From LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, candidates are everywhere. So, there is no reason for you to not include social media in your recruitment strategy.
Now, the question arises as to how you can leverage these channels to find the right talent. The answer to this is threefold.
One, build a fantastic reputation for your organization through your company social pages. Publish engaging and innovative content to showcase your company culture, employee benefits, and satisfaction to attract candidates. Engage with the right audience by participating in relevant conversations using hashtags.
Two, constantly publish and promote job openings on all company social pages. Leverage social media tools such as HootSuite, Buffer, Sprout Social and TweetDeck to automate, schedule, track, and analyze your social hiring activities.
And three, ask your business ambassadors, i.e., current employees to promote your brand as well as openings. Invest in employee advocacy and social selling applications such as LinkedIn Elevate, Trapit, Bambu, and Sociabble to boost this exercise.
2. Recruitment Marketing: Yes, Recruiters Need To Be Marketers Too
Another creative technique in hiring is to implement a marketing approach in your recruitment strategy. Recruitment marketing is the process of attracting and nurturing talent to your organization by marketing to them.
The good old marketing funnel of Attract > Engage > Convert > Nurture comes in handy for hiring the right talent as well. There are myriads of marketing tools available in the market that can be leveraged to implement this strategy.
For example, to ATTRACT candidates, you can optimize your career page using SEO tools such as SEMRush, Moz and Yoast. Publish relevant content to promote your brand which will increase your career page rank on search engines. To ENGAGE your candidates, use social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Email marketing programs such as drip campaigns and email workflows using tools like MailChimp, SendGrid, ActiveCampaigns are also useful in promoting your job openings. To CONVERT your ideal candidates, use advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Bing, and Google AdMob and optimize your job ad copies using SEO tools. Again, use email and social channels to NURTURE your candidates and keep them engaged with your brand.
3. Recruitment Videos: Brag About Your Brand
We live in an era of video. Videos are engaging, interacting and have an emotional value to them. And social media has revolutionized video content – 30 percent of people’s time spent online is dedicated to watching videos.
Video content needs to be a part of your creative recruitment strategy to reach out to the right candidates. This can include producing creative videos such as employee review videos, company culture introduction videos, company interior snapshot videos, candidate experience videos and so much more.
Don’t stop yourself there. Brainstorm creative ideas with your HR team to come up with engaging and synergistic video ideas. You can also use other strategies from this list to promote your videos.
4. Boomerang Employees: Rehire Former Employees
Creative hiring does not always mean hiring new candidates – you can apply creative strategies to attract your past employees too. These are called boomerang employees.
The advantage you have with these potential candidates is that they are very well aware of your company culture, products/services and know what you are looking for. This is assuming they have left your company on a positive note!
Hence, going after this gold-mine of pre-scanned talented candidates must be a part of your recruitment strategy in 2019.
5. Startup Recruitment Sites: Go Beyond The Conventional
Career sites such as Indeed, Monster, and Glassdoor are exhausted with a plethora of job openings across verticals. Which is why you need to explore some innovative and less conventional career sites that your ideal candidates – Gen Z, are well-versed with.
Sites such as The Muse, Angel.co, StackOverflow, and GithubJobs are ideal platforms for you to reach out to talented candidates.
Include budgets in your recruitment strategies in 2019 to explore these job sites.
6. AI, Automation and Data Analytics: Let’s Go Tech
We often come across articles suggesting that Artificial Intelligence will eat up jobs and increase unemployment. Well, here’s an opportunity to turn the tables – leverage AI to hire the right candidates and increase the employment rate.
Include AI, automation and data analytics in your recruitment strategy to automate candidate sourcing, resume matching, creating recruitment workflows to increase recruitment speed and so much more. This enables you to focus on other priorities while automation takes care of the redundant process of resume screening and job profile matching.
In 2019, a successful recruitment strategy will be defined by its ability to automate major tasks of the recruitment process. May the AI force be with you.
7. Collaborative Hiring: It’s A Team Effort
Taking employee referrals to the next level, collaborative hiring is including your entire team in the recruitment process.
Collaborative hiring opens the door to a valley of untapped personal and professional connections of your current employees. This hiring program involves activities within the company such as sharing information, assigning roles, sending emails, collaborative scorecards and measuring outputs.
Although being a creative spin-off on an existing recruitment strategy of employee referrals, collaborative hiring should be a part of your 2019 recruitment strategies.
Bringing It All Together
Understanding the challenges of the labor market clearly affirms that recruiting the right talent is no mean feat. Recruiters need to explore their creative inner being in this age of Gen Z and social media.
The right mix of these creative ideas along with a cohesive employer brand and candidate experience will help you stay ahead of the game in this challenging market.
