Guest Post by James Maron
James Maron is an author and marketing consultant at SutiSoft Inc., one of the fastest growing SaaS providers in the industry. He shares his views on SaaS and Cloud-based business management solutions. Connect with James on LinkedIn.
From maintaining a handy candidate pool to adopting social recruiting methods to using analytics to improve the process of improving your brand image by offering your candidates excellent service, here are nine strategies for effective recruitment.
Recruitment, unfortunately, does not come with a guidebook. Each organization is unique in its circumstances, and candidates are unique in their skills and talents that recruitment often becomes complicated and time-consuming. It is also prone to mistakes, with wrong hires costing organizations billions of dollars every year. Effective recruitment means organizations must pay close attention to details and implement strategies that can yield positive results. Improving company branding and using social recruiting are just a few strategies that can help organizations ensure an effective recruitment process. However, there are many more strategies that organizations can use for the same. We will discuss some of them in this post.
One of the things that is a prerequisite for any of these strategies to work is to get buy-in from all the stakeholders, especially the top management. One mistake that happens in many organizations is that usually low-level employees are put on the job with little to no training and are expected to work miracles. It doesn’t work that way – recruitment is a collaborative job that needs all the stakeholders to be completely involved. Having said this, let’s move on to some of the strategies.
Candidate Pool
It is time-consuming to look for candidates after a position has been opened. Instead, organizations would do better to maintain a candidate pool that they can tap whenever there is a requirement. By providing candidates with an email id to send their resumes to, or by stating the same through their social media channels, organizations can create a talent pool that can be called upon whenever necessary. Also, this a good way to keep track of passive candidates – candidates who are not immediately looking for a job but are interested in considering opportunities. And since candidates willingly post their resumes, you can collect data with minimal effort.
Analytics
Analytics have come a long way in recent years. Instead of being limited in application and scope, and instead of being time-consuming and requiring special skills, analytics today have improved in importance and the benefits they could offer users. Also, analytics today are more widely available and help in painting a truer picture of the conditions.
There are many recruitment analytics that the stakeholders will find useful – the time it takes to close a position, the effectiveness of the recruiters, the performance of the recruitment process, and so on. The software also helps with data collection and management and running calculations on this data is simple and quick. There is also quite a bit of automation in analytics – many of these calculations can be done automatically, and reports can be sent to the stakeholders regularly. Analytics also transform decision-making and allow recruiters to spot and avoid potential bad hires.
Social Recruiting
Social recruiting has also significantly increased in scope in the last few years. Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have come up with improvements that allow users to target potential candidates significantly more accurately and easily. By having a good company page that engages candidates with interesting and relevant posts, organizations can attract them more easily.
Social media is also a good way to keep track of passive candidates – since they will be following the developments, they will immediately know if a position that suits their skills has opened up. Along with the profile, organizations will also have interactions with the candidate to go by in making their recruitment decisions. Social recruitment might take some time and need buy-in from all the stakeholders but it can yield highly positive results. Organizations need to be active and focus on multiple channels to build up a good following among job seekers. Social media also allows potential candidates to interact with current employees and resolve their queries and gain clarifications.
Improve Your Brand
When a candidate has to choose from two organizations which are comparable in size and strength but if one more brand equity and brand value than the other, who do you think the candidate will choose? The brand of the company matters for potential candidates, as much if not more than it does for customers. When you have good brand value, employees would flock to you, and take pride in being associated with you. Make sure that your organization is not affected by any trends or happenings in the industry, and ensure that your PR and communications team is always active.
Freelancers/Virtual Contributors
Technology has brought the world closer and made it easier for organizations to hire and manage freelancers. If organizations can manage the credibility and reliability of freelancers, they have much to gain from this channel. Instead of dismissing this strategy out of hand, organizations would do well to see how well it can fit into their strategy and take measures to address any pitfalls that might occur. Many jobs such as content development, web/social media operations, and design and development, do not need contributors to always be physically present at the workplace. By creating buffer times and allowing for delays, freelancers can be handled more conveniently.
Avoid Saturated Channels
Whether it is in social recruiting or in using job portals, avoid the same channels that are used by everyone else, owing to the fact that they may be saturated. Instead, focus your energies on finding niche spots where you are the pioneer, and can, therefore, find the best talent before anyone else. Sometimes, they might not seem like the pertinent source, but you can find candidates serendipitously. From personal experience, I know that you can be recruited from a social media for a journalism job. You will also find different sourcing channels that cater to very specific, individualized needs. Try finding candidates here – you might get to pick the best of them.
Service Delivery
Recruitment, like other organizational tasks, involves different internal and external stakeholders. Ensure that service delivery across these stakeholders is excellent and consistent. Gone are the days when you could get away with treating employees like they were not important. Today, with so much information around, candidates will easily get to know how you are as an employer, and will not even entertain you if you do not offer them excellent service. Again, from personal experience, I can tell you that lack of punctuality could also hurt your chances of recruiting a good candidate. I had once walked out of an interview since I was kept waiting for too long, and ensured that I conveyed the same to everyone I knew.
Keep Multiple Channels Open Simultaneously
You have so many channels you can source candidates from, and you do not know where to focus your efforts on. You end up not focusing on anything and lose the chance to attract top talent. The best way to go about this is to find the three best channels that have historically shown you the best returns and focus your efforts on them. Always ensure that you have more than one channel in play – you don’t want to limit your options, and there is no guarantee that the single channel will get you what you need. Job portals, consultants, employee referrals, and social recruiting are some of the hottest channels today for best results.
Make Recruitment Interesting
The recruitment process is often the first time a candidate gets in touch with your organization. If the process is insipid and does not challenge the candidates, what kind of an impression are you creating in their minds? Do you want them thinking that the job is equally boring, and their skills and abilities will not be challenged? So, ensure that your recruitment process is interesting, and leaves a good and lasting impression in the minds of candidates. Even unsuccessful candidates must go back happy with the process and the efforts they have put in. You can use a combination of tests and interviews to challenge employees and find out their real mettle.
Some of the above strategies are also warning bells for you on how not to go about recruitment. For example, you do not want people thinking that you do not care about your candidates or that your brand is not worth being associated with. Recruitment is a delicate process that needs time and effort from the stakeholders to be effective.
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