What is an effective recruitment strategy?

For recruiters, the ability to stay current with technology and recruitment strategies is critical in order to be effective. Quality of hire and time-to-fill are two of the most important (if not the most important) metrics, and are influenced heavily by evolving technology and recruiting strategies.

Different stages of the recruitment lifecycle have seen modernization, creating new efficiencies and opportunities to drive more value. Below are some of the strategies we recommend for landing the best hires, saving you as much time as possible at the same time.

Most Effective Candidate Sourcing Strategies

When we talk about candidate sourcing, the first thing most recruiters probably think about are job boards. Job boards were once considered the most modern way to source candidates, and all recruiting strategies were built to optimize around job boards.

However, times have changed. The world of recruiting has become much more competitive. While job boards still provide one avenue to recruit candidates, new recruiting strategies requires a more proactive approach to candidate sourcing. In fact, successful recruiters utilize many different modern channels in order to supply the high influx of quality candidates needed to fill open positions fast.

One approach would be to turn to tools that can search other platforms and the open web for potential candidates. Using the power of AI from tools such as Loxo or Hiretual, for example, you can automatically build lists of candidates based on specific roles and requirements. However, these lists will be “cold”, providing names of individuals who haven’t yet heard about your company, which can make connecting difficult or time consuming.

Alternatively, using the power of collective intelligence, you can quickly build a list of passive candidates who have heard about your company and have even asked to hear more.

Checkster’s Reference Insights tool queries candidates’ references whether they’d like to hear more about your organization. And the kicker is that a whopping 80% tend to say yes. Based on averages seen by Checkster clients, you could be collecting 5 passive (but interested) candidates per candidate whose references are checked.

Given these contacts had a professional relationship with the candidate you were interviewing, they tend to be higher quality passive candidates and often provide a great fit with your organization. This approach can build you a solid sourcing database fast and automatically.

Email Like a Pro For Your Recruiting Strategy

Recruitment marketing is one of the fastest areas of growth in the recruiting industry, and email marketing is one channel in particular that has seen some of the greatest innovations in terms of strategies and technology.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. You can easily emulate strategies from successful marketing and sales teams and create winning automated email programs in a snap. We recommend using tools such as Zapier, Outreach, Autopilot, and Instapage to build killer marketing workflows and automations. Once they’re built, they can run automatically and bring to you interested candidates ready to chat.

Automate Interview Scheduling to Streamline Your Recruiting

And the automation doesn’t have to stop there. Along with your email marketing automation, you can use tools like Calendly to get candidates to schedule their interviews themselves, saving you precious time that can be better spent elsewhere. And you’re improving the candidate experience at the same time: the candidates actually prefer this method as it’s easy-to-use and gives them full flexibility in choosing the time that works best for them.

You can even take it a step further: Use Calendly in connection with Zapier and you can automatically remove candidates from specific email workflows, and enter them into a new email workflow for once they schedule their initial interview time for a seamless experience overall.

Removing the time-consuming back and forth that comes with emailing and interview scheduling can save you several hours throughout the week, and provide a great candidate experience, reducing candidate churn.

Every New Recruiting Strategy Should Promote Company Culture

Employer brand and inclusiveness have become big focuses in recent years. Now, more than ever, promoting a company’s culture prominently has turned into one of the most effective strategies in recruitment. How important is company culture? Millennials are even willing to sacrifice up to $7,600 in salary for a better culture. 1. This is why promoting workplace flexibility, perks, environment, office locations, etc has become increasingly more important as a part of your recruitment strategy.

Use Social Media… The Right Way

Social media marketing in recruitment gets thrown around a lot these days. For most businesses, their social media strategy simply includes advertising open jobs, or posting random content about the company. But a business using modern recruitment strategies knows better. Today’s workforce doesn’t want more noise, they care about real stories.

Social media influencers who attract the most engagement are the ones who leverage rich storytelling and speak to the tone of their audience. Use social media to tell the stories of your employees, or better yet, let them do the storytelling for you with Instagram or Facebook takeovers.

Let employees tell your audience in their own words why they love where they work, or allow them to share their day-in-the-life at your company. These stories personalize your organization and help develop a meaningful brand. High quality prospective candidates will be more likely to say “yes” to working for you if they relate to your company’s culture. As well, you’ll attract more of the same (great employees) by sharing more about your team and what it’s like to work at your organization.

Texting for the Win

Email used to be the preferred style of communication with candidates. Times change, and it’s necessary to adapt with them. These days, you need to ake a multichannel approach with communication. Texting should be a key component of your recruitment processes, especially as it pertains to reminders, scheduling, and particularly if you have opportunities that are important for your candidates to learn about quickly. In fact, 73% of job seekers report texting as the preferred method to receiving information about opportunities. 2

Tools like Checkster’s Reference Insights offer text as a method for requesting and receiving reference feedback. This makes it easy to provide the candidate with the communication method of their choice, while automating the process for you behind-the-scenes.

Streamline Reference Checking Processes

Anybody who has ever had to manually check references knows that the process requires wasted hours on the phone, chasing down references and gathering (usually at best) basic information.

An effective recruitment strategy incorporates the latest tools that capitalize on automation and collective intelligence for checking references. This shift is easy to justify since it will require less time to set up reference checks, but you get more information back (average of 6 reference responses per candidate), faster, and with insightful reports to boot. It’s an easy win! Find out more about Reference Insights here.

Consolidating Interview Feedback Quickly and Fairly

Nothing slows your recruiting process more than having to wait for interview feedback from hiring managers and other internal stakeholders. Setting up various meetings or running huge debrief sessions can take days, and when it comes to time-to-hire, days can mean losing your best candidates.

The most successful recruiting departments rely on powerful tools such as Interview Insights to capture interviewer feedback consistently, compiling the data into easy-to-read, actionable reports giving you instant insights into a candidate’s fit. The days of long meetings and messy note-taking are behind us now that there are modern interviewer tools to make it a much more efficient process.

Data Driven Recruiting

What are your top sources of candidates in terms of quality of hire? Which channels lead to the fastest time-to-fill? Are you tracking and measuring this critical information?

Successful recruiting now means making data-driven decisions. It may take time to accumulate this data, but creating quality of hire surveys and measuring other metrics based on recruiting channel success (job boards, sourcing, etc) will give you the information you need to show you where your best hires are coming from.

Imagine if you spent 90% of your effort on job boards and social media advertising, but found out your best source of hires was career fairs or referrals? That type of data will dictate where you should allocate your budget to ensure you consistently deliver the best hires and at a greater ROI.

Checkster’s New Hire Insights will provide you with exactly those answers. You’ll gain insights into whether your new hire is performing well and onboarding quickly. And you’ll be able to determine if his / her expectations were correctly set from the beginning and whether the team feels it’s a good fit. Then you can tie this data back to your recruiting sources and processes for optimization that will improve your pool of candidates and eventually your company’s bottom line.

Final Thoughts: Effective Recruitment Strategies and Best Practices

With so many technological advances arriving in the recruiting industry, it can be challenging to discern between what’s a fad and what’s going to stick around. This can make it tough to decide which modern recruitment strategies and technologies you should implement with your team, and when.

The key to modernizing your recruitment strategy is to choose tactics that work harmoniously with your recruiting process, adding value every step of the way while removing / reducing various friction points.

If doing all of this on at once feels like too much, then start by taking baby steps. Implement solutions that work to free up more of your time such as Checkster for Hiring to reduce the time you spend collecting reference checks and gathering interview feedback. You can get your free demo of Checkster for Hiring here.

Once you’ve seen the efficiencies in time savings from implementing tools like Checkster, then you can begin to build out further with email marketing automation and test other modern recruitment strategies from there.

1. Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryalton/2017/06/20/how-millennials-are-reshaping-whats-important-in-corporate-culture/#767327fa2dfb

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