Just like your pursuit of happiness shouldn’t solely rely on short-term quick fixes, your pursuit of top talent shouldn’t solely rely on traditional, short-term recruitment strategies like sending LinkedIn messages or attending job fairs.
To ensure top talent acquisition and retention, you’ll need to conceive a strategic long-term talent acquisition plan.
Here are some foolproof talent acquisition strategies that could help.
- Candidate Experience
“If you make [candidates] unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make [candidates] unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
If you replace candidates with customers in this particular quote, then this is an original Jeff Bezos quote!
The candidate experience is really important because you want your reputation as an employer to stand out — especially for those candidates who didn’t make it to the job offer. Their experience in the overall selection process will determine whether or not they apply for another job at your company.
Spreetail, an ecommerce solution, recognized the top two ways to improve its candidate experience,
- Send CX surveys to each candidate — good fits for open roles (i.e., new hires) and rejected candidates (e.g., silver medalists) — so it could track and improve its Net Promoter Score (NPS).
- Revamp its candidate-communication approach through coordinated training and practice (e.g., provide custom-tailored feedback to each individual the Spreetail talent org interviewed).
2. You can’t improve what you don’t measure!
Creating a marketing campaign without data is unimaginable, so why would you recruit without data?!
Your talent acquisition strategy could improve by leaps and bounds with data . For instance, you could use data to figure out where your top talent came from, and use that piece of information to centre your talent acquisition efforts on certain academic programs or professional networking sites.
Data could also be used to find out if certain questions on the job application form are deterring candidates from applying.
In my humble opinion, recruitment is not just about hiring the right candidate anymore. As a recruiter, it’s important to see yourself as a marketer too!
Persuading people to join your company is just as necessary as incentivizing people to buy your products.
By using data and analytics, one could also find out that adding images or videos highlighting the company culture, encourages more candidates to apply for the job.
3. Get creative with outreach strategies
Don’t we all know the best place to eat Italian food, the best libraries across the city or the best place to have afternoon tea in the city?
Similarly, we need to consider other specialised job boards, academic programs, or networking events to find a specific group of talented professionals.
For example, to find the best software developers, a recruiter must explore platforms like Stack Overflow, dice.com or AngelList.
LinkedIn is not the holy grail… there! I said it!
Therefore, to find better talent, you’ll need to expand your sourcing strategies.
Different strokes (methods of outreach) to hire different folks with diverse skillsets!
You’d find your best marketers in a different place than your best engineers, so you’d want to diversify your sourcing approach.
4. Company branding:
“A brand is no longer what we tell the customer it is — it is what customers tell each other it is” — Scott Cook, co-founder at Intuit.
If you replace the word customer with “employee”, the above quote still rings true.
Millenials and Gen Z form a major part of the workforce today.
Two years since Covid-19 upended lives around us, “The Great Resignation (term coined by Anthony Klotz, a professor of business administration at Texas A&M University )” is taking root all around the world.
A majority of workers who quit a job in 2021 say low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%) and feeling disrespected at work (57%) were reasons why they quit.
The pandemic in a lot of ways has recalibrated people’s priorities, where they’re rethinking the role of work in their lives, not only in terms of things like compensation — but also, things like flexibility and purpose.
When looking into a company, a candidate would have questions around flexibility, work-life balance and the likes.
A company that focuses on the well-being of its employees is a place where people would want to work. Building your company identity to reflect a positive, expanding environment can be an effective tool in your talent acquisition strategy.
5. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I)
One of my favourite quotes on diversity and inclusion is this quote by Kadia Tubman, Senior Editor at Insider Inc, “Diversity is having a seat at the table. Inclusion is having a voice and having that voice be heard.”
DE&I is important and shows that the company is willing to stay relevant with changing times.
One of the ways to ensure a bias-free job-application process, is to remove names and photos when sourcing candidates, making applications and resumes anonymous before review, and creating a diverse hiring team.
Some of the tools that can be used to measure DEI are as follows,
Entelo helps recruiters to find and acquire diverse talent which offers the ability to anonymise various aspects of candidate resumes, including gender, name, age, educational background, employment gaps, and many more. Entelo seeks to match talented candidates and promote a diverse and inclusive workplace while removing the potential for hiring bias in order to help your company succeed.
Atipica’s platform assists in retaining and measuring data relating to DEI in your organization. It also creates personalized recommendations for further advancement, and offers the ability to reach out to candidates from underrepresented groups.
Bunch’s model assists in matching potential employees to workplaces and ensuring they will be a good fit based on their prior work experience, qualifications, and the words they use. The technology uses Slack messages, Linkedin profiles and Glassdoor reviews, among other data.
DEI is critical and non-negotiable if you’re a company that wants to scale globally and build a sturdy company culture.
6. Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)
Candidate Relationship Management, simply put, is to stay in touch with past, current, and potential candidates in order to have a ready pool of talent for hiring whenever the need arises.
According to a survey, 71% of the talent leaders cited the importance of CRM capabilities built well into the ATS systems.
The tool, Lever, is an excellent example of an ATS system built in with robust CRM capabilities.
Treating candidates like customers and showing that you value them is something that a CRM can help you with. The more your candidates are looked after, the better are your chances in attracting top performers to work at your company.
A full-fledged CRM software with functionality that helps you source, nurture, interview, and hire talent in a streamlined, standardized manner is the need of the hour.
Talent Acquisition Strategies may differ across companies; what works for Company X may not work for Company Y.
However, the only thing that’s common across high-growth companies with top talent acquisition strategies, is that they keep candidates (aka potential employees) at the heart of everything that they do!
And that, my friend, makes all the difference!