Introduction
You’re cultivating a positive corporate culture and honing your employer brand. Everything seems to be in place for recruitment, yet when you access your ATS, the ideal candidates for your open positions are still eluding you. If it resonates with you, you certainly aren’t alone.
To succeed in this landscape, recruitment teams must enhance their ability to attract top talent with greater persuasion and efficiency. Some of the strategies that you can implement to change the trend are as follows:
- Involve the hiring manager
- Design a candidate Profile
- Construct a clear and engaging job ad
- Design screening questions for evaluation
- Fine tune your hiring to suit each role
- Seek key information in collaborative assessment stage
- Initiate efforts to elevate candidate quality
Hiring top talent for the organization has major benefits which include- improved productivity, competitive advantage, better brand reputation, higher employee morale, boosting employee retention and gaining a competitive advantage.
1. Involve the Hiring Manager
As the initial step, arrange an intake meeting with the hiring manager and other relevant stakeholders. This meeting will provide an opportunity to clarify with the hiring team:
- The essential requirements for the new position
- What future colleagues expect from their new teammate
- The department’s expectations for the new hire
- The specific tasks that need to be accomplished
During this meeting, it’s also advisable to discuss the logistics of the hiring process, including availability, a general timeline for each stage, the compensation range, and the team’s ability to provide feedback to the recruitment team.
The sooner this process starts—and the clearer the communication between recruiters and hiring managers—the more effective the collaboration within the recruitment team will be.
2. Design a Candidate Profile
Next, collaborate with your hiring team to develop a well-defined candidate persona. This persona will guide the creation of job requirements and expectations for the role, ultimately helping to inform recruitment efforts and attract suitable applicants.
This candidate profile should encompass not only the professional qualifications for the position but also the character traits and soft skills you seek in a candidate. Essentially, the profile should represent the ideal candidate as a whole—not merely a list of experience or skills.
Once you have established this candidate profile, you can leverage it to design strategies for advertising to individuals who possess these attributes, and it will serve as a foundation for screening applicants.
3. Construct a Clear and Engaging Job Ad
When crafting your recruitment advertisement, ensure that you use clear and accessible language that resonates with your candidate profile. Get inventive. A job description doesn’t need to adhere to a rigid structure or tone. Feel free to infuse personality, humor, and a touch of storytelling into your advertisement.
If you’re using HireOnboard and feeling stuck, consider trying our AI-powered job description writing tool to help kickstart the process. While this tool provides a solid foundation, remember to review and customize the content to ensure clarity, specificity, and alignment with your company values and specific job requirements.
4. Design Screening Questions for Evaluation
Collaborate with your hiring team to decide on the questions you’d like to include in the screening process. While you likely have standard questions that you ask all candidates, think about what additional information you may want early in the process to assess if they are the right fit.
You might also consider incorporating “knockout questions” into the application process. For example, you could ask, “Are you eligible to work in the United States?” If this is a requirement for the position, your ATS can automatically filter out any applicants who respond “No” to this question.
This approach ensures that you’re asking pertinent questions to your applicants, utilizing the early screening process to eliminate candidates who do not meet the minimum requirements.
With HireOnboard, you can define both screening and knockout questions in advance and assign actions accordingly. For instance, you can send automatic rejections to applicants lacking a work permit or create an internal task for the responsible colleague for all English-speaking candidates.
5. Fine-tune Your Hiring to Suit Each Role
For each new hiring cycle, evaluate which strategies and tactics are most likely to lead to your desired goals and ideal candidates. Reflect on what has worked in the past and what hasn’t.
Is it sufficient to simply post a job ad and wait for applications to come in? Or should you engage in more active sourcing? Is it worthwhile to examine your talent pool for passive candidates who might be a good fit? The answers to these questions may vary depending on the specific role and the ideal candidate persona.
The channels you choose will also differ. Some recruitment efforts may thrive using traditional job boards and social media, while others might necessitate more niche channels, such as industry-specific career networks.
Your hiring team is your best resource for determining strategy for each role. The hiring manager and their team likely have valuable insights into where the ideal candidate persona spends their time online. Leverage their expertise in the industry to help shape your outreach strategy.
With HireOnboard, you can create a job promotion campaign to attract candidates on premium and niche job boards, and our tool will recommend the most suitable channels based on your needs.
6. Seek Key Information in the Collaborative Assessment Stage
Selecting suitable applicants involves more than just shortlisting resumes based on experience and skills. Candidates often bring intangibles that could make them an excellent fit, even if their resume is not as strong as that of another applicant.
To assess and capture these intangible qualities, we recommend documenting these impressions as part of your collaborative evaluation process. For objectivity, it’s beneficial to use standardized forms that each team member can complete for every candidate. This approach not only enhances fairness in the process but also ensures that evaluations are manageable for your team.
If you’re using HireOnboard, you can set up and customize evaluation forms and scorecards, and easily share them with the hiring team to collectively identify the best candidates based on consistent criteria. HireOnboard also assists you in evaluating candidates as part of a structured and equitable selection process.
7. Consistently Enhance Your Employer Brand
Lastly, always keep your employer brand in focus. This is your secret weapon when labor markets become tight and attracting top talent becomes challenging.
Continuously assess and adapt your employer brand messaging as market dynamics shift and applicant expectations evolve. While it’s important to remain true to your core values, ensure that your messaging and offerings align with current market expectations. Stay vigilant about your competitors for talent and monitor other data signals that may indicate emerging trends in candidate preferences.
Conclusion: Initiate Efforts to Elevate Candidate Quality
A shortage of skilled workers, intense competition for top talent, and generational and skills gaps in the market present numerous challenges to quality hiring today, and these issues are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.
To succeed in this environment, recruitment teams must optimize and automate their hiring processes while ensuring they have clearly defined strategies aligned with the company’s goals.
Applicant management systems like HireOnboard can assist with this. Our tools enable recruiters to streamline their processes, enhance collaborative hiring, craft better job descriptions, and ultimately find and attract the right—and best—talent for their organizations.
