Recruitment is a critical concern for companies who want to remain at the top of their industry. Your recruitment strategy impacts the overall well-being of your company, so it’s important that you continually refine your technique to achieve the best possible outcome.
In this article, we’re going to discuss the top 20 tips you can implement to immediately improve your recruitment strategy this 2022.
How to Improve Your Recruitment Strategy in 2022
1. Be A Proactive Recruiter
It’s a job seeker’s paradise out there, with recruiters giving more and more ground because of various external situations like the pandemic and the mass resignation that followed. How can you get ahead of your competitors?
The answer is by being more proactive.
Proactive recruiters don’t wait for candidates to find them – they actively look for rising talent and build a positive relationship with them, even before sending out an offer.
Additionally, instead of looking for industry veterans who are in overwhelmingly high demand, start looking for rising talent that shows a great aptitude for learning and cultural fit for your company.
2. Shift Your Focus
Nowadays, recruitment is becoming more and more like marketing, with recruiters advertising their roles like how marketers advertise their products.
As such, there’s plenty to learn from this age-old position. However, perhaps one of the most important things is focusing on your customers.
Instead of the typical “Here’s what you need to do in this job,” focus on what the position can do for the candidate. This psychological concept is called the Needs-Supplies Fit.
3. Give More Thought to Your Job Descriptions
Job descriptions are critical if you want to attract the best talent in your industry. However, it’s one of those things which are easy to do, but difficult to do well – and very easy to do badly.
Job descriptions are job seekers’ first window into your company. Thus, you need to be more careful about making your job descriptions.
Avoid simply enumerating the role’s daily tasks. Instead, focus on the actual impact that the position will have on the entire organization. More than that, avoid jargon, use simple language, and community with simple language that anyone can make sense of.
4. Appeal To The Younger Generation of Talents
Each generation of workers is characterized by specific values that affect how they work.
Millennials, for example, have been typified by their propensity to hop between jobs, aside from others. Gen Zs, the next generation of the workforce, are yet distinct from millennials.
There are plenty of reasons why you should cater to the younger generation, but the most basic reason is simple math; according to the Pew Research Center, Generation Z is the most populous and diverse workforce cohort and will soon outnumber any other in the labor market.
Thus, if you want to be attractive to the next wave of potential employees, you need to be able to cater to their demands, which means being more in line with trends.
5. Zoom in on Soft Skills
The extraordinary situations that have characterized the past few years, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation, have highlighted the need for soft skills more than ever before.
According to a 2016 Wonderlic survey, 93% of the surveyed employers rated soft skills to be either “essential” or “very important.”
Another startling finding by LeadershipIQ also highlighted the importance of soft skills in the workplace: among new employees, about 46% will fail within the next year and a half for lack of soft skills.
While hard skills can be easily taught, soft skills are more challenging to acquire. Focusing on candidates who are already teachable and resilient will save you plenty of heartaches later on.
6. Make Remote Recruitment Standard Practice
The Covid-19 pandemic that started in the previous years has seen the rapid shift to an increasingly digital system to adjust to being able to adjust to external circumstances.
In the following years, expect these trends to continue.
To make yourself an attractive employer, you need to make sure that you can cater to a wide variety of demands, and that includes the demands for remote recruitment by qualified candidates who may not be otherwise geographically accessible for you.
7. Look For Passive Candidates
Most of the talents in the job market right now are not actively looking for a job. They are passive candidates, potential job seekers who already have a job but are only browsing for new opportunities.
Looking towards passive candidates can help you hire experienced, high-quality talent without too many competitors crowding their view.
Passive candidates are a different demographic from the typical job seeker, so naturally, the way you approach them should be different as well. Here are a couple of tips to keep in mind:
- Be very selective about the candidates that you want to recruit, so conduct a skill gap analysis first.
- Marketing to passive candidates is a long-term play, so aim to build up your relationship slowly over time.
- Attract your target talents from uncommon channels, such as social media, referrals, and even physical advertising.
8. Stand Out From the Crowd
There are tons of job posts on the internet, and all of them follow the same basic format, content, and style – take advantage of this monotony by standing out from the crowd.
That’s not to say you should depart from this professionalism entirely – it’s also an important factor in making your job descriptions accurate within your industry standards.
However, there are several things you can do to break the mold, so to speak.
For example:
- Create a professionally-made 30-second recruitment video.
- Link your online job posts to an engaging careers page that shows off your company.
- Insert a discoverable QR code that will link to an online experience, like an exclusive promotional video, coupons, etc.
9. Go Where Others Aren’t
If you want to have something that others do not, don’t shop in the same places that others do. This principle also applies to recruitment: there are plenty more recruitment channels than just LinkedIn and a couple of job boards.
You need to recognize the power of different social media platforms and internet forums, both the mainstream and niche.
For example, Reddit is a place where professionals of all kinds have in-depth discussions about things that interest them, and GitHub and XDA Forums are places for coders and mobile developers. If you want to source passive candidates, these places might be a good place to start.
10. Retain Your Employees
The best way to have high-quality talents right on hand is to avoid losing them in the first place. All of the strategies listed here will be for naught if you don’t take steps to decrease your turnover rates.
Top talents are nurtured in a healthy working culture with plenty of opportunities for training, advancement, and upskilling.
Not only will this help you retain your employees, but it will also create a wonderful employer brand that will make people want to work for you.
11. Always Put Candidate Experience First
Candidate experience remains to be a top concern for recruitment this year, affecting not just the applicant’s willingness to apply again but also their perception about your organization and even your employee retention, according to recent statistics.
Keep your recruitment process as efficient as possible to increase candidate experience. Communicate often, avoid tardiness, and lessen your candidate’s anxiety as much as possible.
12. Create A Distinct Message
Your job applicants need to know exactly what your job post means, not just in terms of opportunities and compensation, but also in what their overall impact will be.
Creating a distinct message that comes with your job description is more art than science, but it will help potential job applicants ground themselves in your company’s principles even before they begin to work at your company.
To do this, you need to embed the open job role in your company’s mission, vision, and work culture. This will let the applicant know what the position is really all about.
13. Value Work Ethic and Experience
Shiny degrees and badges look great on a resume, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about their hands-on competency.
If you want to hire better talent, you need to let go of the bias that Ivy-League graduates are automatically the best. More often than not, an experienced, hard-working candidate will be better for you in the long run.
There have been plenty of instances where a self-taught genius has made millions by themselves simply because they were rejected by otherwise prestigious companies they applied to.
Imagine if you were the one to absorb and nurture an undiscovered talent.
14. Improve Your Interviews
The interview phase is one of the most crucial parts of your recruitment, yet it’s one of the most undervalued. In the previously-quoted study by LeadershipIQ, one of the reasons that hiring managers made bad hires was because they were distracted during their interviews.
Automating most of your administrative tasks might do the job to help minimize administrative problems that may infringe on your interview time.
Subscribing to a feature-rich HR platform like HireNest will make your HR duties more manageable and give you more time and headspace to improve your interviews.
15. Remove Unconscious Bias
Diversity is a valuable part of today’s workspaces. Not only does it improve various aspects of the organization, but it’s also one of the primary demands of today’s job seeker.
The best hiring managers take steps to remove unconscious bias in the recruitment process.
You can do this through a variety of methods, from something as simple as a diverse hiring team to implementing anonymous shortlisting policies.
16. Focus On Non-technical Qualities During Interviews
It’s been mentioned in this article, but it bears repeating: soft skills are just as important as hard skills. Not to mention, your interviewee’s technical qualifications have undoubtedly been outlined in their resumes, so going over it again would just be a redundancy.
Instead, focus on the non-technical qualities of your applicants, such as personality, thought processes, and culture fit.
17. Allow Space For Innovation
The world is constantly changing, and you need to be able to adapt to it. You can take a step towards this simply by allowing candidates to innovate in their job roles to make their work more efficient.
It’s not enough to simply avoid micromanaging your employees (that much should be the minimum), but you have to explicitly state that you’re leaving certain parts of their job up to them.
This way, they can design their own work processes and roles – with your guidance, of course. If their methods work out perfectly, they might even take up their innovation to the managers and help improve the position as a whole.
18. Nurture All Employees To Be Top Talents
Define what successful employees are in your company, and actively encourage your work culture towards that direction. Don’t just state what you want from your current employees, also do your best to foster this behavior.
Whether you want to encourage unbounded creativity, extreme focus, or building strong relationships, you need to make spaces for these ideals in your company culture.
19. Define What Success in the Role Is
Traditional job descriptions don’t cut it: you need to be specific and realistic when defining your goals, especially during the onboarding stage.
For you, success in the role might mean being able to close the first client within the first 30 days, independent functionality within 2 months, or the employee’s first big project within the first 6 months.
Whatever it is, these aren’t just goals. These targets state your belief in your employees’ potential, as well as your dedication to realizing that potential.
20. Don’t Be Over-Reliant On Applicant Tracking Systems
ATS are extremely useful tools that help you create more efficient systems and workflows for your recruitment and your HR as a whole – however, it’s undeniable that it removes some of the human element from work.
To balance it out, you need to identify where the human touch is necessary. It could be:
- During important communication materials like congratulatory “you’re hired” emails, company-wide memos, etc.
- Specific aspects of HR interaction such as team-building, conflict mediation, etc.
- Designing company culture to emphasize core values
Techniques to Improve Your Recruitment Strategy
Your recruitment strategy is now more important than ever, thanks to major external circumstances that might ripple down for years to come. You need to stay on top of trends by immediately implementing these modern techniques to improve your recruitment strategy.
Here at Hirenest, we can help you get better hires with pre-assessment tools. Check back for more details!
