The most valuable assets of your business are your staff members. To be able to hire and nurture the best talents of the industry, you should know where and how to look for them. In this article, we'll tell you how to make the most of the recruiting process. If you follow these recommendations, you should be able to boost the efficiency of your business and maximize your profit.
Create Compelling Job Ads
An ideal job description should match the following criteria:
● Feature exhaustive and comprehensive information about open roles. Candidates should understand which team they're going to join, which projects they will need to handle and which job duties they should be ready for. To make applicants feel psychologically comfortable, it would be wise to split the requirements into two categories: must-haves and nice-to-haves. Thanks to such an approach, you can expect to receive more job applications. Those candidates who lack skills from the "nice-to-have" list will be able to acquire them while already working for you. The ideal length of the "must-have" list is around 6 bullet points.
● Have straightforward job titles. Some companies resort to clickbait and write something like "Great opportunity for recent graduates!". Such a title might encourage graduates to open your job offer — but it won't help you to find specialists with relevant skills and qualifications. The second drawback of using clickbait consists in the fact that candidates won't be able to find your job offer by filtering the titles or searching for titles. They might type in words like "Python developer" or "copywriter" in the search field — and the headhunting site won't show your position to them simply because it lacks these keywords in the title.
● Be clear, polite and inclusive. Avoid jargon, discriminatory language and complicated sentences. Instead of talking about "the ideal candidate", use "you" when talking to a candidate. If your organization supports diversity, you should inform your potential applicants about it.
And of course, you should let people know the specifics of your business. Don't make them google the information about you or rely on third-party sources! Explain what makes you different from other hiring companies and why the candidate will enjoy working for you. Instead of simply praising yourself, you should back up your opinions with facts. For instance, you can say something like "We opened two new branches last year".
Go Off the Beaten Recruiting Track
If you stick to the conventional approach to candidate sourcing, you can post your job offers on your company's website, on its pages on social networks and on headhunting platforms. But you can always take one step further and reinvent recruiting with the help of these measures:
● Communicate with people on social media. Instead of posting a job ad and waiting until someone replies to you, you can join discussions. By talking to people, you can identify individuals with the relevant skills and qualifications for your positions.
● Attend events. Meetups, conferences and other offline and online events offer great headhunting opportunities.
● Use Boolean search. This method facilitates the process of discovering candidate resumes. If you use Boolean strings on Google, they should allow you to find candidates' profiles on social media.
● Get referrals. This method is particularly efficient for high-quality hires. To stimulate people to recommend top-notch professionals to you, you can design a referral program with incentives. Or, you can benefit from dedicated referral software that relies on the gamification principle.
● Purchase sourcing tools. They should help you to select the best candidates faster and more efficiently than headhunting sites. You'll be able to get exhaustive information about the candidates, including their contact details and links to their social media profiles.
Please mind that your job offers might seem appealing not only to people who are actively looking for new positions. Some professionals might be happy with their current occupations — but when they get to know about you, they might realize that you might offer them their dream jobs. Such candidates are known as passive ones.
Build Talent Pipelines
The term "talent pipeline" denotes groups of candidates whom you can invite to the positions that will open in the future. Such an approach should enable you to minimize time-to-hire when you need to fill a role.
To build a talent pipeline, you should:
- Identify the roles within the pipeline (typically, these would be hard-to-fill roles and the ones with high turnover)
- Think of your past candidates, former staff members and interns
- Source passive candidates by going off the beaten recruiting track, as we described above
- Reach out to candidates to engage them
Once you establish contact with the candidate, you should keep in touch with them until you can offer a position to them.
Boost Your Recruitment Efficiency
As a recruiter, you should handle a lot of standard processes. Consider building checklists for them to organize your hiring better. You'll be able to rely on them when preparing for screening calls and interviews. Before you begin a dialog with a candidate, you can be sure you have all the information ready.
To start interacting with a candidate, you can use email templates. They are ideal for inviting people to interviews as well as asking for referrals. To prevent your email templates from becoming stale, you should update them regularly. Of course, you shouldn't rely exclusively on templates. Once you have established contact with a candidate whom you might be eager to hire, you should compose personalized emails to them.
To interview remote candidates, you should purchase video recruiting software. Yes, you can do it on Skype or Zoom. But dedicated software will allow you to keep candidate profiles in a searchable database, collaborate with your team and manage your hiring stages. For instance, you might want to turn your eye to Bitrix24. It has an excellent built-in contact center and a CRM that can store unlimited amounts of data.
Evaluate Candidates Effectively
To select the best candidates, you might want to apply these three methods:
● Structure your interviews. Prepare your questions beforehand and tie them to job requirements. If possible, ask the same set of questions to each candidate for the position and score their answers using the same scale.
● Offer standardized tests to candidates. Your HR managers will be able to process the results of these tests in a very short time. However, tests don't fully reveal the candidates' potential, so you should combine this method with others.
● Review work samples and assignments. You can offer small assignments to candidates or evaluate samples from their portfolios.
To boost the quality of your hires, you should hire a strong HR team first.
Enhance Candidate Experience
Here are the recommendations that you might want to keep in mind to impress the professionals who reach out to you:
● Shorten your application process. Your application form should be concise. Ideally, you should ask the professional to complete a few qualifying questions as well as attach their resume and cover letter. The questions should be simple and relevant. You shouldn't ask for information you can find on resumes or online profiles. It should take a candidate no more than five minutes to fill in the form. The longer the form, the fewer applications you'll receive.
● Keep your candidates updated. Once they submit the form, let them know that you have received it. When you decide which professionals you'd like to invite for an interview, send reminders to them. To facilitate communication at this stage, you can use email templates. When you reject a candidate, it would be great if you could provide them with feedback. Thanks to feedback, young specialists will be able to learn from their mistakes and make progress quicker. Plus, you'll establish a foundation for future interactions with the professional (since you work in the same industry, your paths might cross again and again).
● Update your Careers page. Professionals who purposefully want to work for your company will check it for sure. To make the most of this page, you should not only post job offers there but also tell people about your business. Describe the benefits of working for you (without using empty phrases like "core values" or "industry leader". Add quotes or stories by your team members. Share videos and photos that let candidates have a sneak peek into your organization's everyday life.
Every candidate who gets in touch with your company should get a positive impression of you. It doesn't matter whether you'll hire this person or not. Even if you don't, the candidate will be likely to tell their acquaintances about your brand and corporate culture.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you have a better understanding of how to organize the recruiting process. It would be wise to start with hiring a strong recruiting team and dedicated software for conducting remote interviews (such as Bitrix24). You should write compelling job ads, build a talent pipeline and use various techniques for assessing the candidates' efficiency.
