Your entire team is involved in a truly successful recruiting strategy; as are a number of aspects you might not have anticipated. We’ve compiled 23 straightforward recruiting tips to help you consistently attract top talent and simplify the process.
Companies can find and hire new talent thanks to a successful recruiting strategy. You probably want to hire the best people to help your business succeed, whether you’re going through normal turnover or adding new positions as a result of growth.
At the point when utilized well, deliberate selecting procedures can be quite possibly of the best resource in your organization’s development and improvement. You might be able to boost your team’s productivity and efficiency by finding new hires with high levels of qualifications. Selecting new representatives that are a decent social fit can assist with supporting confidence in your group.
We offer 23 suggestions for hiring new employees in this article.
23 best recruiting tips for recruiters
Finding the best employees for your business can be made easier by reviewing and improving your recruitment strategies. Here are 23 suggestions to assist you in your efforts to recruit:
- Encourage employee referrals
- Prioritize the candidate experience
- Have a great offboarding process
- Use modern tools
- Practice collaborative hiring
- Write better job descriptions
- Value quality over quantity
- Communicate a strong Employee Value Proposition
- Think like a marketer
- Ask better questions
- Explore remote work arrangements
- Seek and embrace diversity
- Get clear (and realistic) about timelines
- Use an interview rubric or scorecard
- Don’t discount previous candidates
- Look for internal recruits
- Prioritize diversity
- Use a rubric
- Utilize marketing strategies
- Simplify the application process
- Utilize outside resources
- Offer competitive compensation
- Hire more recruiters
1. Encourage employee referrals
In his most recent book, Work Rules! Laszlo Bock revealed the secret to Google’s success in recruiting new employees. Grab a copy if you haven’t already because it contains a lot of useful information from one of the best people operations practitioners in the world.
In the book, Bock talks about the difficulties Google had in finding the best employees for an organization that was growing at an exponential rate. Several priceless learning opportunities emerged during the process.
Even though they got a lot of press, Google’s wacky interview questions and billboard Puzzle Easter Egg hunts weren’t the best ways to find great candidates. In fact, the most efficient methods for recruiting and selecting candidates were quite straightforward.
Google’s “self-replicating hiring machine” was developed through numerous iterations of trial and error, but like any great achievement, it began with one step. Bock elaborates: Turning every employee into a recruiter by getting referrals is the first step in building a recruiting machine.
Sometimes the most effective methods are the simplest:
- Hire the most remarkable individuals you know.
- Make sure they’re always challenged and happy.
- Encourage them to bring their best friends who are talented and give them credit when they do.
- Give candidates a great experience.
- Repeat (until employee networks invariably outgrow this procedure).
When you reach the point where you are unable to repeat this procedure, it is likely that you have begun building a specialized in-house recruiting team.
Employee recommendations are valued by more than just Bock. According to a CareerBuilder study, 82% of employers ranked employee referrals higher than any other source for providing the highest ROI.
Employment referral is one of the most cost-effective ways to hire for growing businesses. It makes use of people’s professional networks to find high-quality candidates. Improve your employment referral program by offering stipends or other tangible benefits to successful hires. A culture of respect for referrals can also improve networking connections. When employing this strategy, be sure to purposefully value the personal investment of both the referring employee and the referred hire.
You can give referral bonuses in the form of the following:
- Financial bonus
- Social bonus
- Prize bonus
- Vacation bonus
- Additional benefits bonus
By sharing an applicant’s resume with a hiring manager or informing them of a job opening, anyone can refer an applicant to a position. When looking for qualified candidates who have already been thoroughly vetted by a reliable employee, employers rely on referrals.
References can likewise come from previous workers who had a positive involvement in your organization. Positive offboarding experiences can help ensure that former employees will recommend your company to highly qualified new hires.
2. Prioritize the candidate experience
You can effectively win over the people you want to hire by providing a positive candidate experience that helps you make the most of your hiring budget. The candidate experience is the first time a potential employee interacts with your business and culture, so if it’s not done right, it could cost your company a bad reputation that’s hard to fix.
Top candidates get the impression that your company cares about its people even before they join the team if the candidate experience is well-designed.
That is a remarkably strong (and positive) motion toward send — to up-and-comers, yet to fresh recruits and longstanding workers. You are reiterating the importance that your company places on its employees at all levels. During the hiring process, you are also setting a behavioral example for other employees to follow.
Even candidates who aren’t chosen will have great things to say about working with you if they had a very good experience with your company. A bad candidate experience will always leave a bad impression, not only on the candidate who went in for the interview but also on the employee who recommended them.
If an employee goes above and beyond and recommends a candidate to you, you can rest assured that they won’t do so again if they are treated badly. It doesn’t matter how much you pay or how good your projects are: You are doing the organization a disservice if you do not treat candidates with the same respect as long-term employees.
To ensure that your candidate experience is on the right track, here is a quick checklist. Have you:
- Early on, provide an accurate description of the job responsibilities.
- Arrive on time?
- Are you prepared?
- Offer a warm welcome to the team?
- Give the candidate some feedback?
If the process is already good, keeping this quick checklist in mind will help keep it on track to greatness and help fix it if it’s broken.
The interactions a prospective employee has with everyone at the company, from recruiters to hiring managers and human resources professionals, determine how they perceive and feel about the hiring process.
Other interactions, such as the online application process, job advertisements, and automated responses to application submissions, are also included in the candidate experience. The company’s reputation among job seekers can be influenced by their experience, which can influence how much they want to work there and what they tell others.
Consider promptly following up on any rejections so the candidate can apply for positions that better suit them. Even if you did not select the candidate, you should still give them the impression that they are valued by sending them a real rejection email rather than a generic one from the company. Also, as soon as you know you want to proceed with a candidate in the hiring process, you should request an interview with them.
3. Have a great offboarding process
A great offboarding experience is a crucial component of a successful recruiting machine, despite the fact that this may appear counterintuitive. The way employees are offboarded has a significant impact on whether or not employment relationships end in bad terms.
Very much like current representatives who love your association enough to prescribe it to their companions, past workers can do likewise. Former employees may occasionally be an excellent source of new candidate recommendations.
Past employees are also potential brand ambassadors.
It is more likely that former employees will return if they were offboarded amicably and enjoyed working for your company. If and when they do, they’ll bring back the novel abilities you employed them for, and possible a few new ones.
4. Use modern tools
More tools than ever before are available to assist you in increasing the efficiency of your sourcing and hiring procedures, both on a large and small scale.
Organizations can hold blind auditions with GapJumpers, a tool. Instead of focusing on resume bullet points, GPAs, prior relationships, or any other number of unconscious biases, blind auditions provide an opportunity to strictly evaluate candidate performance.
Why are unconscious biases so important?
An excellent candidate may be overlooked for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with their success in the position for which you are hiring. On the other hand, blind auditions can assist in preventing candidates who appear to be more attractive on paper but are less suitable for a position.
Textio is a tool for creating better and more effective job descriptions for businesses. That is one of the first things a candidate will see, despite the fact that it may not appear to be the top priority in your recruitment strategy. A great candidate might find a number of unneeded descriptors and types of language to be unappealing or off-putting.
There are some excellent platforms that can assist you in reaching and interacting with the ideal audience once you have written the perfect job description.
ZipRecruiter is a powerful tool for increasing recruitment force. It is a platform that lets you create a single advertisement and post it on more than 100 job boards. Social recruiting and screening can also be managed from a single platform.
Wayup is a very useful tool for any organization that wants to create an internship program or is looking for new team members with recent college degrees. There is a free version that you can use to start looking for a few candidates.
Modern applicant tracking systems are a great way to speed up the hiring process and fill open positions. There are a lot of choices, so do your homework to choose the best applicant tracking system for your business.
When you are unable to meet in person, digital recruiting tools like social media, email campaigns, and virtual job boards can help you reach potential new hires. Also, think about hosting or going to virtual employment events like video conference career fairs. Platforms for electronic communication of this kind can add to the interpersonal relationships you build within your industry and even help you make new connections in your network.
A candidate selection platform can be used by HR professionals instead of manually reviewing applications. Pre-employment skills assessments are carried out using this technology. It might assess your capacity for problem-solving, communication, or other relevant practical skills. It can also evaluate certifications and years of experience of a candidate. A candidate can be invited to the subsequent stage of the hiring process if the platform determines that they meet the requirements. These evaluations can also be used to schedule interviews.
5. Practice collaborative hiring
Another effective recruiting strategy is collaborative hiring. There are numerous reasons why it is crucial. First, and this is a big one, your hiring process probably involves multiple stakeholders.
Your new recruits won’t be working in a vacuum unless they are astronauts.
The work of those around each new hire will be affected. This doesn’t mean you really want each individual from a division to approve a fresh recruit, however they ought to basically be involved.
It’s critical to pay attention to and consider the ideas of your team. They are in a unique position to offer insights into the candidates seeking the position.
Your coworkers can also assist with the hiring process in other ways. Companies can avoid a number of cognitive biases, or the mistakes that people naturally make when processing information, thanks to collaborative hiring. The awareness of cognitive biases is always beneficial. Your coworkers can assist you in recognizing and comprehending your subconscious biases.
6. Write better job descriptions
You start out at a disadvantage if you don’t accurately describe the position you’re hiring for. To ensure that you are attracting the most qualified candidates, it is essential to be truthful about the position.
It’s possible that the position you’re trying to recruit for isn’t particularly glamorous or pays well. Don’t try to disguise it that way if that’s the case. When the truth is revealed, at best, you will have squandered everyone’s time.
At worst, you’ll hire a talented worker who finds out later that the position didn’t suit their skills, interests, financial expectations, or personality. That employee is more likely to be disengaged and to leave as soon as they find a more suitable position.
The most qualified applicants are more likely to respond to an excellent job posting. Additionally, in order to concentrate on the interview, a well-written job posting limits the number of questions from potential applicants.
First, think about your company’s culture and whether your job posting should be more casual or formal. Many organizations attempt to extend a particular voice in the entirety of their public substance, including position postings, to help their image personality.
Check to see that your job description accurately identifies the duties, education requirements, and skills applicants will need to fill the position. The main requirements or qualifications, the location of the position (or whether it is a remote one), and the advantages of working for the company are all mentioned in job postings.
7. Value quality over quantity
You probably already know that a high performer has significantly better results than their peers. A very efficient strategy for recruiting can be to concentrate on the quality of the candidates rather than the quantity.
What’s going on?
In comparison to five good employees who are not a good match, hiring two outstanding employees who are a perfect match requires less overhead. Less onboarding and fewer interviews.
Additionally, there is more potential for exceptional outcomes.
Ironically, LinkedIn is using this new program to expand its talent pool while receiving fewer applications at the same time. Because we would rather have missed hiring two great performers than avoid hiring a poor one, the hiring machine was intentionally overly conservative.
As you work to build your team, keep quality in mind. It’s likely that the extra time and effort you put into finding a great candidate will pay off in the long run.
8. Communicate a strong Employee Value Proposition
The EVP outlines the “give and get” of the employment agreement—the value that employees are expected to contribute in addition to the value that they can anticipate receiving in return—as well as what the organization would like to be associated with most as an employer.
Therefore, what are the components needed to construct a potent EVP?
You can combine a near infinite number of elements into your EVP, but the following are some common ones:
- Salary: Do you offer competitive salaries?
- Benefits: What kinds of advantages do you provide? Who qualifies?
- Work environment and company culture: How do you feel about your workplace? Is the culture of your business balanced? How does working for your company feel?
- Autonomy: Are workers micromanaged or in charge of how they perform their jobs?
- Recognition and rewards: Other than monetary compensation, how are employees rewarded for their efforts? Do you give bonuses on a regular basis or only to those who make it through the year or reach a certain milestone?
You will need an offer that stands out in order to attract the strongest candidates, just like you would to attract customers and clients.
9. Think like a marketer
What is the brand of your company?
Recruiting changes along with the business. Recruitment is in a similar situation as sales and marketing, which required a dramatic shift. With just a few quick searches, people can now learn a lot about a company thanks to technology.
The ground-breaking Forrester study, which asserts that 70% to 90% of the buyer’s journey is completed prior to first contact, is well-known to many of us. You’re missing the boat if you don’t think this has anything to do with recruiting.
Before even applying, potential employees, like potential customers, spend a lot of time researching employers. Sites like Glassdoor give potential employees unprecedented access to and insight into the work experience of others in your company.
It very well may be a signal for ability, or a shame. You choose how much. Employers will be more likely to apply on their own if you create an employer brand that piques their interest.
10. Ask better questions
When you want to hire the best candidates, it’s important to ask them the right questions.
This can be different for every association, and that is the reason it’s a particularly significant region to zero in on. A list of questions for an interview might not be appropriate for another company.
These inquiries might come in the form of a programming exercise for software engineers. Those inquiries might center on a member of the marketing team’s contribution to revenue.
The point is that your inquiries ought to be pertinent.
Unless solving such puzzles will be fundamental to a candidate’s regular responsibilities, there is no need to ask out-of-the-blue interview questions. Asking the right questions will help you find candidates who are a good fit for your culture and the job at hand.
11. Explore remote work arrangements
Your business may rise to the top of the list for a much wider pool of talented individuals with a great remote work program. Remote work is now more efficient and easier to manage than ever thanks to modern communication and collaboration technology. A remote work arrangement is successfully utilized by many productive teams.
The WordPress platform’s developers, Automattic, operate almost entirely remotely. Although this flexibility in remote work does assist in attracting top talent from around the world, it is not the only advantage. As they make sense of on their professions page:
“Anywhere they choose, everyone works. We operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week because we are spread out across more than 50 nations.
It is essential to keep in mind that working from home is not an all-or-nothing proposition.
While some teams may benefit from a 100% remote structure, it is not necessary for your team to implement one. A lot of qualified candidates just want the flexibility of working from home.
This adaptability may mean the difference between attracting these candidates and losing them before even conducting the first interview.
Flexible working hours are more than just a benefit of the job.
Some highly qualified candidates might not be able to work every day in a co-located office because of health issues or other life factors. A candidate may require flexibility in their working hours for a variety of reasons, including being sole caregiver, having limited mobility, experiencing migraines triggered by bright lights, or simply performing their best work from home.
Many candidates may find your company more appealing if you include the flexibility of remote work in your employee value proposition.
Due to careers that allow professionals to work from almost anywhere and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, remote work has become a popular option for employees in many industries. By promoting your company’s successful remote work program, you can reach candidates from all over the world.
Flexible work schedules, increased productivity, and the ability to save time and money on commuting expenses, such as meals and clothing, are some of the advantages of working from home that could entice good employees.
12. Seek and embrace diversity
A diverse team is a significant competitive advantage, and recruiting is the first step in building one. A diversity-focused recruitment program gives an organization the chance to experience the numerous advantages of a diverse and inclusive team in addition to significantly expanding its talent pool.
Forbes Insights’ Global Diversity and Inclusion contains research that states: Encouraging Development through a Different Labor force:
“Senior chiefs are perceiving that a different arrangement of encounters, viewpoints, and foundations is essential to advancement and the improvement of groundbreaking thoughts. When asked about the connection between diversity and innovation, the majority of respondents agreed that diversity is important for promoting diverse ideas and perspectives that encourage innovation.
Diversity can take many forms, which is important to keep in mind if you want to hire more people from different backgrounds. A successful program seeks applicants from as many different life experiences and backgrounds as possible.
13. Get clear (and realistic) about timelines
It can take a long time to find a great new employee, often much longer than anticipated. Your recruitment and hiring team may find extended deadlines challenging, but candidates may find them even more so.
Finding a new job is already difficult, and if you have to wait for an extended interview or recruitment process, it only makes things more difficult.
If your recruitment process takes an excessive amount of time, a qualified candidate may give up entirely or wait too long to accept a favorable offer from another company. They are likely to tell others about that bad experience. A negative candidate experience will be negative for your business.
Do your best to inform candidates of two crucial details early on:
When you plan to make a hiring decision and how much time the candidate will likely need, candidates can plan and organize their job search accordingly if you communicate your expectations about time and timing from the start.
If you intend to assign homework to interviewees, let them know in advance so they are not surprised, and give them plenty of time to complete it. Be open about the fact that no final decisions will be made until the end of a three-month search process if you are in the first week.
14. Use an interview rubric or scorecard
Still, many hiring and recruiting decisions are based on a candidate’s “gut feelings.” The issue with those instinctive responses is that they are rarely accurate.
Utilizing an interview scorecard or rubric can make it easier to remain completely objective throughout the selection and interview process.
Your recruitment efforts can be made more effective and inclusive by utilizing practices like these to temper gut reactions with quantitative data, which can also help reduce the number of “misses” in your hiring process.
15. Don’t discount previous candidates
Even if a candidate isn’t selected for a specific position, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be a great fit for another position on your team or for the same position if it comes up again in the future.
If you pay attention to the quality of your candidate experience, you can keep your company at the top of their list of dream jobs. Get intimate with rejections for applicants who were selected for an interview. Call them, point out what they did well, point out where they can improve, and ask to keep in touch.
Candidates will frequently truly value candid, constructive suggestions for how to improve their performance in the future, and the personal touch will significantly increase their loyalty to your employer brand.
16. Look for internal recruits
If you haven’t already, you should think about hiring internally. Employee morale can be improved by encouraging lateral advancement and internal promotions. Internal recruiting can also demonstrate your company’s interest in assisting employees in their career advancement, which can assist in locating and retaining high-quality employees.
It takes less time to hire, train, and onboard employees when they are hired internally, and it saves money on external recruitment costs like advertising on job boards and paying for background checks. Additionally, dealing with a smaller pool of candidates when hiring internally saves time during screening and interviewing. Because the majority of the employee’s information is already recorded, hiring internally also cuts down on the amount of paperwork that needs to be completed.
17. Prioritize diversity
Diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds can boost innovation and team efficiency. Diversity in hiring is an important way to make sure that staffing is a good representation of the workforce, which can help achieve workplace equity’s best results. Try incorporating initiatives that promote diversity, inclusion, and belonging into your recruitment procedures.
Hiring bias frequently causes recruiters to consider candidates who aren’t a good fit or to overlook qualified candidates. While automated platforms are used by some businesses to reduce hiring bias, algorithms can also replicate human bias. Implementing measures like these can guarantee a fair recruitment process:
- Training hiring managers and interviewers
- Creating a standard interview protocol
- Implementing blind hiring, a practice that omits irrelevant information, like race and gender
- Using assessments and data evidence instead of assumptions
- Facilitating a transparent recruiting process
18. Use a rubric
The recruitment process can be anchored by clear expectations. Utilizing a meeting rubric or agenda to assess applicants could impart straightforwardness in your recruiting cycle and guarantee that the top competitors apply to join your group.
An interview rubric is a scoring tool that helps decide who to interview, who to invite back for another round of interviews, and who to hire. To objectively evaluate both tangible and intangible information, such as relevant experience and demeanor, this kind of rubric is utilized.
19. Utilize marketing strategies
Because it can encourage potential candidates to look for open positions with your company, applying marketing principles to your recruiting efforts can help you recruit effectively.
In order to attract the best employees, large businesses need to have a strong corporate identity. On your website and social media platforms, promote your business as a great place to work. Consider adding video or composed tributes to the professions part of your site to give first-individual encounters to likely workers to investigate.
Marketing a product can be analogous to advertising your openings. Choose your language carefully if you use job boards, professional networking sites, email campaigns, or social media to advertise openings. Your explanation of your company’s benefits should be balanced with a genuine tone. Take into consideration doing research on the kinds of benefits and work environments that candidates in your region and industry prefer, and then make sure to highlight those aspects in your job postings.
20. Simplify the application process
Simplifying the application process is a good idea once you have a lot of good candidates. To increase completion rates, keep the application process to no more than five minutes and use one page for each section.
Here are a few different ways to further develop the application cycle:
- Create a mobile-friendly application procedure for candidates who prefer to apply on their smartphones.
- Consider carefully the responses you mark as required.
- Utilize quality programming to naturally fill applications in view of a resume accommodation.
- Send a robotized email to the contender to affirm receipt of their application.
21. Utilize outside resources
Most schools and colleges give work help administrations to new alumni and graduated class. When you are hiring, try sending out listings to these kinds of organizations and attending employment events like career fairs. You could target local institutions of higher education or those that are well-known for providing high-quality instruction in your sector.
At hiring and networking events, it is often easier to connect with potential candidates and begin to understand how they might fit into your company’s culture. Happy hour get-togethers, seminars about your industry, virtual groups, trade shows, and conferences are all examples of networking opportunities. Consider your target audience and the format that best suits your hiring requirements if you are thinking about hosting your own networking event.
22. Offer competitive compensation
Consider persuading management to offer compensation that is at least as high as that offered by competitors in your sector if you are able to have an impact on how decisions about compensation are made at your company. Although potential candidates rarely consider compensation alone, it can have a significant impact on your recruitment efforts’ ultimate success.
Non-monetary incentives can occasionally also assist in attracting qualified candidates to your organization. Allowing employees to work from home full- or part-time, for instance, might be enticing to some highly qualified applicants. You can offer new hires low- or no-cost opportunities like additional benefits or flexibility.
23. Hire more recruiters
Increasing the number of recruiters on your team can sometimes help you find more qualified candidates in a shorter amount of time. If your business is expanding and would benefit from having more one-on-one interactions with new hires, you might want to think about hiring additional recruitment professionals. Before deciding whether or not to hire more recruiters, you might want to conduct a budget analysis. The best candidates will be drawn to businesses that view hiring as an investment in the future.
Hey, I am Sachin Ramdurg. I run and manage futuredecider.com website that helps students, graduates, and professionals, to find and decide on their future career with ultimate future career advices and future career guides. I have an overall 12+ years of career guidance experience in multiple domains which has helped multiple students, graduates, and professionals to find the best career path for their future.