The quality of your hire is what will make or break your company’s operations. Small and medium-sized businesses need quality hires to grow while enterprises need quality hires to sustain their growth. There was a time when hiring was all about the company – what are their needs and requirements, does the candidate fit into their job role, would they be a good cultural fit in the workplace, do they have enough experience to do the job well, and so on.

However, things have changed dramatically over the past couple of years. Hiring has now become about the candidate as well – is the job location good, would they be allowed work from home, how many paid leaves does the company offer, what’s the career growth potential and opportunities in the company, is the role something the candidate would like to continue for several years or not, and so on. According to a study by Devskiller, 52% of candidates claim competitive compensation packages are the most attractive element of a job. With so many moving parts involved in the puzzle to fit and hire the best talent, you need a recruitment strategy much more solid.

This is where Employee Recruitment Strategies come into the picture. While there is no ‘one size fits all’ formula to finding and hiring the ‘right’ talent for your firm, you can still utilize these strategies to build a powerful process of obtaining the best talent. These strategies aren’t set in stone but rather allow you to get an idea of how you should be molding your current hiring process.

What is an Employee Recruitment Strategy?

An employee recruitment strategy, often referred to as a hiring strategy, is a structure and strategic plan of action that can help companies identify and locate talent pools and then bring the best talent on-board. An employee recruitment strategy is a long-term action plan rather than a one-time approach.

One could consider an employee recruitment strategy similar to a sales channel strategy. Just like leads, potential candidates are attracted to the company via relevant content. Once they reach, candidates, just like leads, are nurtured by numerous assessment methods, after which the best candidates are given a job offer to accept or reject. The idea of having an employee recruitment strategy is to be able to not just get the best talent for your company but also to convince them to say yes for the position after a thorough assessment by both parties.

According to Talent Now, top candidates stay available for just ten days before getting hired. It is crucial to act quickly and strategically to be able to lock down the best talent for your company. If this seems like something your company would like to implement as well, read on to find the top 20+ tips on preparing the best employee recruitment strategies.

How to recruit employees effectively – 20+ tips on employee recruitment strategies

1. Understand your job requirements first and foremost

It is crucial for you to understand whether you need a full-time hire, part-time, contract-based, intern, or a freelancer. You do not want to make the mistake of investing in a full-time hire when the requirement can be easily filled by a freelancer or an intern. If your needs are short-term, it is a good option to go for an intern or a contract-based employee. If you are not sure when the need might arise but would require immediate attention, going for a freelancer or a part-time hire is a great option to cut costs.

2. Create an employer brand for your company

If the top talent doesn’t know who you are, they won’t bother applying to open positions in your company. Recruiting is a lot like marketing nowadays, and top talent is always looking out for a good and famous brand to associate themselves with. This is why it is essential for companies nowadays to create a clear and positive employer brand. According to Glassdoor, organizations that invest in employer branding are three times more likely to make a quality hire. There are three key elements that are essential when creating an employer brand – your mission, culture, and values.

Top talent needs to know what your company stands for, what’s the culture like in your company, and what the values are based on which your company runs. You also need to answer questions such as, ‘Why should you work for us?’ and/or ‘What percentage of your employees would recommend your company?’.

3. Go for niche job posts

You can no longer ask candidates to send applications for ‘Technical Manager.’ You need to be clear and concise about exactly which department you need a Technical Manager for. Is it your cloud department or your operations technology department? This helps you attract applications from candidates who have specific experience in these areas. Going for niche job posts is a targeted way of gathering the top talent available to your company.

Your job roles need to be well-defined, explaining exactly what the person would do and which skills and technologies do they need to have experience in to be able to give their best. This allows both parties to be absolutely clear about their needs and skills.

4. Create concise job descriptions that reflect your company’s vision and mission

The idea is to not just create niche job posts but also concise job descriptions that clearly outline how your company works and what you envision on doing in the next few years. This allows top talent to visualize themselves in the company and get a preview of how well they would grow. Clearly mention what the job requirements and responsibilities are in crisp bullet points. It’s always a good idea to mention the range of compensation you are looking to offer and also give a brief about what department they would be working in and who their reporting manager would be.

The theme of the job post should reflect the nature of your company. Are you a marketing and advertising agency looking for social media specialists who can jazz up your social media platforms? Make sure the job post is fun and attractive. Are you a logistics company looking for developers who can bring you more revenue? Make the job post well-structured and sophisticated.

5. Invest in Talent Acquisition Management Systems

When a job post does the job well, and numerous applications begin to trickle in, you need to start managing a tremendous amount of data. This also takes a lot of effort and time, considering you need to sieve through loads of data. To reduce the cost of time and effort and make sure that your productivity is high, investing in a Talent Acquisition Management System, such as Talenx.io, is a superb idea.

A good Talent Acquisition Management System can help you manage applications well and make sure that you can shortlist candidates faster. It also helps automate numerous processes such as job posting, sorting out high performers, interview scheduling, and much more.

6. Target passive talent and try to win them over

When we talk about passive talent, we are referring to people who have a great deal of experience for the position you are looking to fill but are currently employed full-time in some other company. The idea is to get in touch with them via several means such as LinkedIn or even email and explain to them how you found them, what exactly is the position you are looking to fill, and why they should consider switching their company.

Though a bit tough, targeting passive talent can help you acquire valuable employees who could work potentially very well in your company.

7. Have an employee referral policy

According to Clear Company, referral hires have greater job satisfaction and stay longer at companies – 46% stay over one year, 45% over two years, and 47% over three years. Employee referral is a great way to get top talent who is already pretty familiar with your company. The entire process of hiring a person – from putting the job post to waiting for applications, conducting interviews, negotiating salaries, and so on – is shortened, and less time is spent.

You can also motivate your employees to recommend top talent by compensating them for their referral. Pay your employees a substantial amount of money if they can recommend top talent, and the talent gets hired. This motivates other employees to recommend good candidates as well.

8. Choose your platform or portal for posting jobs carefully

We’ve talked about how recruitment nowadays is much like trying to sell your products. If you do not choose the right channel to convey your message, you will end up with a bad pool of leads. This is why you need to think very carefully before you choose the platform or portal on which you would put the job post.

If you are looking to spread your job requirements to a vast pool of people, LinkedIn is a great way to go. In case you are looking for design professionals only, putting the job post on Behance is a very good option. If you want to reach your desired pool of top talent in the best way possible, you need to be proactive in choosing the portal or platform.

9. Consider college & campus recruiting

This is a great option for when you are looking to fill entry-level or mid-level job vacancies. The young crowd has a lot of cognitive knowledge who are looking to work on the next interesting thing. Recruiting from colleges can help you find individuals who approach problems from new perspectives and have a drastically different way of tackling issues. Moreover, there are numerous different ways of engaging talent from top colleges – job fairs, conventions, and even sending your top-level employees to speak at a college event.

Campus recruiting can also help you find candidates for not just full-time but also part-time, freelancing, and internships. Thus, depending on your requirements, you can find a diverse range of talent when you go for college recruiting.

10. Improve your job application forms

No one wants to fill out lengthy and complicated applications with little chances of ever hearing back from the company. It is incredibly time and energy-draining. Moreover, if there are numerous useless questions on your job application form, there are high chances that top talent will ditch the form in the middle and never submit it. This is why you need to ask for only that information which is necessary for your shortlisting process.

Do you need to know how many years of experience they have? Are there some questions on the application form that can be eliminated and asked later during the interviews? Ask yourself numerous such questions and prepare a crisp application form to keep the talent’s engagement high. How your application form is structured shows a great deal about your company as well.

11. Use social media to conduct recruiter marketing

It’s been the age of social media for quite some time now. To be able to market your job openings and your company well, you need to make the most use out of social media. Make sure that you aren’t active on social media sites only when you need to fill a vacancy. Create a constant online presence where you continue to interact with your audience. You never know which one person out of them might turn out to be top talent and fit well in your company.

The best social media platform to use for this purpose is LinkedIn. Create a company account and constantly upload content relevant to your customers as well as your potential candidates. You may talk about your company culture, anything new and exciting your company has been working on, and so on. You could also upload interviews of your current employees talking about how their experience has been at the company.

12. Streamline your interview process

You need to be very clear and concise about the grounds on which you will assess a candidate. It’s a good idea to share with the candidate exactly how many rounds of interviews will be conducted, how many questions will be asked, what would be the topics of assessment, and how much time would each step take. Stay in constant touch with all candidates you have chosen to consider for the job. Update them about their application status regularly, and if they are not chosen, let them know about the same as well.

You also need to decide which interview steps can be easily conducted online and which need the candidate to come to the office. Forcing candidates to be physically present for a round that could have easily been conducted offsite gives a very bad impression of your company. Ask all interviewers to prepare beforehand and always be on time. If you require candidates to be on time for the interview, you need to show them the same decency as well.

13. Go back to previous top performers who missed out on getting hired

Vacancies for the same post or a similar post can arise numerous times. It is always a good idea to go back to the pile of applications you received previously for the same or similar job post and file through them.

You might have rejected these candidates for numerous reasons – they couldn’t attend the interview, they lacked one particular skill required, and so on. It is also possible that this candidate rejected you previously in case they didn’t like someone’s behavior, or they weren’t offered their desired compensation.

14. Do not shy away from giving top talent high compensations

Many companies do not understand the cost-benefit of a candidate. If they are asking for compensation higher than you were looking to shell out, do not reject the candidate straight away. Understand that this person is highly talented and has the potential to bring in great results for the company. Acquiring new candidates would be an even more costlier process.

You could choose to hire someone mediocre who is happy with the compensation you wish to offer and then watch them leave your company after a few months and spend money on hiring a new person all over again. Or you could hire top talent, shell out more money for their compensation, retain them for a longer period of time, and watch the great results they bring to the company.

15. Headhunt top talent at networking events

Networking events such as meetups, talks, conferences, and so on have a high turnout of talent professionals who may or may not be looking for a job change. Headhunting top talent from such networking events is a great way to acquire great candidates who are passionate about the work they do and wish to do greater things.

16. Choose to hire internally

When everything else fails, look for people internally. In fact, it is a very wise option to actually look for internal hires first, then go for employee referrals and passive candidates, and then finally release the job post to the wide public. There are loads of promising candidates in your pool of employees who are deserving of a promotion or additional job responsibilities, so choosing to go with them is a great way to save time and money.

17. Get the best people in the firm to conduct interviews

You might get the best candidates, but what would happen if the interviewer isn’t up to the mark and has poor communication skills? You will lose out on a great hire since the interviewer will neither be able to put forward the job requirements well, nor will they be able to assess the candidate well.

You need to make sure that the employees who interview the candidates are well-versed with the job requirements and have great communication skills. There is a high chance that a poor interviewer would reject great talents and approve of poor candidates, thus causing you to make horrible hiring decisions.

18. Introduce an option for candidates to apply for any post at any time

You might not have identified a need for a new hire, or you just might not be in need of one. However, having an extra good talent on the team is never a bad option. This is why you need to introduce an option for candidates to apply for any post at any time. You could call this section – ‘Did not find the job vacancy you were looking for? Apply anyway!’. This way, candidates and the company both do not have to wait for open roles to come up.

If you find good talent, you can bring them in for interviews, and if the job vacancy comes up at a later time, you can straightaway look for the applications you already have, thus saving you time and money.

19. Allow candidates to sign up for specific job alerts

By providing job alerts, you are allowing candidates to stay in touch with your company’s requirements. They are clearly interested in working for your company and are passionate about what they do. As soon as a vacancy comes up in your company, these people would be one of the first ones to get to know about it. Hot leads stay informed all the time and can quickly apply for the opening.

20. Prepare a candidate FAQs section on your careers page

Getting the right information is of the utmost importance when it comes to applying for jobs and getting updates on the same. It is always a good idea to show the candidates that you are in this with them together. Preparing a candidate FAQ section on your careers page is a great way to go about it. Answer some crucial questions such as ‘How will I know if I have been selected to move forward in the process?’, ‘Will you tell me when a role is filled?’ ‘Are there any internship opportunities available?’ and more.

21. Bonus tip – Consider ex-employees!

This might seem like an awkward tip but can work wonders if you are open-minded to the possibility of it. An ex-employee already knows your company culture, vision, and mission so they won’t have any issues fitting in. Plus, with the years that they have spent in other companies in the industry, you know that they have acquired loads of skills and experience. You already know the commitment level and work ethic of this person, and considering them could just be the magic trick that you needed!