Strategic Workforce Planning

You need to look at your company’s future needs and plan accordingly. Identify growth opportunities and potential skills gaps, in addition to determining how retirements and promotions will impact your staffing levels. Use all of that information to proactively recruit professionals to achieve your long-term goals.

Employer Branding

The word “branding” likely brings your company’s logo and products to mind. And while that aspect of branding represents an invaluable part of running a business, you also need to manage your employer brand. Employer branding addresses how potential candidates view your company and its mission. If they view you favorably, they are more likely to apply for jobs.

Sourcing Strategies

There’s no better time than now to move on from linear sourcing strategies in favor of a multichannel approach. Reach out to prospective employees using social media, referrals, recruitment agencies, and job boards. The broader your talent pool, the better your odds of finding and hiring skilled professionals.

Screening and Assessment

Your screening protocols should balance efficiency with accuracy. You can’t waste the candidate’s time or bog down your HR personnel with a months-long process. Still, you also need to be thorough enough to ensure a person will be a good fit for your business. Skills tests and personality quizzes could be worthwhile tools to find the best candidates.

Interview Process

Your interviews must be structured to ensure consistency and fairness. Standardized questions and scoring can reduce bias and improve the quality of your hiring decisions.

Onboarding

Once you’ve extended a job offer, you need to provide the person with a seamless onboarding process. Quickly integrate them into your company to increase the likelihood of long-term retention.

Craft Clear Job Descriptions

Ensure that your postings are free of jargon or confusing verbiage. The tone you choose for job descriptions has a huge impact on how prospective employees view your business. In fact, 76% of job seekers develop a positive impression of organizations that use a neutral tone in job descriptions. In comparison, only 60% of job seekers feel the same about businesses that use a casual tone.

Use Social Media

Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn can be great for reaching candidates. You can target candidates based on industry, location, and other factors, thereby helping you connect with candidates more efficiently.

Implement an ATS

An applicant tracking system (ATS) provides a single source of truth for storing and sorting through applications. However, not all ATS solutions are created equal. Recruit by HireRoad is a high-volume ATS that helps you organize candidates and quickly identify the most promising applicants. Your hiring team can easily access and review applicant data to identify candidates who are a good fit for your business. It can then progress these individuals to the next stage of the vetting process.

Use Pre-Employment Assessments

As mentioned earlier, pre-employment tests help you objectively evaluate candidates, and they reveal whether they are proficient in the skills they list on their resume and job application. By using these tests, you can make informed hiring decisions based on hard numbers as opposed to needing to rely on intuition.

Conduct Structured Interviews

Traditionally, interviews were treated as a chance for hiring teams to meet and gain insights about the applicant. While that remains true, it’s important to remember that you should also be trying to win over the interviewee during your sit-down with them.

Make sure the interview is structured and organized to prevent bias. Keep questions focused and give the participant a chance to showcase the depth of their talent. A staggering 80% of job seekers have opted out of the application process after a bad interview experience, so if you want to keep top talent in the running for key positions, you have to provide a great experience.

Embrace Diversity and Inclusion

Roughly four out of ten U.S. workers consider diversity and inclusion when weighing job offers. By making these concepts a foundational part of your company culture, you can attract workers who are committed to equality and equity. In turn, you will be able to create a stronger, more resilient team.

Establish and Track Key Metrics

Finally, you need to identify metrics that will reveal how effective your talent acquisition efforts are. Data points like time-to-hire, cost-to-hire, and quality-of-hire provide valuable information about the effectiveness of your recruitment process and where you can improve. But don’t stop there. Invest in analytics solutions to turn the metrics into insights that will guide decision-making.

Skills Gaps

Filling gaps in your workforce can be tough, especially when seeking niche talent. Start by identifying key areas of need and either recruiting for those skills or developing them internally.

Too Many Applications

Your hiring team can get inundated with applications, many of which may not even be relevant for the job in question. Use an ATS and pre-employment assessments to screen candidates efficiently and at scale, without sacrificing quality.

The Need for Speed and Quality

You need to fill key roles fast, but you don’t want to rush through the screening process and hire the wrong person. That’s where data-driven tools like people analytics technologies come into play. They’ll give you the information necessary to make quick and informed decisions while still meeting hiring standards.

Prioritizing the Candidate Experience

Lastly, you need to provide applicants with a good experience while applying for jobs and completing pre-screening tasks. The entire journey should be smooth and efficient. As a test, try completing an application for a role at your company. How long and complex is the process? Are there any redundancies that you can address? Post apply, provide clear communication and deliver timely feedback to keep applicants engaged.