5 best practices to find and hire your best candidates
Recruitment never stops. And almost at all times, your company’s war for talent is on.
And so, recruiters have to constantly attract, source and screen qualified candidates based on hiring parameters such as relevant skills and competences, experience, education, communication proficiency, and other qualifications. This task can be a bit daunting, especially when screening of candidates for a certain job/role has more volume and recruiters assigned to the task are, at best, limited. Result? At some point of time, since your company hinges on your best people (aka talent) to grow, it has to ensure that its recruitment process needs to be more refined, hands-on and in cadence with your hiring goals.
More so, recruiters have to work in alignment with HR priorities of your hiring managers. This way, they can define job vacancies with an attractive job title, reflecting your company’s brand persona with the language in which you want to articulate that best resonates with your candidates: all in a nuanced manner.
That said, here are some recruitment best practices that you can put to work to level up your hiring efforts in the right direction.
Source candidates from all possible online and offline channels.
There are a broad array of sourcing channels that your recruiters can use for capturing candidates. Go to where your candidates are, and a large part of your sourcing job will be done faster than you’d imagine. To have an eclectic mix of sourcing channels improves your time-to-hire and boosts recruitment efficiency. Enlisted below are some in-demand sources to kick-start your talent acquisiton process.
Social media. Most notably, social media sourcing is increasingly employed by recruiters to achieve great hires. Let’s say you’re looking to hire a customer support executive. With advanced search on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, you can wade through conversations/threads like customer experience, CX, etc. to find experts in your area of specialization. And then recruiters can send these prospective candidates personalized invites to apply for the said role.
Job boards. Be it LinkedIn, Indeed, Jobvite, Naukri, ZipRecuiter, Monster, CareerBuilder — recruiters can harness such mainstream (and even niche) job portals to hunt for a variety of roles. The trick to make it work is to leverage recruitment marketing in the form of exciting and bespoke job ads, hard-to-resist company story that captures small attention spans of new-age candidates, and some kind of social proof (positive work-of-mouth) of your existing employees.
Events. Attend events where your professionals huddle along. Speaking of which, as a best practice for an even tailored and targeted approach to meet you candidates, you can host your own event. Think your company-specific recruitment hackathons. Think ‘Lunch and Learn’ events. Think meetups. Think campus hiring. By orchestrating such events, candidates appreciate your immersion into their industry and career journey — giving them a chance to tell their story.
Career site. Your company’s career site is also your content hub: one that answers FAQs related to your company culture, people, perks and benefits, among others. It’s a page where you showcase your employer brand via a compelling video that helps your employees and candidates to envisage your consummate brand identity.
Some Talkpush: Our conversational recruitment platform is compatible with all your sourcing channels which enables your company to have a unified messaging dashboard for you to engage with your candidates anytime, anywhere.
Invest in talent technology.
Hiring without using talent technology means a lot of manual, administrative work that can take achingly long hours for recruiters to screen large volumes of prospective candidates. Plus, they have to sift through job applications, segment them into relevant categories such as completed, shortlisted, selected and rejected, which can otherwise be automated using an automation software.
Some Talkpush: We can help recruiters by pre-screening your candidates and reminding them to complete their application through our recruitment chatbots.
Make the application process simpler and effective.
According to a research, a typical candidate spends 3–4 hours in preparing and submitting a job application. If the application process is long and complex, the candidates will drop off in the middle of their application journey. As a result, your candidate’s first impression about your company’s hiring process reflects a not-so-pleasant candidate experience. Given the competitive talent landscape, your in-demand candidates want a real-time, responsive hiring process so that they can apply faster, and smarter, via any channel of communication.
Some Talkpush: Our platform delivers omni-channel, real-time responsiveness 24/7, so that recruiters can be relieved to work on converting candidates to happy new hires. Further, we deliver simple and brief forms within a conversation, which encourages your candidates to seamlessly move to the next level of recruitment process.
Balance conversations with chatbots and humans (you, dear recruiter).
Per Chatbot being the new recruitment trend, candidates are welcoming to have a conversation with a chatbot as long as they receive the requisite information about the job they are applying for. When these chatbots are programmed with certain FAQs, they can reply with most of your candidates’ job-related questions immediately. However, chatbots only have a certain role to play. Candidates have always been wired to be more responsive to human form of interaction — and that’s why automation should work FOR humans, not instead of.
Some Talkpush: This is a bot and bros operation. We always ensure that our conversations are secured within your candidate’s personalized journey with us. We never forget the value of human to human conversations. That’s why our platform allows recruiters to stay in control at all times, giving them the chance to take over the conversation from the bot and then giving it back whenever they want.
Build your talent community (and nurture your candidates).
While job boards and career sites are largely engineered to generate more candidate interest in your company’s open roles, you cannot underestimate the power of existing employee referral programs and proactive candidate sourcing to increase footfall at your recruitment premises. Result? More job acceptances and lower attrition rates thanks to positive employee referral engine and candidate experience.
Some Talkpush. We can retarget your (existing and past) talent pool with short and personalized messages via SMS, WhatsApp and Facebook messenger to circle-back and learn their current interest to apply for a job role. This can save your recruiters’ time and cost in finding new candidates and then processing their candidature to see if they are a good fit for the said role or not.
Now it’s your turn.
Are you looking to accelerate your talent acquisition efforts with a conversational-first talent acquisition platform — 24/7 and cost-effectively?
Talkpush us here!
Like what you read? Share it with your readers using #Letthetalenttalk