Your recruitment strategy must adapt to changing conditions — from new business goals and headcount needs to economic uncertainty and competition for qualified candidates. The good news is there is a blueprint your enterprise talent acquisition team can use to navigate these shifts and hire top talent quickly and at scale.
Building a more effective recruitment strategy: 8 ways to improve your hiring process
Here are eight tips to strengthen your recruitment strategies and boost hiring performance.
1) Audit your recruiting people, processes, and technology
Your people, processes, and technology impact the success of your enterprise.
Human resources expert Josh Bersin indicates investing in the right hiring solutions is the first step to improve your people, processes, and technology. However, you shouldn’t empower your talent acquisition function with just any tools.
“You have to use the technology [you invest in] to pinpoint your hiring, build creative campaigns to attract people, and train and empower recruiters to do their jobs well,” said Josh.
Training recruiters to use your applicant tracking system and recruitment marketing platform to source, nurture, engage, and analyze candidates will set them up for success.
Consider Holland America Group Director of Talent Acquisition Jim D’Amico, who recently told SHRM he wants to enable his TA team to build stronger connections with potential candidates.
“That means development training for my leaders, technology training for my recruiters, and conferences for my team, to take them to that next level [with our recruitment strategy],” said Jim.
2) Modernize your enterprise talent acquisition tech stack
Can your recruiters and hiring managers easily access candidate profiles in your ATS? Do you have artificial intelligence and automation capabilities that eliminate manual labor? Do your current TA tools support your high-volume hiring? Is your recruiting data centralized and easily accessible?
If the answer is no to these questions, your technology stack requires attention.
The best way to address these issues is to invest in a single solution, like the Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite from Jobvite, so your hiring team can collaborate across the entire recruiting lifecycle and streamline hiring tasks.
Jobvite offers multiple advanced capabilities, purpose-built for enterprises, all in a single solution. Large-scale companies benefit from using this unified solution by ensuring recruiters and hiring managers work better with another.
For example, Apex Group improved hiring team collaboration by investing in Jobvite recruiting technology. The Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite enables talent specialists and hiring managers at Apex to work from a centralized platform that provides real-time recruiting funnel insights and hiring performance data.
“Jobvite is a true single source of truth … and helps us easily track performance over time,” said Apex Group Global Talent Acquisition Projects and Programme Lead Teodora Rebic. “Connecting with hiring managers right in the system to show our pipeline efforts is invaluable.”
3) Refresh your employer branding and recruitment marketing
These two parts of your recruitment strategy go hand in hand.
First, add your employer brand messaging in job postings, your career page, on social media profiles, and other owned and external digital properties where potential candidates may find you.
By doing so, you ensure consistency with how you present your employer brand externally. And you can better compel job seekers to apply because they learn what it’s like to work in your company.
The 2023 Employ Recruiter Nation Report found the lack of employer brand awareness was a top recruiting challenge for 18% of HR decision makers.
Given its importance to your recruitment strategy, employer branding deserves your attention.
Next, ensure your targeted recruitment marketing campaigns reach the right passive candidates.
Test different advertising filters, like those for experience and professional interests, in your LinkedIn job ads to connect with passive candidates whose skills and expertise align with open roles.
Send personalized messages to candidates on other career communities whose expertise matches the job role. Gauge their interest in your company and the position with recruitment messaging that features your employer brand.
4) Assess and improve your candidate sourcing and nurturing
Employ CEO Pete Lamson notes that in addition to driving a high volume of candidates, you must also focus on attracting and engaging qualified candidates.
While there may be “more candidate flow than there was previously, having the right volume of candidate quality remains mission critical for recruiters,” Pete recently told SHRM.
After altering your sourcing approach to add high-quality job seekers to your talent pool, augment your candidate engagement efforts, starting with your email and text campaigns.
With Jobvite candidate relationship management system, you can use AI-powered candidate matching to get recommendations for top talent already in your database to engage for open roles. From here, you can send personalized messages to individual candidates or groups of candidates.
Over time, you can see which types of email subject lines, SMS communications, and other engagement-related elements help you move more qualified candidates into your pipeline.
5) Build an employee referral program to get bonus candidates
The Employ Recruiter Nation Report found employee referrals are the fourth-most-valuable sourcing avenue for employers, with 13% of HR decision makers citing the channel as the best place to find high-quality candidates.
Your sourcers and recruitment marketers may add the most candidates to your talent tool, but an employee referral program can provide your talent acquisition team with premium candidates too.
For example, between 30 and 40% of employees at Samtec were hired via a referral. Using Jobvite recruiting technology allows the business to activate its employee network and automate the referral process.
Samtec recruiters are notified the moment a new referral comes in, and dedicated profiles are created for referred candidates. Meanwhile, employees who refer job seekers are updated as their referrals advance in the interview process. And all without the need for any manual work.
“From employees being able to seamlessly share application invitations within the platform to integrations with LinkedIn and Indeed, Jobvite allows us to enhance and support the work we already do and focus on growing our team through the networks of our employees,” said Samtec Compliance Coordinator and ATS Systems Administrator Michael Townsend.
6) Streamline the interview process and eliminate bottlenecks
When candidate encounter inconsistent communication and bottlenecks in the interview process, they may exit the hiring process altogether. That means your enterprise may miss out on high performers, simply because of interviewing challenges.
You can prevent future candidate drop-off by keeping active candidates apprised of their status and your decision-making timeline throughout the process.
Candidates want to be treated with respect, so make sure you don’t ghost them in the interview process.
“After investing time and effort into crafting tailored resumes and cover letters, preparing for interviews, and building hope, being met with sudden silence from a recruiter can be deeply discouraging,” HR professional Scott Sparks recently wrote.
A quick email or call is all it takes to keep top talent informed and interested in joining your business.
As for bottlenecks, analyze your interviewing data to identify any stages that take longer than average. See what differentiates those stages, and pare down the complexity of those stages or eliminate them altogether to speed up your hiring.
7) Analyze recent recruiting efforts and make data-backed changes
There are two main facets of your recruitment strategy your talent team should analyze frequently:
- Speed: Commonly tracked speed-related metrics include average time to hire by role, team, and location, and how long it takes the hiring team to provide feedback.
- Quality: Tracking the effectiveness of sourcing and nurturing based on application rates, engagement rates, hiring manager satisfaction, and employee retention is critical for measuring candidate quality.
The more you assess and act on these metrics, the more easily you can improve in both areas. And the best technology that enables in-depth hiring analysis is a talent acquisition suite like Jobvite.
Former GroupM Talent Manager Jennifer Gabrielle-Chapman said the company used the native reporting and analytics in Jobvite to gain greater visibility into their recruiting speed and hiring quality.
These insights helped the business driver greater TA efficiency, forecast candidate pipeline growth and needs, and provide transparency with progress recruiters made with filling key roles.
“[We would] pull weekly data reports [in Jobvite] showing the activity across our operating companies, resource management within our talent team, be ahead of the curve for seasonal peaks and troughs, placement data and hires closed off in each week — the list goes on,” said Jennifer.
Actionable analytics are invaluable to the success of your recruitment strategy. All you need is a data-driven mindset and accessible insights into core metrics to elevate your hiring performance.
8) Think globally, not locally, to address critical hiring needs
When it comes to your candidate pool, you must look beyond your office locations to fill open roles. You will miss out on a large pool of qualified candidates by ignoring international job seekers.
“If you want to go after the best talent, then you have to go for a global recruiting strategy and not just a local one,” Robert Kelley, Professor of Management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, recently told HR Executive.
If your TA team needs support with identifying and engaging qualified talent across the globe, an enterprise talent acquisition provider can support your global hiring strategy and ensure that the right hiring workflows are applied to each geography.
Jobvite ensures that workforces spread across different countries and locales can streamline their hiring and tailor processes required to hire talent — no matter where they are.
Building more effective recruitment strategies to attract top talent requires the right enterprise recruiting technology. Book a Jobvite Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite demo today.
