Recruitment is such a complex subject that we can talk about it forever. And we, in fact, have already written extensively thorough articles on some aspects of recruiting, such as using virtual and augmented reality applications in a remote environment and using recruitment automation tools for hiring and employee management. However, in this article, we’ll cover the major recruitment strategies that seem to be on the rise and trendy, including sourcing through social media, employing tools such as paid ads and psychometric testing, and wrap it all up with fair hiring practices, a set of recruitment policies, which we particularly liked.
Contents:
Social Media
Paid Advertising
Psychometric Testing
Talent Pools and Inbound Recruiting
Recruitment Automation Tools
Fair Hiring Practices
But why would you even care to learn modern strategies? What’s wrong with the old ones? Now, these are entirely viable questions. And we’ll address them in a moment.
Not long ago, it seemed sufficient enough to post your ad on a job board and wait for the candidates to flow. However, the modern world dictates its own terms, and hiring managers along with recruiters now need to employ smart tactics to attract the best talent from the available pool of candidates. The sad news is that the talent crunch is getting worse with a lot of great companies acquiring the best available talent, leaving you with what remotely seems like “sufficiently and adequately qualified” candidates, meaning these people might be great, but they are not THAT great. The best talent is now more informed than ever: they know what they are looking for, how they want to communicate with an employer, how engaged they prefer to be. What matters now is your employer’s brand, how your website looks, if you are present on social media and what websites, like Glassdoor or Clutch, say about you and working for you. The rise of social media is nowhere near its fall, so it’s about time you started getting the most out of it.
Social Media
The social media statistics are truly extraordinary, with a total number of users falling over three billion and an average user having as many as seven profiles. Approximately eleven new users join a social network every second. I, personally, don’t know anyone without at least one profile on social media. An average user spends almost 142 minutes a day on social apps, which is 2 hours and 22 minutes, with people younger than 24 spending even more time. If the abovementioned statistics haven’t yet convinced you, consider this: Facebook has reached almost 2.17 billion users at the start of 2018. Can you even imagine 2 billion people? It’s about time you start using these powerful resources to your advantage.
Here’s what you can do:
Do not disregard the power of Facebook. The great way to engage with Facebook users is to show them how great it is working for your company. Show, rather than tell. Use videos instead of long descriptions that nobody reads anyway. Make a bunch of powerful interviews showing off your best talent at work, choose the most exceptional speakers with outstanding public speaking skills. If none in your company possess oratory skills of that degree, then make a speech yourself or employ a professional speaker. That’s not going to be cheating if you ask a guest speaker to talk about his experience working for your company or visiting your office.
Before you even start sourcing potential candidates on LinkedIn, develop a complete keyword-rich profile for yourself, as a recruiter, or your company. Add keywords to your professional headline since it’s considered the most critical SEO part of your profile and make it as specific as possible. For example, it might say something like Tech Recruiter – We Hire Web Developers for Remote Work instead of just Tech Recruiter. Make your company profile (or your own) as complete as possible.
What’s also essential is creating your company showcase pages, where you can feature a particular brand or company’s initiatives, products, or services. To keep people interested and engaged with your company showcase page, you’ll need to share valuable and meaningful content. You can ask your present employees to follow, and interact with your page first, then tell your customers you’re on LinkedIn and ready for connection. Join as many professional groups as you can and share your company’s content there as well. Now, it’s important to understand the need to create quality content that is quick and concise. Don’t just share blog posts from your company’s site, create an SEO-specific content for your LinkedIn pages as well, that way you’ll have better chances at boosting awareness and keeping your audience engaged, as well as attract relevant talent to your pages.
Twitter is a fantastic tool for local hashtag searches. For taking everything out of Twitter searches, you’ll need to learn how operators work on Twitter. For example, if you need to find tweets that mention one or two keywords, use the search operator “OR,” like this Developer OR Programmer. For local searches, use “near,” for example, #appdeveloper near:Austin within:20mi. You can use dates if you want to find tweets that fall within a certain timeframe. For example, if you know there was a huge web development conference in San Fransico in September 2018, then you might type in a search bar the following string: Developer near:”San Fransisco” within:10mi since:2018-09-01 until:2018-09-10. Otherwise, you can use Google to search for particular indexed tweets from Twitter, for example, site:twitter.com tweets “App Developer” “iOS”.
Here are other takeaways for using Twitter for recruitment and sourcing:
— Do not only repost your blog posts from your company’s website or post job openings, that way you’ll quickly lose your audience.
— Instead: post important articles, share your thoughts on recruitment, on trends in web development, if you’re recruiting developers, or anything else unique and valuable for your audience.
— Post at least 3-4 times a day, and do not be afraid of using automatic posting tools for scheduling or delaying some of your tweets.
— Twitter is a great tool that gives a glimpse into your prospective candidate’s life: their interests, people they follow, posts they comment on, etc.
Paid Advertising
You don’t have to advertise your business only to your clients, but your candidates as well. Consider using Facebook ads and target a particular demographic or people with specific interests. Paid advertising is also a fantastic way to boost awareness about your company and your brand. Otherwise, consider paying for top slots on job boards, that will come in especially handy, if you need to fill the position fast.
You’ve also probably noticed how hard it is nowadays to boost your company’s webpage in Google organic search. If a prospective candidate uses Google to search for web development companies or recruitment agencies looking for web developers for hire, then they will most probably see industry-heavy recruiters or large corporations that dominate the Google search. One way to break the trend is to employ PPC advertising to appear on top of the page in search results. Any good, paid advertising campaign starts with market research and keyword analysis. Thanks to available tools offered by Google, it’s now easier than ever. Brainstorm all the possible keywords your potential candidates can search for and check all of them in Google Keyword Planner. Google Adwords will guide you through the ad campaign process, and if you’re not sure what exactly to bid on, the auto-bidding tool can do the work for you.
Psychometric Testing
In our previous article on Applications and Software used in recruitment, we’ve covered two great services for testing candidate’s knowledge and aptitude, namely HackerRank and Pymetrics. HackerRank is especially suitable for testing technology staff, from junior to senior developers: you can either choose a predefined set of coding challenges or create your customizable test. HackerRank automates the code reviews, prepares scalable metrics for each candidate, schedules interviews for real-life coding challenges, etc. Pymetics is more of an assessment tool evaluating cognitive and emotional state of a prospective hire. The assessment is based on complex dynamic algorithms that change as soon as new data appears in the system. Psychometric testing is a great way to gain more insight as to who you are actually hiring. There are all sorts of psychometric tests, and you really have to choose the ones that suit your company profile, the job your hiring for, and other relevant factors. In any case, whenever you decide to test a candidate, ensure them that there are no right or wrong answers, and you need these tests for better professional placement because a resume and portfolio are sometimes just not enough.
Talent Pools and Inbound Recruiting
In our previous article on TOP 5 Latest Books in Recruitment, we’ve covered High Velocity Hiring by Scott Wintrip, who wrote the whole book about talent acquisition and a specific phenomenon of creating a Talent Inventory as a hiring strategy. The idea behind Talent Pools and Inbound Recruitment is pretty straightforward: cultivate top talent first and then put it on the jobs when they open. Talent Inventory is, therefore, a pool of ready-to-hire candidates who have passed interviews successfully and possess the required and relevant skills for the job. Making interviewing an ongoing process can dramatically affect the recruitment process making it faster and more efficient. Think of a Talent Pool as a database with prospective candidates that you can tap into any time you have an opened job position without the need to search for candidates when the job needs to be filled immediately or as soon as possible.
Another relatively new term in recruitment is Continuous Candidate Engagement (CCE). This modern recruitment strategy is based on a candidate-centric approach, meaning throughout the hiring process, interviewing, screening, scoring, testing, and whatnot, you never leave a candidate in a limbo. Continuous engagement with a candidate, informing them about their application status, asking them for feedback and suggestions, show your company as a great place to work for, increase your brand awareness, and create an image of how well your company’s organized and put-together.
Recruitment Automation Tools
In our previous article, we’ve covered the 13 Best Applications and Software for Automating Hiring Processes and Employee Management. There, we’ve covered major Applicant Tracking Systems, like Bullhorn and Workable; video interviewing software, which especially can come in handy if you hire remotely, among those are EasyHire and Rec Right. Reviewed a couple of examples of recruiting software for employee management, like BambooHR and UltiPro. Mentioned two best testing and assessment tools, such as HackerRank and Pymetics, which we’ve also covered earlier in this article; and described two robot recruiters, like Robot Vera and Matilda. It’s essential to automate most of your hiring processes to avoid human-prone errors, eliminate bias and subjectivity, as well as optimize your recruitment strategy and procedures making them more efficient and less labor-intensive.
If you’re interested in the use of Artificial Intelligence in recruitment, then you might be interested in our post on AI in Recruitment, which looks at some of the cases and trends in the industry.
Fair Hiring Practices
Needless to say, that fair hiring practices are essential for any business. Hiring based on merit rather than anything else will increase the likelihood of getting the right person for the job, and your company benefiting from it in the end.
The first step in creating a fair hiring environment is standardizing your interview questions and conducting structured interviews. The difference between structured and unstructured interviews lies in the amount of preparation you invest before the actual interviews happen. It means that for a structured interview, you need to create a set of predetermined questions that you’ll ask all your candidates applying for the same position, irrespective of gender, social status, age, race, etc. This is the most objective and fair way to conduct the interviewing process. During the interview, you’ll have to ensure that every candidate has the same amount of time and freedom to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and experience. Using consistent evaluation for all candidates is the fairest way to select the appropriate talent.
Moreover, the fair environment doesn’t just end in the interview room, but extends to on-boarding, employee placement, and work in the organization: remuneration needs to be equal for all people working at the same positions, irrespective of gender, race, etc. It’s also imperative to abide by the law and follow the local labor laws to ensure your employees are protected and do not look for the greener grass or for other jobs where rules are actually followed. Besides, discrimination can become costly: consider fines and litigation costs not to mention a bad reputation.
Another thing to consider includes embracing diversity from the very beginning. Diversity and inclusion build a company that can quickly adapt and bring non-standard solutions to common problems or creates new innovative products that would embrace all walks of life and serve all types of people.
Then, it’s vital to establish your company’s mission and work on your business integrity. Is this really necessary to look for only males for web developers? Or females for secretaries? I, personally, knew great men who were brilliant in administrative positions, and women who were excellent coders. Keep your mind blank and beliefs open whenever you walk into that interview door because the next female intern might be the one who’ll lead your company in the future.
Conclusion
Having described the best modern recruitment strategies and progressive fair hiring practices, we’re confident to say that you’ll be well prepared to implement forward-looking, dynamic, but gradual changes. Remember that Rome was not built in one day, and so does everything else in life: takes time, tolerance, and practice.
