The holy grail of attracting the right candidates is a lot easier than you think. But first you need to understand two essential perspectives for developing an overall view of your candidate attraction strategy - internal and external.
Internal candidate attraction strategy
Firstly, build a team ethos within your recruitment business. People, processes and technology are, without doubt, the three key core areas for success. But without an effective ‘team’ approach, achieving exceptional performance is limited.
Managers everywhere talk about nurturing a great team ethos, but only the best recruitment companies understand how to create a true experience of teamwork. Belonging to a team means feeling part of something larger than yourself - and in this case accurately representing and promoting your client's organisation. This means not only understanding your own mission or objectives but also your clients', plus their recruitment strategies and employee value proposition (EVP).
A joined-up approach to understanding their EVP will ensure all your recruitment activities are aligned.
Tech plays a crucial role in attracting the right candidates – do you have the right tools to engage with the people you need? Whether it’s a champion applicant tracking system, a slick job posting tool, or a CV search facility that saves considerable time, money and effort, having the proper technology to source, attract and track candidates that are perfect for your clients' is the difference between winning and losing when it comes to candidate attraction.
External candidate attraction strategy
Do you understand every aspect of your candidate experience? Become your candidates and live and breathe your application process for yourself. Candidates are looking for efficiency and simplicity, after all, today's lifestyle are busy and you’re not the only recruiter in the market. They'll want to know about a company's ethos, career development, and, of course, the physical work environment. Does your attraction strategy tick all their boxes?
The curation and marketing of your vacancies should be high on your priority too. Many recruiters overlook the importance of creating a strong job description/advert. Would you apply for one of your roles? Are you enticed to read on? Or, are you a little bored? Well-written job specs and adverts are vital to attracting the best talent.
And finally, does your team understand your recruitment software? Are they using all the tools and functions within your ATS system? Posting your vacancies to all your job boards and social channels needs to be a simple and efficient process. Building a water-tight internal technological process will have you off to a good start. Feel free to reach out to our team if you want to discuss how you can do this.
So, what are some of the essential elements to consider when looking at both your internal and external candidate attraction strategies? Here’s our lowdown:
- Recruitment Technology
Rec tech's vital, but it's all too common for a recruitment specialists not to understand their own recruitment software. If technology just isn’t your bag, you need to change your thinking quickly. If you don’t appreciate the technological options available to your campaigns, you'll quickly develop holes in your candidate attraction strategy.
- Visual impact
Get creative! Give your candidates a positive visual experience and you to gain their attention. Excellent branding and a high visual impact will significantly increase your chances of creating the optimal experience for your potential candidates.
- Employer brand
Career sites should play a central role in communicating employer brand, along with values, culture, and objectives as a minimum standard. The image of your client's organisation as an employer and place to work is essential to candidate attraction.
A candidate's expectations around career development, training and wider benefits packages will reinforce an employer brand and will help to position the organisations you're promoting in what could be a crowded space.
- Social Media
Social recruiting’s your secret weapon! Your future talent pool's is social, so engage with them, talk to them, show them how social you are too.
But having a clear understanding of what different social networks are available to you is essential - not all social channels are effective in every recruitment strategy. Do your research and remember…online connections are key.
Social recruitment's a two-way channel, particularly as candidates use social media to investigate prospective employers. Organisations should ensure that all content displayed on corporate social media is informative, concise, and professional.
- Video interviewing
Save time and resources, optimise your candidate experience, improve your screening process, source perfectly-matched candidates, and reduce the time-to-hire! Just a few of the key benefits of integrating video interviewing into your candidate attraction strategy, and it’s one of the fastest growing technological adoptions - made even more popular throughout the pandemic - but one that's here to stay.
- Psychometrics
Psychometric testing is a common way of evaluating candidates, allowing recruiters to increase the chances of finding the best fit for a vacancy. It provides an objective overview of a candidate’s character, strengths, weaknesses and working style. Evidence shows the use of psychometrics increases employee retention by giving a holistic view of person's suitability from the off.
Evaluate Everything
It’s not enough to implement your strategy and leave it there. Instead, the most successful candidate attraction plans are ongoing processes that are consistently reviewed and evolve to suit.
Ask yourself, what worked? What didn’t? What’s your cost per hire? And time to hire? What did you take from your last recruitment drive? Knowing where you started and comparing to where you’ve ended will add an extra, essential element to your candidate attraction strategy.
People are the lifeblood of every business and winning the war for talent will mean the difference between success and failure for a company. Taking a 360-degree approach and looking at your strategy from both an internal and external viewpoint will give you a clearer understanding for attracting the right candidates.
idibu is next-gen candidate attraction software designed to maximise your recruitment CRM. Click below to arrange a free demo or just to have a chat with our team about your needs.
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