Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Michelle Deery. Michelle is a content writer for Heroic Search. Her opinions are her own.
Hiring new employees is one of the most challenging parts of running a business. Every new hire can have a huge impact of a business’s culture and performance, so the stakes are high. After all, great people are the difference between success and mediocrity.
With 41% of employers estimating a single bad hire costs $25K, it’s more vital than ever to get the hiring process right. Here you’ll find eight advertising strategies you need to arm yourself with to get the best talent.
Key Takeaways:
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Be transparent and honest to ensure that you and your candidates start off on the same page.
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Highlight your company’s best features by allowing current employees to advertise open positions.
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Make sure to utilize digital resources like LinkedIn and your company website in the right way.
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Be mindful of your full recruitment cycle and use KPI-based SMART goals to implement your strategy.
What Is A Recruiting Strategy?
A recruiting strategy is your plan to identify, attract, and hire candidates for open positions. A good recruiting strategy needs to be focused on its goals and implementation. This requires a clear understanding of the what needs must be met by the candidate.
Recruiting strategies help define the role, responsibilities, and skills required for the position. For your strategy to be successful, you want to be able to explain your reasoning along every step of the process.
8 Recruiting Strategies To Attract Top Candidates
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Choose the appropriate market.
It goes without saying that you need to be advertising in the right place. The first thing to do is to figure out where that is – either online or at a local location. For example, if you are a B2B business looking for IT talent, you should be advertising in relevant tech job places. Whether it’s at a conference, on social media, via a jobs board or at a local meetup, find where the best places are to net the talent you require and advertise there.
Be sure that your advertisement concisely covers all of the essentials that a candidate needs to know:
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Job duties and responsibilities
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Required skills, knowledge, and education/training
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Salary range
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Hours and location (remote, etc.)
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Advertise flexibility.
The days of being chained to an office desk from 9-5 are over. Flexible working is not just a selling point today, it’s a requirement for forward thinking potential hires.
Top talent want to be offered the flexibility to work where they want and, as long as your employees meet their goals, offering flexible working can be a huge selling point when it comes to attracting the right people. After all, a little bit of flexibility and remote working can go a long way! Plus, nine out of ten say flexible working boosts productivity… A win win.
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Be transparent to gain trust.
Whatever method you use for advertising, transparency should form an integral part of your hiring strategy. Why? Because new hires absolutely hate being lied to. Therefore, you should be descriptive, clear and concise when it comes to actually writing the job role and specs.
Think about what a candidate would want to see. Consider the day to day tasks required, how the job role fits within the company hierarchy, what the goals for success are, the key salary and benefits information, who the manager will be, the necessary skills required and so on.
It’s best to be open and honest about the challenges the job faces. If you are clear about the role and what kind of talent you are looking for, you’ll be much more likely to make a good, long-term hire.
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Don’t underestimate physical advertisements.
It might be deemed as ‘old school’ given the recent preference for digital job hiring methods, but using a ‘now hiring’ vinyl banner is still an extremely effective way to drive interest to your business.
Remember, not every candidate you might be interested in is using social or digital channels to search for jobs, so a vinyl banner is a good way to get their attention. Placing your banners strategically and making sure the image and copy reflects your business is a good place to start.
A vinyl banner can provide you with the perfect way to attract new employees by advertising your hiring needs. You can use them for signposting directions to your office or for advertising job openings.
They can be used in a variety of locations – booths, the side of a road, the side of a building and so on. Regardless of how you use them, a banner can allow you to catch the attention you desire. And if one location isn’t working as you’d like, simply take it down and relocate it to the most appropriate spot.
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Highlight your company culture and values.
One of the first things a potential employee will do is check out the company’s values and culture. This is not about skills or education, this is about personality and passion. And you need to get this right to ensure the possible employee fits within your company.
It works two ways however, as potential hires also want to see if their new workplace will be a nice place to work. Dedicate time to showing off your company culture via social media, your website and so on. Whatever your mission and core values, promote them and hire in accordance with them.
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Use employee referral incentives.
Promoting from within is an easy way to reward hard work, but sometimes you need to look elsewhere if the right candidate isn’t available. Instead of overlooking your current employees for new roles, you should empower them to help bring in great candidates.
Nobody knows your company better, a team of evangelists will only help the business prosper, and your current team might know like-minded people who could fill and opening without the headache of going through the recruitment process.
The best strategy to empower your current employees to advertise for you is to reward them for successful referrals – perhaps with a gift or a cash bonus. Not only is engaging your employees in the recruiting process a cost effective way to find good candidates, but they are the ones who will ultimately be working with the new hire every day so they need to connect.
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Use LinkedIn (the right way).
LinkedIn is a powerful tool at your disposal, but you need to use it the right way. Firstly, all business owners should be utilizing their network, as well as the network of their current hires, to connect with potential candidates. LinkedIn’s advanced search options makes this a fairly easy process. You can easily see experience through a person’s profile, identify mutual connections and search by skills or keywords.
If you want to try it out properly, cash in on LinkedIn Premium’s one money free trial, which gives you access to InMails so you can directly contact potential candidates.
Away from LinkedIn, social media is a perfect platform for advertising job openings. Millennial workers, in particular, regularly look at jobs via Facebook and Twitter, and plenty of brands are now using both channels to advertise on with recruiting content. Combine targeted ads with organic posts to attract attention and encourage engagement.
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Use your website.
In the digital age, your website is the face of your business. Adding a careers page to your website is a no-brainer. This page can host your job openings, your company values and culture and any fun content you have about your current employees.
Try getting creative with it to draw interest. Video, for example, is an effective engagement tool for new hires. Perhaps add a video on the page highlighting your company culture, or speaking with a current employee about what it is like working at your company.
Recruiting Strategies FAQ
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What is the full recruitment cycle?
The full recruitment cycle is every stage of the hiring process. The recruitment cycle begins by identifying the needs of the company that a candidate must meet. Then the company advertises, screens, and interviews candidates before making an offer and on-boarding the person they hire. The full recruitment cycle is key to a recruitment strategy because it provides the time frame in which to proceed.
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What are important KPIs for recruiting?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to consider for your recruiting strategy include:
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Number of qualified candidates.
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Number of responses per posting.
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Source of hire.
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Application to interview ratio.
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Time to hire.
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Cost per hire.
The KPIs of recruiting highlight the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy. They also reveal that your strategy should consider the entire full recruitment cycle.
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How do you set a recruiting goal?
Use the SMART goal method to set recruiting goals. The SMART goal method allows you to set realistic and quantifiable goals, which will help you implement your strategy and analyze its success. SMART stands for:
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Specific. Define your goal in a focused manner.
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Measurable. Provide your goal with quantifiable benchmarks.
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Attainable. Have the resources to achieve your goal.
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Realistic. Align your goal with your needs of the company.
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Time-based. Provide a time line in which to accomplish this goal.
A SMART goal provides a framework that you can build with your identified needs and KPIs to track your progress.
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Final Thoughts
There you have it, eight advertising strategies to help you get it right when it comes to hiring new employees. Hiring new employees can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be so difficult. With the right strategies, you’ll soon be able to welcome the right employees.
Author
Michael Overell
Michael Overell is a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader with a proven track record in building companies, products, and teams in both startup and hyper-growth environments. Currently, he serves as a key executive at ClassDojo, where he is responsible for driving revenue growth and helping children around the world access quality education. Michael is also actively involved in investing and providing support to promising foreign founders looking to break into the US market through his work with Antipodes.
