Employees are the most important assets to any company. Good employees can help grow your business, foster amazing culture, and become leaders. Bad employees can hurt your brand, waste time, and create a negative atmosphere. Finding and investing in employees is an important measure for ensuring the long-term success of your organization. However, before you can hire and benefit from great employees, you need a streamlined recruiting and hiring system. Recruiting stellar workers is multifaceted and comes with several challenges, and is an art as much as it is a science, and must be treated as such. Done inefficiently, finding the right people, getting them in the door, and on-boarding them can be an exhausting, resource-intensive experience. Fortunately, by embracing these ten strategies you can optimize your ability to recruit top talent with minimal hassle.
1. Promote Your Brand
One of the best ways to recruit candidates is to incentive them to come to you. Building a brand that attracts, interests, or intrigues a candidate will send people running your way. Promoting your brand begins with establishing your brand. Creating a brand that turns heads, draws interests, and gains viewers organically is one that has the potential to succeed long term. Having a strong, recognizable logo and mission statement that resonate with desirable candidates is one of the first things to do. Make your brand bold and specific to the value that your company provides. Make sure that you are advertising your brand across social media, using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to grow an audience. Candidates exist across multiple platforms, and so your recruiting campaigns should have multiple channels. Along with promoting your brand, it is crucial to know how to sell your brand when speaking with a candidate. Being an expert on your company and being able to effectively articulate its selling points is key.
2. Make a Personal Connection
When all is said and done, a candidate chooses an employer based on the people as much as the company itself. Thus, to sell the candidate on the company it is important to sell him on the people of the company. To do this, establishing a personal connection is critical. Jocelyn Cohen, a recruiter at Zesty in San Francisco, mentioned "It's important to have a personable approach with candidates. The more comfortable the candidate is, the better you get to know their background and skill set." Enable your candidate to open up by opening up to them, being friendly, and being genuine.
3. Filter your candidates
Having a plethora of candidates isn't always a good thing. If a majority of these candidates are under qualified, uninterested, or a poor fit in another way, then their candidacy is a waste of everyone's time. Be strategic with your filtering, and take full advantage of online tools to do this.
4. If you want someone, reach out
There is no replacement from direct communication. If you think someone might be a good fit for your company, then tell them. Direct messaging, emailing, or calling is a great way to grab a prospective candidate's attention because it's articulate and to the point.
5. Create a talent pool
Similar to a database of candidates, your talent pool should consist not only of the candidates you're currently talking to, but of the ones you have spoken to in the past and wish to speak to in the future.
6. Get Mobile
Recruiting is a full-time commitment. You never know where you'll be when the perfect candidates comes your way, but you want to be ready for it. Having access to your candidates' profiles and data on your phone is a helpful tool.
7. Get referrals
This is one of the most powerful tools for recruiting new employees. Your employees know your company, and so they have a good idea of who might be a good fit for your company. Leverage your employees' connections to find new candidates.
8. Drive Candidates to your Webpage
Utilizing display ads, search ads, and inbound marketing content like infographics, blogs, and interactive content are great tools for driving traffic to your webpage. Inbound marketing techniques can help you find the right candidates and get them interested in your brand.
9. Ask for the best
Don't sell yourself short. If you want the best, demand the best. This will create a positive cycle; if great employees have the impression that you only hire great employees, they will take more of an interest in your company.
10. Use a targeted search
The dangers of using an unfiltered, untargeted search are that it puts you at risk for having irrelevant or otherwise unsuitable candidates. Filtering based on desired criteria is a great way to facilitate a targeted search.