Recruitment Challenge #1: Candidate Flow

Recruitment Strategies to Address Candidate Flow

Not all jobs within a company face the same recruitment challenges, so your recruitment strategy will need to be flexible and comprehensive enough to address all roles. In a tight labor market, flow will always be a problem for most companies. Flow is the traffic to your job postings or your pool of interested (and qualified) candidates.

1. IMPROVE YOUR EMPLOYER BRAND PROJECTION.

Do an audit of your employer brand touch points (web, social, reviews, employee engagement) and make sure you have a good story to tell and are putting your best foot forward to talent. Candidates are consumers, and they will make their applying decisions based on multiple factors.  The first place they will look is your career website. Make sure it speaks to them! Whether you are trying to convince someone to leave their current employer, or competing with the company down the street for a new grad, your company culture and value proposition (the “sizzle” and the “why” behind the work) will set you apart.

Check out some of our work here.

2. EDIT YOUR JOB POSTINGS.

A job description is different from a job posting. It is pretty much universally accepted that a resume is not an exhaustive list of previous duties, but rather marketing collateral to highlight why a company should hire you. Think of your job postings that way. There is a time and place for a job description that has all the KSAs and balanced-scorecard data points, but the place for a candidate’s first impression of your opportunity ain’t it.

3. TECHNOLOGY IS YOUR FRIEND.

Make sure you are using the right services to broadly syndicate your postings. An effective applicant tracking system (ATS) should blast your job postings to all the top job boards, allow for easy applying, facilitate sharing of jobs, and serve as a searchable database. There are lots of options out there: we really like JazzHR but there are so many that will do the trick.

4. GET ON SOCIAL.

You’ve held out and held out, or you have an inconsistent approach to social media. We feel your pain, but time to get serious about social as a critical part of your recruitment strategy. This is the place to share your culture and continually brand your company as a hiring company (see #5) while reaching the largest audience. While many platforms allow for very, very (scarily) precise targeting, just think about it as the world’s largest referral network on which to project your brand and advertise specific openings!

5. ALWAYS BE RECRUITING.

Implement a pre-demand recruitment strategy. You know there are certain positions that are really hard to recruit for or those that are often open and ready for a hire. Create a systematic process for advertising those roles and engaging with talent in those fields regularly. Ideally it should include enlisting every single employee at your company in talent scouting via an official (or not) employee referral program. Make it easy for them! If you are always looking for customer service folks, print up business card that say “You impressed me!” with contact information and give stacks to your employees to hand out to people they encounter who provide them awesome customer service. When you post a new job, ask employees to share it on social media.