There’s no mistaking that today’s internal recruitment teams have it tough.

Workers in this digital age have immediate access to information about job vacancies, salaries, benefits, and even employee insights into the pros and cons of working for a particular employer. Furthermore, social media and online talent search tools are becoming cheaper to use, opening up the available talent pool to more competition.

As people are more informed about the many job opportunities available to them, and companies have more options for finding new recruits, the task of hiring and retaining talent is much more difficult.

In order to adapt to modern hiring trends, your company must know how to use all the tools at its disposal to build a strong, reliable team for your operation.

Here are some practical tips to get you started.

Develop a Sustainable Recruitment Strategy

The first and most important thing is to create a sustainable organizational backbone that defines and guides your recruitment strategy. Start by outlining a clearly defined organizational structure that includes job descriptions and profile definitions – what jobs are being done and who can deliver efficiently? Then, build strong recruitment processes that takes into account the many ways you could build your teams and the requirements for each type of worker.

Remote working has created the opportunity for companies to hire from anywhere in the world, especially for software development or customer service roles, where physically being in the office is no longer a necessity.

By combining a mix of core employees, part-time staff members, remote workers, home office workers, temps, or consultants, you diversify your employee base, making it much easier to adapt to any changes – in other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

This also ensures a sustainable operation, as you can tap into virtually any channel of recruitment whenever you need to.

Build a Highly Motivated Recruitment Team and Keep them Motivated

Recruiters today are like salespeople: they have to sell jobs to prospective candidates in order to highlight the benefits and perks they can offer, because their competitors are doing the same. The decision of taking a new job will always imply a cost of opportunity for the candidate; it is not an easy sale.

To be good salespeople, great recruiters need to be kept motivated in order to perform. They are often repeating the same process over and over again, often discussing roles with candidates who are not interested. This requires a lot of energy.

Spoil your recruiters, make sure they are not tired of their work, and show them that you appreciate everything they do, regularly.

Perhaps provide them a weekend trip somewhere to relax and unwind after a heavy recruitment drive, recharging them for the next big push. Or, when they deliver something big, let them head home a few hours early. Free time is always a bonus.

Show your recruiters that you care about them on a personal level. Their work is very hard, both mentally and physically, so showing interest in them, and not just their metrics, helps them to feel important to the company, which in turn drives motivation.

Know your Market

Clients, especially of IT services and contact centers, will often ask companies to provide data about local talent pools to prove what is or isn’t available.

To prepare for this, it’s vital to have a deep understanding of your market, as well as the data to back that up.

First and foremost, know your competitors. Find out who is recruiting and what they are offering. This gives you a valuable comparison to develop a better proposition.

Research graduate figures from local universities, find out which skills are common and which are scarce, learn about salaries from other companies, and record what you learn when speaking to the available workforce.

Surveys are also a good way to approach this. Try asking local educators if they can release surveys to students about working part-time. You may find out that there are young people willing to work alongside their studies – a vastly untapped source of motivated talent.

Recruitment requires getting your hands dirty, so engage with your market on as many levels as possible, and do it regularly to stay one step ahead of the curve.

Utilize Technology to Innovate

From a candidate perspective, it’s highly frustrating when a recruitment process takes up a lot of their time, or when a recruitment team loses information, doesn’t communicate, or repeats stages in the process, mistakes that can often deter people from joining the company.

To avoid this, companies should leverage technology to put clearly defined processes in place, and make sure the whole recruitment team is informed.

First up, social media. Perhaps this is a no brainer these days, but companies need to use a lot of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to hunt down talent, advertise job opportunities, and communicate with candidates.

Also, every stage in the process should be traceable. When did that person last contact you? How did they contact you? What tasks were completed? What is the next step? There are plenty of recruitment management systems (RMS) available that provide a way to easily share information on candidates, record data, create reports, and track the entire recruitment process, so that anyone in the team can take the reins if necessary.

An attractive, up-to-date, and easy-to-use website is also vital. In the digital age, this is the world’s front door to your business, so it should be inviting and clean or you could easily scare off potential employees.

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This combination of technology, market knowledge, motivated recruitment teams, and a sustainable hiring strategy will help you approach recruitment as if your business depended on it – because, ultimately, it always does.