There’s no mistaking that today’s internal recruitment teams face tough challenges. Workers in this digital age have immediate access to job vacancies, salaries, and benefits. Additionally, they can access 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. This increased accessibility opens up the available talent pool to more competition.

As people become more informed about job opportunities, companies have more options for finding new recruits. Consequently, the task of hiring and retaining talent becomes much more difficult. To adapt to modern hiring trends, your company must use all available tools. This will help build a strong, reliable team for your operation.

Here are some practical tips to get you started.

Develop a Sustainable Recruitment Strategy

The first step 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. Identify what jobs are being done and who can deliver them efficiently. Then, build reliable recruitment processes for each worker type.

Additionally, remote working has created the opportunity for companies to hire from anywhere in the world. Specifically, this is especially true for software development or customer service roles, where being in the office is no longer necessary.

By combining core employees, part-time staff, remote workers, home office workers, temps, and consultants, you diversify your employee base. Consequently, this makes it much easier to adapt to any changes. Moreover, this approach ensures a sustainable operation, allowing you to tap into any recruitment channel whenever needed.

Build a Highly Motivated Recruitment Team and Keep them Motivated

Recruiters today are like salespeople. They must sell jobs to candidates by highlighting the benefits and perks offered. This is necessary because their competitors are doing the same.

Straightaway, the decision to take a new job always implies an opportunity cost for the candidate. Therefore, it is not an easy sale.
To be good salespeople, recruiters need to stay motivated to perform well. They often repeat the same process and discuss roles with uninterested candidates, which requires a lot of energy. Therefore, spoil your recruiters, ensure they are not tired of their work, and regularly show appreciation.

For instance, provide a weekend trip after a heavy recruitment drive, recharging them for the next push. Alternatively, let them head home a few hours early when they deliver something big. Free time is always a bonus.

Further, show your recruiters that you care about them. Their work is both mentally and physically demanding. Showing interest in them, not just their metrics, helps them feel important to the company, driving motivation.

Know your Market

Clients, especially in IT services and contact centers, often request data about local talent pools to understand availability. To prepare, deeply understand your market and gather supporting data. First, know your competitors by finding out who is recruiting and what they offer. This comparison helps you develop a better proposition.

Research graduate figures from local universities to identify common and scarce skills. Learn about salaries from other companies and record insights from the available workforce. Surveys are also helpful; ask local educators to survey students about part-time work. This approach may uncover a source of motivated young talent. Engage with your market on multiple levels to stay 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.

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.