Poor recruitment techniques result in poor-quality hires. And unfortunately, using the same old techniques again and again won’t get you better results. Whether you’re new to recruitment or you’ve been at it for years, it’s time for a fresh approach.
It’s a challenging time for the job market. But when you’re struggling to attract top talent, it won’t help to sit back and blame the economy. Instead, look for ways to hire smarter — just like your competitors are doing. Let’s take a quick look at some key challenges you might be facing, before digging into 10 great recruitment techniques to hire better talent.
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Today’s Recruiting Challenges
Because of Covid-19, the labor market in 2023 looks drastically different from the way it looked in 2019. Today’s employers are facing a whole range of new challenges, primarily due to an atrophied labor force.
Shrinking Labor Force
Today’s available talent pool is a lot smaller than it used to be just a few years ago. That’s thanks to a whole range of pandemic-driven factors. These include reduced immigration, lack of childcare, increased savings, employees starting their own businesses, and the pandemic driving older workers into early retirement.
Larger Skills Gap
The “skills gap” is also a huge issue, with 69% of HR professionals in 2023 citing a skills gap in their organization (up from 55% in 2021). Today, almost half of employers are failing to recruit candidates with the skill sets they need. The result is that companies are struggling to remain competitive, with fewer skilled workers on hand.
10 Best Recruitment Techniques
In today’s demanding economy and even more demanding hiring market, one rule holds true: find the best employees fast, or your organization will suffer. But finding those employees in a tighter talent pool is ten times harder than it used to be. So — yesterday’s recruitment techniques simply won’t work.
Here are the 10 best hiring techniques for recruiting talented and loyal employees.
1. Use an ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
Almost every single Fortune 500 company uses an ATS: at least 494 of them, according to JobScan’s research. But today, with the advent of AI-driven SaaS, many smaller organizations use an ATS, too. In fact, about 66% (two-thirds) of all organizations use some form of ATS.
If you’re not using an ATS such as Discovered to track applications, you’re missing a huge opportunity to streamline your hiring process and quickly identify the best candidates.
Find out why Discovered’s clients swear by its easy-to-use interface, clear, affordable monthly pricing plans, and AI-powered features that slash 90% of the busywork from your hiring process.
2. Encourage Employee Referrals
A successful employee referral program is the most powerful recruitment method for discovering the best hires. There’s nothing better than a personal recommendation from someone who already works for you and knows your company inside out. On average, referral hires stay 70% longer than non-referral hires, leading to a 41% reduction in overall hiring costs.
Implementing an employee referral program and creating all the emails, posts, texts, and more than you need might sound like a huge time commitment. But AI technology makes the process incredibly fast.
3. Have a Clear Recruitment Marketing Strategy
How do you market new roles? If you’re not sure, or if different hiring managers and recruiters in your org use whatever methods of hiring they want, you definitely need a clearer recruitment marketing strategy.
That includes developing an ideal candidate persona and posting open roles to the right job boards. It also pays to use social media strategically. Almost half (48%) of job hunters between 18 and 41 have applied to jobs they found on social media.
4. Craft Personalized Candidate Outreach Emails
You could sit back and hope the perfect candidate will come to you, but in today’s claustrophobic job market, that recruitment technique doesn’t work like it used to. It’s much better to be proactive and reach out to individuals who might be interested but aren’t actively job hunting. (According to LinkedIn’s research, 87% of both active and passive candidates are open to new opportunities.)
You don’t need to hire a recruiter for this. You can send engaging, personalized emails yourself and get rewarding results. Check out the case study “1 hour to find a Rockstar” here for a glimpse at how it works.
5. Maintain an Attractive and Up-to-Date Careers Page
Many potential candidates will visit your careers page, either as their first interaction with your role or as part of deciding to apply. Your careers page should look professional — it’s a crucial part of your employer branding. Plus, you’ll need to keep it up-to-date. It’s painful to miss out on a fantastic candidate because you didn’t get around to posting a new role soon enough.
If you don’t have the technical or design wizardry you need to keep your careers page up to date, simply use Discovered — Performance Hiring Software to craft a fantastic careers page that’s optimized for search engines.
6. Investing in Strong Employer Branding
Your employer brand is what your employees and potential employees think about your company. Are you instantly known as a great place to work? Or do prospective candidates have no idea who you are?
Building a strong employer brand can take time and money. Having a clear, engaging, and easy-to-navigate website is a good start. You’ll also want to encourage your current employees to leave (honest) reviews of your company on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.
7. Focus on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)
DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) matters more than ever to qualified candidates, with 86% saying DEI is important to them, and 62% saying they’d turn down a job offer “if it came from a company culture that didn’t support a diverse workforce.”
DEI should matter to you, too. Inclusive teams make better decisions up to 87% of the time. That means it’s crucial that your organization takes every step possible to reduce bias in the hiring process. This can include recruiting “blind” (e.g. stripping names and genders from resumes in your ATS) and using objective pre-employment assessments.
8. Use High-Quality Pre-Employment Assessments
Pre-employment assessments are one of the most accurate types of recruiting methods to judge how a candidate will perform on the job. Our survey of almost half a million new hires found that using pre-employment tests also significantly reduced time-to-hire (from an average 24–30 days down to an average of 5–10 days). That’s a 74% faster hiring process.
Creating and administering high-quality pre-employment assessments might sound like a huge extra task during the recruitment process. But with Discovered’s ATS, you can quickly create assessments through the power of AI, and automatically administer them through the ATS software. We’ll even create a free pre-employment assessment for you when you book a demo.
9. Conduct One-Way Video Interviews
Screening candidates can take up a lot of time. If you do 15-minute phone-screening interviews, that adds up fast — especially once you allow for extra back-and-forth on scheduling and technical issues.
One-way video interviews are a refreshingly efficient alternative. Candidates can answer questions at their own convenience. Then you, and your team can easily watch the video recording whenever it suits you. Good ATS systems will administer and store the one-way video interviews. AI-powered tools can even score the interview for you.
10. Create a Positive Candidate Experience
One effective recruitment technique that’s often missed by employers is to deliberately create a positive hiring experience. This might sound like an afterthought or “nice to have,” but it’s an essential part of your recruitment toolkit.
A good experience, with prompt communication and clear timescales, means candidates will be more likely to accept an offer. Not surprisingly, 81% of job seekers say a positive candidate experience “influenced their decision to accept the offer.”
Candidate experience can also significantly impact your employer brand: 8% of candidates left a negative review online after a negative experience. However, 57% left a positive review online after a positive experience.
Dramatically Improve your Recruitment Techniques Today
All the recruiting techniques above are highly effective, but you’ll really see the true benefit of them when you use them all at once. Discovered – Performance Hiring Software can help you there, letting you easily incorporate all these techniques and more into your hiring process. You can find out more here and book a free demo at a time to suit you.
