If you’re hiring for a specific industry like Industrial construction, that’s niche talent acquisition.
On the other hand, if you’re recruiting for general industry, but you’re hiring only process engineers or employees with experience in 3D printing, that’s niche talent acquisition, too.
Recruiting niche talent has its own special challenges. Talent pools are limited, and competition from other employers can be stiff. Candidates in narrow niches also tend to have high expectations for pay, benefits, and job satisfaction. Niche acquisition therefore takes more time and effort than general recruitment.
That’s the bad news. On the upside, if you take the time to learn your ideal candidate’s goals, broaden your search, and use niche hiring strategies like referrals and targeted employer branding, you can cut this Accenture-sized task down to size.
Meet with our hiring coaches today to see how AI can slash 90% of the time from your hiring process. Start filling jobs faster right away, with 10x higher quality people.
What Is Niche Talent Acquisition?
Niche talent acquisition is recruiting top talent for highly specialized roles or industries. The employees who fill these jobs are harder to find and harder to entice, because niche recruitment and talent acquisition pull from a narrower pool of candidates, making it more costly and time-consuming.
How to Recruit Niche Talent
Although it’s more challenging to find and hire niche talent, there are a few proven strategies that can make the process easier, faster, and more cost-effective. Start by conducting information-gathering discussions with a few niche employees, then use time-tested hiring tools like employee referrals and employer branding to elevate your efforts.
1. Start With Empathy
If you want to catch a certain type of fish, you need the right kind of bait. That means you have to know what that fish likes to eat. And if you’re angling for a specific type of employee, you have to know what motivates them.
So — take the time to build some empathy with your ideal employee. Reach out to 3-5 of the perfect-fit non-job-seekers who are already working in the role you want to fill. Ask about what motivates them, why they love their job, and their goals for their career and life.
Then, recraft your employer value proposition (EVP) to offer those enticements. Of course you’ll consider pay, but also factor in perks, career advancement, health insurance, onsite daycare, and other deal sweeteners.
2. Broaden Your Search
When you’re looking for the best employee in a narrow talent pool, you’re limiting your options. While that’s unavoidable with niche talent acquisition to some extent, you can increase your odds by adding remote candidates and offshore candidates to your pool of candidates.
Offshore recruitment lets you access more talent at lower cost and with easier scalability. To do it, post job ads to native job search sites like Indeed and Linkedin, but also to country-specific sites like Naukri.com (for India) or Onlinejobs.ph (for the Philippines).
3. Use Referrals
Referrals are the #1 way to find the highest quality talent. Referred new hires cost $3,000 less than traditional hires, and they’re 30% less likely to leave within one year than non-referred employees. But when it comes to niche talent acquisition, referrals are invaluable.
That’s because niche employees are more likely to know others in their narrow field, and more likely to converse with them about their careers. So — incentivize your existing employees to reach out to their networks, to help you find niche candidates.
4. Write More Engaging Materials
In step one above, you took the time to build empathy for your niche employee. Now, it’s time to prove it to your candidates. Do that by packing your understanding of their needs into your:
- Career page
- Outreach emails
- Job ads
- Email drip campaigns
- Social media posts and recruitment videos
And other content.
Make sure all this content is tailored to empathize with your perfect niche candidates’ needs and get them excited.
For instance, let’s say you’re hiring data analysts for a financial services firm. During your empathy building, you talk to five data analysts who work for competing firms. You learn that data analysts value career advancement and working in a strong company culture with respected peers.
So — you reflect those values in your recruitment marketing materials with employee testimonials and visuals. Then when new potential candidates come knocking, they see exactly what they’re looking for.
Pro Tip: Use AI to help you craft the perfect recruitment marketing content, fast. Discovered – Performance Hiring Software can do that for you, plus post the job ads to multiple sites, and even screen your applicants.
5. Use Niche Job Boards
If you’re trying to fill a niche role like AI developer or a youth nurse practitioner, you should post your job on LinkedIn and Indeed. But you might have more luck posting to niche talent acquisition job boards, like ai-jobs.net or the AANP Job Center for nurse practitioners.
Post to multiple job boards too — not just one or two. The more job boards you post to, the more candidates will see your ad, and the bigger your talent pool will be.
6. Use Niche Assessments
Even when you’ve found your candidates, your niche talent acquisition journey isn’t over. Before you can cross the finish line, you’ll need to find the most qualified candidates among your list of applicants. To do that, administer niche skills assessments. For instance, you might have to have your candidates take a project management skills test or a sales skills test.
If that sounds like a heavy lift, it is. But — AI can do the lifting for you. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to write a project management skills test for you, like this:
ChatGPT prompt:
Write a 10-question pre-employment assessment for a construction project manager that assesses for the top 5 project management skills.
ChatGPT answer:
You can use ChatGPT to write a skills assessment like that for you, or let Discovered’s research-backed prompts do it for you, as part of the standard platform.
7. Let Discovered Modernize Your Employer Brand
Discovered – Performance Hiring Software’s AI integrations can take 90% of the time, effort, and cost out of your niche talent acquisition. It can quickly create engaging recruitment marketing content like careers pages, social media posts, and email drip campaigns.
Discovered will also post to multiple job boards for you, screen incoming resumes, rank your candidates, administer one-way hiring videos, automated reference checks, and other screening tools, and put it all at your fingertips in a single dashboard.
Schedule a demo today, and see how Discovered can make your niche recruitment easier.
