New Employee Search: How to Make the Hiring Process Easier

Recruiting good talent to your company is always challenging, time consuming, and often expensive. Although recruiting today is primarily digital, thoughtful companies are looking for more effective means of finding people with the right talents who also match the company culture.

This is important, but unfortunately it only makes the recruitment process that much more difficult. However, there are some good tactics to use with today's candidates.

Inbound Strategy

The easiest way to recruit top talent is to have them seek you out. This requires building brand awareness and promoting the opportunities you have with the right audiences.

Activities such as blogging and social media can direct quality candidates to a "recruitment funnel" of online content, videos, and messaging that give you a chance to sell your company through qualities like great benefits or a vibrant company culture.

Focus on target audiences that relate to the position, and you'll not only find the right candidates reaching out to you, but sharing the opportunity with friends that they think might be a good fit.

Extend Awareness

This becomes more difficult when you're looking for candidates who wouldn't normally become a follower of your brand. For example, a video game developer may have a following among gamers and programmers, but that won't be of much help if you're looking for an accountant or HR manager.

Even if you are in need of another game developer, smaller companies may not have the time to devote to developing and managing an online presence. But there are other channels that can still prove effective in growing your reach.

You could contact hiring agencies who specialize in the type of job role you need to fill, attend or advertise in a related trade show or conference, or post to specific career websites or journals.

Use Landing Pages

Companies around the world spend over $3,300 on recruiting for each new hire. Even so, the general quality of the candidates overall is not what management had hoped for. You can get better results and save a little money if you invest more time and trouble in the job posting itself.

Instead of a generic description and a short paragraph or two about your company, create an informative and inspirational landing page that all your other postings link back to. Go into more details about what the job entails and what kind of candidate you're looking for in terms of character and work history.

Talk about your company culture and show photos and videos of company workspaces, managers, and employees the new hire will deal with. Set up a comments section so candidates can ask questions or provide feedback. This helps narrow down the field to those who feel like they're a good fit for both the work and the business.

Analytics and Technology

You should also seriously think about software that is meant to make the recruitment process easier and more effective. An applicant tracking system (ATS software) can work with your hiring funnel to help you gather data on where your applicants are coming from, what they click on, and what content they enjoy most.

You can add an identifier to each applicant to keep their unique recruitment experience as part of their record in your candidate pool. This allows you to rate candidates, alter statuses, set permissions for data access, and leave comments or attach files. These systems make it possible to organize and refine your hiring process going forward.

You should make it clear in your recruitment that you're not just accepting applications, you’re a great company looking for someone special. It's also important to have tools in place for continually improving your recruitment process.