Scale up your recruitment process in candidate short market

Are you finding yourself struggling in the staffing industry? You may need to upend the current recruitment process you’ve set up to compete in this candidate-short market. Traditional recruitment practice isn’t going to work for you anymore. You need to change with the changing times!

Transactional calls are a big no-no! You can’t just depend on the job boards and portals anymore. People-centric staffing strategy, referral recruitment, and networking are at the fore now.

And it all began with the rise of recruitment marketing!

What is Recruitment Marketing?

The expansive growth of digital marketing has given a complete makeover to the recruitment process. Businesses are leaning towards a high-touch approach to engage with their customers. Brand building and promotion of company value and culture have taken a front seat in a bid to attract top candidates.

The traditional recruitment process commenced after the employer-candidate rendezvous. However, in recruitment marketing, the process preceding engagement is considered vital as well. This process encompasses generating awareness, stimulating consideration, and finally enticing the prospective employee’s interest in the job opportunity.

This image defines all the stages of Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing

Advertising and content marketing strategies are used to target specific talent in the online marketplace. Inbound recruiting is at a new high thanks to a significant influx of engaging and informative content in the digital space. With recruitment analytics in place, staffing firms can measure their efforts and optimise strategies that need improvement.

Adopt recruitment marketing and integrate it into your current talent acquisition strategy. This is the first step you must take if you want to upend the prevailing traditional recruitment process in the candidate short market.

There is much to share about recruitment marketing strategies, but that is for another time. For now, we focus on the basics you must do right to reinvigorate your talent acquisition strategy.

From the points mentioned above, one thing is clear:

Candidate Experience and Engagement has never been so relevant before!

How to Improve Candidate Experience in Recruitment?

First,

Integrate it into your candidate engagement practice

We can’t stress this point enough. QX boasts a team of more than 500 recruiters and sourcing experts. We interview dozens of candidates every day who are keen to join our RPO team. However, when we talk to them, we find that 90% of them lack an adequate understanding of candidate experience. A majority of them have been trained to stick to a definite script that focuses on acquiring specific information about the applicant as required by the job requisition. Now gathering these details is important, the script serves as a decent guiding light, but that’s all it is – a guide. Do not treat it as a bible.

Use the script as a framework to define what you want to collect from the engagement with the talent. But adopt a people-centric approach during the communication that helps you build trust and make a better connection with the applicant. Ingrain this approach into your talent sourcing strategy, and you will find that they will be more accommodating and listen to what you have to say.

Second,

Connect with candidates the right way

Identify the portals and platforms you want to use to link up with candidates. Active candidates can be sourced from job boards, job portals, and career page leads. Passive candidates can be sourced from social media platforms, networking sites, and industry-specific forums and platforms. Don’t limit yourself to specific go-to channels; know where your target talent hangs out on the internet and find a way to engage there.

Important Note:

Whether it is your website, LinkedIn, or another job board, if you need applicants to apply for a role, make sure that process is quick with minimal steps. Make it as easy as possible for them to understand the job requirements and initiate communication with you. More straightforward the applying process is for them, better is their recruitment experience. Oh, and make sure that the job post, advert, and even the recruiting website you use to attract applicants are mobile-friendly.

Even an AI bot is capable enough to make transactional calls and emails. Bring empathy; bring a human touch into your communication. When you initiate engagement, make sure your outreach message is unique and is customised to pique their interest. Note that the potential hires are not always interested in the designation or salary; they want to know more about the company culture and values.

Is candidate availability a challenge for you too?

It should be. One of the major challenges that recruitment agencies and staffing firms face is connecting with candidates during their available hours. You have to understand that while you are working, the candidates may be occupied at their current workplace as well. When they are available to answer your calls or texts, you may be out of the office too. You need to work on a strategy that enables you to connect to talent during their available hours. You can achieve this by building a new recruiting and sourcing team that operates outside your standard working hours.

Many staffing firms find this setup cost-intensive, so they opt to outsource candidate sourcing and other recruitment services from end to end RPO service providers based in other countries. India is considered one of the best countries in terms of cost and services in the outsourcing landscape.

Providing a fine recruiting experience is the best way to get passive candidates on your side! Won’t you agree?

Talent Acquisition Process

Next, get your sourcing experts to work on the current requirements while simultaneously focusing on database regeneration and building a talent pool.

How to carry out Active Sourcing?

Get yourself a team of sourcing experts and recruiters that dedicatedly focus on fulfilling priority job requisitions for your clients. They proactively focus on finding candidates who are actively looking for new job opportunities. Your team must use ATS, CV database websites, and job boards to connect with active job seekers. Do not ignore passive candidates you may have contacted earlier. Call them to check if there is any change in their availability. Even if they aren’t available, who knows? You may still be rewarded with new quality references.

Important Note:

From all the available platforms, you must always use ATS first to source talent. ATS is a treasure trove of quality candidates filled through active and passive sourcing efforts. Sourcing from ATS saves time, money, and efforts.

Is Passive Sourcing necessary?

Yes! Have a team of sourcers and recruiters work on building a pool of passive candidates. This practice serves numerous purposes, but catering to active requisition is not one of them. By connecting with passive candidates, you are preparing yourself for future job requisitions. Call it Database Regeneration process if you will!

You get to engage with prevailing talent in the market and build a network of professionals in the online community. Building a professional rapport with prospective employees also contributes to employer branding and increases the probability of earning more referrals.

Speaking of referrals,

Is Referral Recruitment any good? – It is the Most Potent Sourcing Tactic

You must incorporate referral recruiting tactics into your plan. It is one of the most effective approaches to find quality candidates. Mostly used for hiring mid-level employees, hiring through employee and candidate referrals offers abundant benefits. Apart from saving time and money, its most important benefit is that resources employed through this tactic are significantly better in terms of quality and reliability. Provide value in your engagement with candidates, and quality referrals will come to you. Referral Sourcing is one of the best methods of talent sourcing in a candidate-short market.

Is “Sourcing through Networking” effective? – It is the doorway to Top Management Hiring

Networking is one of the most preferred methods of sourcing when it comes to hiring senior and top management professionals. You won’t find this talent proactively seeking jobs on job boards and portals. The talent marketplace for these profiles is niche. You need to go the extra mile to hire these candidates, and networking would mostly cover that mile.

Online networking platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Meetup, and Slack can connect you to senior and top management professionals from varying industries. Reach out to your passive candidates, establish rapport, foster relationships, and build your talent pool.

Another underused method that you must use to recruit is networking through offline platforms. Visit industry-specific events and conferences and engage with the professionals you meet. Doing so gives you a chance to establish a professional association with them and tempt them to a new job opportunity you have up your sleeve.

Leverage Tech in Recruitment

Human-touch is vital in recruitment, but you shouldn’t ignore the benefits a tech could bring to your recruiting efforts. Here are the tending techs you can integrate into your talent acquisition strategy.

Semantic search technology

Semantic search makes the candidate sourcing process easy as it takes the meaning of words and the searcher’s intent into account rather than words themselves. This method enables the team to get hold of relevant candidates that they otherwise might have missed out on using the traditional keyword search.

For instance, searching for ‘content marketer’ will give you the CV of a candidate in which the ‘content marketer’ term may be missing but includes ‘content writer’, ‘blogging’, and ‘digital marketing’. If you are devising a new talent acquisition strategy from scratch, you want to ensure you include this feature in your plan. ATS systems and tools that provide this facility are available in the market now.

Candidate Interviewing technology

Many large enterprises have already started using this technology, which has made screening easier and reduced time-to-hire. The tech allows the recruiters to automate the interview scheduling and screening process (to an extent). Harqen uses machine learning and analytics to rank candidates and measures their performance in interviews.

Recruitment Automation and Data Analytics

A wealth of data availability has augmented data-driven recruitment practices in the staffing landscape. Artificial Intelligence (AI) analyses this data and uses it to drive and continually optimise the recruiting process. Certain repetitive tasks taking up unnecessary time, efforts, and resources are now automated to speed up the hiring progression. CV parsing, screening, candidate matching, and talent rediscovery are few examples that can be automated using AI technology.

If the above technology is too expensive for you to integrate, you can always partner up with RPO agencies that use these techs. You get added benefits without incurring extra integration costs.

Consider recruitment process outsourcing to offshore partners

When the going gets tough, and you need to steer your business out of crisis situations, then working with an offshore recruitment partner is quite a practical and beneficial solution. Apart from increased cost savings, RPO partners offer your business enhanced agility and scalability – operating flexibility that allows you to ramp up or ramp down your operations per prevalent job market condition, without incurring any long term costs.

Here’s what recruitment industry influencer Ian Knowlson and QX Chief Customer Officer Akhilesh Pandey had to say about the values that recruitment process outsourcing partners offer to recruiting and staffing agencies.

What are you waiting for?

If you are still using the traditional recruiting process for your business, then it’s high time you press that reset button. We are not asking you to perform a surgery; just a retouch could do the trick! Find a way to incorporate the hr recruitment process steps mentioned above into your current hiring process, and we assure you, results will come.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed several recruitment businesses to adopt new technology and practice homeworking to ensure business continuity. Many recruitment agencies have also opted for a shared service model, preferring to outsource recruitment duties to RPO service providers and gain increased agility and scalability and focus more on the top line. QX Global Group RPO division is offering COVID support to recruitment agencies with added value services in this dire time of coronavirus crisis.

If you are finding difficulty upending your recruitment process, or if capital, cost and technology is your challenge, then get in touch with QX RPO UK Services, one of the best RPO agencies for UK staffing in India.

Originally published Jul 15, 2020 12:07:25, updated May 04 2022

Topics: Process optimisation, Recruitment