The 7 deadly sins of recruitment
Matt Singer, VP Marketing at Jobvite reveals the 7 deadly mistakes to avoid in recruitment.
By 2020, half of the workplace will be millennials. This demographic has been at the forefront of the communication revolution and their impact can be seen everywhere, including recruitment. To stay competitive and in order to attract digital natives, HR leaders and recruiters will need to adapt their strategies too—otherwise they risk losing highly skilled candidates to competitors.
There is no magic recipe to recruitment strategy success, but there are some basic mistakes you can avoid making during the recruitment process that will pay huge dividends.
Search and forget
Treat candidates like customers. Once you have caught their attention, work hard to maintain it. Losing interest in candidates means they are likely to lose interest in you too. It speaks volumes about organizations if they treat each candidate as an individual.
Communication is key in any hiring process, so employing a multi-channel communications approach means you should interact with candidates in a variety of ways, from email all the way through to engaging them on social networks like Twitter! Investing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems is one way to help build and maintain strong relationships with future candidates. If done correctly, recruiters should expect to see increased loyalty and interest.
Failure to track
Increased investment in recruitment is justified by the types of candidates that are brought into the business by recruiters. By tracking and reporting the results of your hiring efforts you can clearly demonstrate the value in your tactics. The best way to achieve this is using technology that tracks where the candidate was originally sourced.
In addition to demonstrating a clear ROI, this will also give you the opportunity to provide executives with analytics pertinent to the business such as time-to-hire, cost-to-hire, and ROI by recruiting channel. This will give them first hand exposure to your efforts and successes.
No more vacancies
There is no time to put your feet up. The best and brightest candidates are still out there, but they might not be job searching, yet. This is prime time for broadcasting your employer brand. Being proactive means when the passive candidate becomes active, they are more likely to think of you.
Social media is the perfect way to extend the reach of your employer brand. Regularly posting relevant content helps develop a receptive audience of both active and passive job seekers. According to Jobvite’s UK Social Recruitment Survey, 64% of recruiters said that employee referrals were the most effective source of quality hires. So ensure your social content is accessible to employees, empowering everyone at your company to be involved in the hiring process.
Our employer brand is just fine
With millennials internet fluent and turning to the technology to find information, it is vital your company has a presence on there, particularly an easily accessible company profile page. But it is not enough by itself. You need to keep active and regularly post. If content is outdated or too corporate, it will deter candidates from applying. Ensure that anything posted showcases a personality that will be endearing to prospective candidates.
Out with the old, in with the new
Making the mistake of using outdated recruiting methods will waste time and resources. It is time for a recruitment refresh if you want to engage with candidates who regularly use social media. The days of searching for CVs are over. Instead, a range of tactics, old and new, must be embraced. Referrals and social media must become cornerstones of a new strategy.
Ready, set, go!
Recruiters often struggle to drive enough visitors to the company’s career site. It is important to spend the time curating content on social media networks to subtly encourage people to find out more on the website. Couple this with a database of passive candidates, or talent pool, that you build up over time, and you will career site traffic increase.
Adopting fresh and simple software that compliments your recruitment strategy will ensure that the content published on various channels will reach the audience it is intended for. Modern recruiting systems can automate many of these processes. The pressures of a changing workforce does not need to be a daunting prospect. Instead, it is a massive opportunity to attract the best of a new generation.
