Hiring the right talent is critical to a business’s success. With strategic planning and a well-defined process, organizations can dramatically increase their chances of hiring and retaining the best. Your end-to-end strategy — from pre-recruitment planning to active recruiting to new hire support — should be in place long before a new job is posted.
Company vision and brand
If you were not part of the team that developed your company’s goals and mission statement, familiarize yourself. Having a firm grasp helps you share that vision with potential candidates and helps candidates understand if your organization is the right fit for them. This is important to not only recruiting efforts, but also retention.
Building an effective employer brand conveys your culture, benefits, and growth opportunities, providing transparency to prospective employees by effectively describing the positive attributes of your workplace. When developing your employer brand, ask yourself these questions:
- What makes our identity unique?
- How does our brand compare with the competition’s?
- Do our print and online content convey our brand consistently?
- Can we build better ways to measure and track key performance indicators?
Your internet presence is your best tool for recruitment, and it’s critical that your values, culture, and work environment are reflected accurately. Once you’ve buttoned up branding, you’re ready to move into active recruiting.
Consider internal and external candidates
If you don’t already have an internal recruiting process in place, now is the time to develop one. Well-defined succession plan mapping can drastically help you match strong internal candidates with new roles. In-house training programs not only help identify gaps in existing employee skill sets but also engage current employee, encouraging them to remain with your organization.
If there is no opportunity to promote from within, go external. There are three kinds of external recruits: those actively looking, those occasionally glancing at job postings but not committed to their search, and those completely passive candidates who are not actively seeking new employment but would consider it if the “perfect job” were to present itself. Consider the following methods to attract external talent:
- Create an attractive careers page on your company’s website
- Encourage or even incentivize employee referrals
- Create both traditional and social media job postings
Utilizing technology is one of the smartest approaches to facilitating external recruitment. Pay special attention to how the social media platforms you choose perform on smartphones, as this is rapidly becoming the preferred form of communication for many professionals.
Using algorithms and Boolean searches for talent mining, you can predict a candidate’s suitability for your company. Rather than evaluating a candidate solely on an interview, adopt a data analytics approach, and look for a proven track record of achievements with evidence of measurable business outcomes.
Finally, build retention strategies into your recruiting plan, ensuring the highly qualified candidates you hire remain high performers once they are employees. Integration into the company culture and feeling like part of the team helps new employees become productive more quickly and creates an immediate sense of loyalty. Make sure you have a robust onboarding process in place that includes proven practices, such as assigning every new hire a mentor.
Talent strategy checklist
Your talent acquisition strategy is critically important, so ensure it is thoughtful in structure and execution. At the very least, it should:
- Reflect your company culture, goals, and mission
- Be built upon a visible, consistent, and unique employer brand
- Drive talent to a clear and easy-to-navigate company careers page
- Include procedures to recruit internally and externally
- Utilize recruiting technology tools best suited to your needs
- Delineate evaluation methods and essential KPI targets by position
- Have effective quality-of-hire measures
- Include a well-established an onboarding process and retention strategy
A thoughtful, well-planned, and well-executed recruiting strategy dramatically increases your chances of finding the best talent with the right skills. Whether you handle recruiting internally or outsource the task to a professional staffing company, a sound strategy will help ensure success.
Partner with the best to recruit the best — Alpha1 Staffing.
