Recruiting Tactics
Recruiting Tactics
The Power of Employee Referral Programs
Recruitment costs are on the rise, and many companies are still struggling to attract and retain skilled employees. That's where employee referral programs (ERPs) come in. ERPs are programs that encourage employees to refer their friends or acquaintances for job openings within their organization. In this article, we will explore the benefits of ERPs, the challenges in implementing them, and the technological solutions available to streamline the process. We will also discuss strategies for achieving maximum participation and the role of intrinsic motivations versus cash bonuses. What is an employee referral program? An employee referral program is an initiative implemented by a company to encourage its existing employees to refer qualified candidates for available job openings. This type of recruiting strategy often yields higher quality and more diverse talent than traditional recruitment methods, while also driving employee engagement and boosting morale among existing staff. In many companies, referrals can be 50% or more of new hires. The process typically starts with the employer outlining the program’s details such as how much money will be offered for successful referrals, who can participate in it, and what types of roles are eligible. Employees then share information about the open position with their networks which can consist of family members, friends, colleagues from previous employment or even former classmates. When someone applies using the referral link that was provided by the employee, they typically have priority when it comes to being considered the role. When a referral is successful, both the employee who provided the reference and the candidate who was accepted usually receive a monetary reward from the company. By incentivizing referrals, companies are able to attract better quality talent in a cost-effective manner. Additionally, it helps employers create an atmosphere of collaboration and goodwill within their teams as people actively work together to make sure they are all contributing towards positive outcomes within their organization. Employee Referral Example Workflow An employee referral example involves employees recommending qualified candidates for open positions in their company. This recruitment method can help employers find the right fit for a job quickly and cost-effectively, since referrals tend to come from people who already have an understanding of the organization's culture and values. The referred candidate will typically go through the same hiring process as all other candidates, but they may have a slight advantage since they have already been vetted in some way. The rewards for successful referrals range from cash bonuses to vacation days and other perks. Employee referral programs are becoming increasingly popular as a cost-effective way to recruit new talent and create quality connections between employers and job seekers. With the right incentives in place, employee referral programs can have a great impact on the recruiting success of any organization. Benefits of Employee Referral Programs ERPs offer several benefits, including higher chances of hiring the right talent, reduced hiring costs and time, and increased employee satisfaction and retention. When employees refer someone they know, they are likely to have a better idea of their skills and work ethic. This can result in higher quality candidates being referred to the organization, reducing the risk of a bad hire. ERPs can also save time and money compared to traditional recruitment methods, such as job postings or recruiters. Furthermore, employees who refer someone are more likely to be happy and engaged because they feel they are contributing to the success of their organization. Challenges in Implementing ERPs Despite the benefits, challenges in implementing ERPs exist. Employees who are not incentivized may be reluctant to refer others, and managing the referral process can be time-consuming and overwhelming. Additionally, measuring the effectiveness of ERPs can be difficult. How can companies ensure that the referrals are high-quality and that the program is cost-effective? These are all important factors to consider when creating an ERP. Technological Solutions for ERPs Fortunately, technological solutions can help streamline the ERP process. Role-matching algorithms can help identify the right candidates for specific job roles, while social sharing features make it easy for employees to share job openings widely. Referral tracking software such as Erin can automate the referral process, reducing administrative burdens, and gamification features can incentivize participation. These technological solutions can also provide valuable data on the effectiveness of ERPs, allowing companies to fine-tune their programs for maximum success. Strategies to Increase the Success of ERPs To achieve maximum participation and success, companies should implement strategies such as setting a grace period for referrals to avoid missed opportunities, regular communication and feedback to keep employees engaged and motivated, and ensuring consistency and transparency in the referral process by providing visibility into referred candidates. These strategies can help create a sense of ownership among employees, making them feel part of the recruitment process. They should also create a thorough communication strategy so that current employees know how and where to refer their network. A successful ERP campaign is constantly ongoing and should pervade your office. Intrinsic Motivations vs. Cash Bonuses for Referrals While cash bonuses are a common incentive for referrals, they may not always be the best solution. Non-monetary incentives such as recognition and career growth opportunities can be more effective in motivating employees, as they signal a long-term commitment to their professional development. However, cash bonuses can supplement these intrinsic motivations, providing a short-term reward for employees. ERPs have become a tried and true way to fill job openings. By offering several benefits such as reduced hiring costs and time, increased employee satisfaction and retention, and higher chances of hiring the right talent, they are an essential recruitment tool. Implementing them, however, can be challenging, but technological solutions can streamline the process. Strategies such as setting a grace period for referrals, regular communication and feedback, and providing visibility into referred candidates can increase their success. Additionally, balancing non-monetary incentives with cash bonuses can motivate employees to participate. In all, a comprehensive ERP strategy can help organizations attract and retain top talent, ensuring long-term success.
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Recruiting Tactics
Sourcing Candidates
In a tight job market, sourcing candidates can be a challenge. But with the right approach, you can find the talent you need to fill your open positions. Sourcing is part art and part science. Brush up on your Boolean string skills and learn how to effectively pitch potential talent. Then use the options below to build a well oiled sourcing machine that churns out candidates. Here are some tips and tricks for sourcing candidates in today’s competitive job market. Get yourself a good sourcing tool Every recruiter needs a good sourcing tool beyond the obvious tools like LinkedIn and Indeed. A sourcing tool such as HireEZ is a good example. It contains a searchable database of talent including sources such as LinkedIn and a host of other places where talent hangs out. Sourcing tools help you speed up the search process and reduce time-to-hire ratios. HireEZ claims to have 800M+ profiles in its index! That’s a massive amount of talent which is hard to ignore. Use social media platforms to your advantage – LinkedIn, Twitter, Github In this day and age, social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are exceptional resources for sourcing high quality candidates. By actively engaging in relevant social conversations and leveraging these platforms to their full potential you can really see an impact on your search results. For instance, using social media channels to post job openings and connect with potential leads allows employers to conveniently reach a vast network of job seekers without the hassle of dealing with multiple other outlets. Additionally, social media offers insight into potential candidates’ qualifications beyond what is listed on their resume, allowing recruiters to make more informed decisions while also reducing time spent sifting through applicants. With social media being such a valuable tool in recruitment, it’s essential that employers take advantage of all it has to offer when looking to source new candidates. Attend industry events and job fairs – this is a great way to network and meet potential candidates in person Attending events and job fairs related to your industry is a great way to expand your professional network and meet potential candidates in person. Events are a great opportunity to interact face-to-face not only with possible candidates, but also with other recruiters, HR professionals and key decision makers in the field who could be valuable sources of referrals. By attending events like these, you can build relationships that open up more opportunities to easily source candidates and take advantage of the latest trends and tactics for finding the best talent. Get involved with college career centers – they can help connect you with talented students and recent graduates University career centers are increasingly becoming savvy resources for employers looking to tap into the talent pipeline and fill their open positions. Not only can university recruiting help hone teams, but they can reduce recruitment costs by allowing companies to get involved with universities and build relationships that may provide a steady stream of candidates. Building meaningful connections with university career centers provide more than just access to an overflow of potential candidates; universities can also offer support, like mock interviews and resume workshops, helping employers connect with educated candidates as soon as they enter the job market. Investing in university recruiting is a great way for businesses to establish themselves for long-term success. Utilize online job boards – Indeed, Ziprecruiter, and Talent.com are all popular choices Job boards provide a wide range of job postings to job seekers, making them an essential tool in recruitment campaigns. Indeed, Monster, and Glassdoor are a few great examples of job boards that should be leveraged for effective sourcing. When used strategically, job boards can play an integral role in recruitment marketing by efficiently connecting job seekers to job opportunities. Utilizing job boards can help attract a larger talent pool for employers and allow jobseekers to remain abreast of the latest job trends. For employers looking to quickly find the best candidate match for their roles, using job board features such as filtering by qualifications and desired years of experience is key. Utilizing these job board options can help organizations optimize their talent pool and recruit the most qualified candidates with ease. Use employee referral programs – ask your current employees if they know anyone who would be a good fit for the open position Employee referrals can be an effective way to source candidates. When your current employees refer people they know to join your team, they can help you find potential team members that you might never have found other ways. Employee referrals are valuable because they come from people who already know and trust the company’s values and culture. Plus, referrals not only expedite the recruitment process but also bring improved quality of applicants – increasing the chances that the talent sourced fits the company’s goals and approach better than other sources of candidates. It is therefore worthwhile for companies to make use of referral programs to ensure that the best possible candidates are hired for their open positions. Companies should be sure to actively encourage referrals from current employees as a way to increase their success in finding good hires quickly and easily. Just remember that when it comes to sourcing candidates, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It’s important to experiment with different tactics and see what works best for your organization. And don’t forget to tap into your current employees – they may just know someone who would be perfect for the job!
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Recruiting Tactics
7 Recruiting Strategies for Hourly Workers
If you clicked on this link it’s safe to assume you probably are feeling some pressure right now to hire more employees. This information is purposely designed to focus on hourly workers, but some of these ideas and strategies work across all levels of worker. Unlike, our salaried workforce, though, hourly workers tend to actually be more difficult to find. They most likely don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, or a resume on a job board database. Hourly workers usually fill out applications and as of 2022, no one in the HR tech space has really figured out the secret sauce of building an hourly recruiting technology that attracts the massive workforce that is hourly that is similar to what we’ve been able to do around the salaried workforce. So, I’ll just come out and say that one thing that we all feel, but we sound silly if we say it out loud – “Hiring Hourly Workers Is More Difficult Than Hiring Salaried Workers!” at least when we get into ultra-low unemployment environments like we have right now. TL;DR, Blah, Blah, Blah, just give me the silver bullets! That’s what it’s all about. We need to hire and we need to do it fast, please don’t give us some kind of mathematical formula to solve! Not to worry, like you I rip open the Oreo cookie and just get to the good stuff right away! My Top 7 Hourly Recruiting Strategies! Don’t let your current workers leave! Okay, we are not saying to lock them into your place of business! That’s illegal, don’t do that! The best hire you’ll ever make is the one you don’t have to! Yes, we need to desperately need to hire more workers, but simultaneously we need to stop the out flow of workers leaving us. You will not be able to stop everyone from leaving. Hourly workforces are transit by nature, but if you can reduce your turnover by 10-20% it has a giant impact on your ability to hire. We tend to discount feedback of workers that leave. It’s a very normal psychological response to do this. We feel like if this person has decided to leave then they are no longer part of the “family” and we basically give up on them. But, if we start to really gather this data/feedback and look at it all together we will begin to see trends and common issues that we can work to change and make better. I love to ask location managers this one question: “If I gave you $100 per employee, what would you do to increase their experience and retain them longer?” What we know as HR and Talent Acquisition professionals is $100 to keep an employee is literally nothing in the greater business scheme. We pay way more than $100 to hire the replacement of each worker that leaves us on average. The actual average cost of an application in the hourly world right now runs anywhere from $30-60 per application, not hire, just getting an application! When we work on this question of what would a manager do, it’s never “Oh, just give each worker the $100.” Because we all know that would have limited impact in retaining a worker. What we find is managers come up with all kinds of low-cost and no-cost ideas to show workers they are appreciated throughout the year. Sending them handwritten thank you notes to their homes, sending or giving them small gifts of appreciation, posting pictures of them with words of thanks on social media, etc. All of which adds up over time of letting our hourly workers know that you care about them more than someone else will, and you should never underestimate the power of that feeling in retaining your workforce! Turns out, Marketing works! On average right now, organizations are spending 5-10X the amount on job advertising that they were pre-pandemic. Meaning, if you spent $500 a month running job ads to attract workers, you will need to spend $2500 to $5000 just to get the same amount of applicants! Still, this is the primary applicant attraction strategy that organizations still use to hire hourly workers. We post our jobs on job boards, social media, etc. and we hope someone will apply. For those who are spending about the same amount as we did two years ago, that is basically all you have is hope! Many organizations are beginning to use Programmatic Job Advertising tools. Programmatic Job Advertising is a sophisticated way to say we are letting the robots run our job ads, we aren’t making the decisions anymore! Turns out, the robots actually do a wonderful job at running job ads! Actually, programmatic technology has been around for decades but we’ve just recently started using it for job advertising. You know how you got to Nordstrom’s and look at a pair of shoes, but you’re not ready to buy. So, you then go to another site, like Facebook or something, and there’s an ad for those exact same shoes you just looked at! That’s programmatic, and it’s very powerful at getting you to buy. It works the same way for candidates. Programmatic puts your job posting in front of them where they are on the internet, not just at job sites, so your job posting gets viewed by many more possible candidates. On average we see organizations saving around 30% on their job advertising by using programmatic job advertising technology. Communicate with Hourly Candidates Their Way! We tend to build hiring processes around the way we work. If I’m a corporate recruiter, I’m sitting in front of my laptop or desktop all day. I’m comfortable working in that “environment”. 90% of our hourly workforce only access the internet, thus your jobs, from a mobile device, their phone. Yet almost all hourly application processes are built around desktop apply, not mobile. I ask recruiters, HR pros, etc. to constantly do one thing for me. Go over to the nearest McDonalds and just park in the lot. Logon to their free WIFI and then go apply to one of your jobs. What the vast majority find, is that is sucks! It’s difficult to navigate and takes to long to load, etc. This is exactly how your potential applicants feel as well. And they give up. On average, organizations lose about 60% of applicants to give up on trying to apply to you because the process takes too long or is confusing on mobile. I recently was working with a large manufacturing facility where the General Manager was forcing applicants to come in and fill out an application. This person had their organization’s best interest at heart, he really did! His feeling was, we have them walk-in, fill out the application, and we’ll immediately talk to them and offer them a job if they’re good. But, what many of us know who have GenZ or young Millennial kids know, almost none of them would ever walk into that building to apply. But, if you put a sign out front that said something like “Text – Hire Me to #897654” all of them wanting to work there would do that! In fact, we were able to show this GM just that when they went from having about 1 application a day to having 15-20 by just giving people an opportunity to communicate the way they want to through text messaging. I commonly tell groups I speak with that if you are not currently using text messaging to recruit candidates, you should be fired from your job. Across the board, not just with hourly, text messaging gets exponentially more response rate at every level of employee. You can tell me any kind of employee you try and hire, and I can show you that the response rate from email to text messaging is 7-10 times more for text messaging. From $15/hr hourly workers to $250,000 executives! Let Your Great Employees Hire for You! Sure, we all know that employee referrals are the best! When we take a look at source of hire statistics, and cost of hire statistics, employee referrals will always be in the top 3 of all companies. Employee referrals, on average, make better hires and are cheaper to hire then almost every other kind of hire. Now, the challenge is how do we do more of this? Yeah, we all have an employee referral program and for the most part we all think our employee referral programs suck. They are stale and boring, and no one really pays attention. Here are two recruiting strategies on how to make them better: Employer Brand Advocates – instead of having all of your employees be a part of employee referrals, create an exclusive team of employees who will help you get more hires. We find that most organizations can start really small, just a handful of employees who you would say “love” working at your company. You then feed them messaging they can share on their social feeds, and with friends and family. Instead of rewarding the final outcome of a referral, reward the behavior that leads to referrals. If an employee gives you contact of someone who might want to work for you, pay them $20 or a gas card. If that person shows up for an interview, pay the referring person $100. Etc. What I find is paying the behavior leads to far more employee referrals and your employees love the immediacy of the reward, which sparks other employees to get involved. Focus on Local! 80%+ of hourly hires live within five miles of their place of employment. This means we have to focus our recruiting efforts hyper-local! Billboards, yard signs, canvasing local schools and places of worship, etc. A best practice is to start in one-mile circumferences from where you need to hire someone and keep going out by one mile, looking for every possible place you might find a worker. Then figure out how do we let the people know we want them? Your success of hiring and keeping hourly workers has as direct correlation to how far and how long it takes for them to commute to your place of business. I recently spoke with a head of HR for a manufacturing company that paid to have a billboard put up directly across the street from a newly built Amazon warehouse. They knew Amazon was attracting so many people to come to work for them and spending a lot of money to get that traffic. They also knew Amazon can go through a lot of employees, so why don’t we let folks know they have other options. Hiring hourly workers is very hard, but we also sometimes over think it. Hiring someone that has to walk across the street to come to work for you versus someone who has to take three buses and a train, well, we all know who is probably going to be more consistent in making it into work! Let recruiting technology work for you. Make sure you are experimenting with conversational A.I./chatbots. At best, you might have someone focusing on recruiting 40 – 50 hours a week. When an hourly worker comes to apply to your website and has a question or a problem, there’s a great chance no one will be there to help them, and they’ll just go apply somewhere else. Having an always on chatbot on your website will increase your apply rates and capture contact data that will allow your recruiters to text these candidates the next day they are in the office. What I find is that most organizations actually don’t need more applicants. They just need to actually engage every applicant they have without bias. When we do testing where every applicant gets a full engagement and interview, we find that most organizations need about 50% of the applicants they have to fill their roles. One of the most valuable sources of applicants is the same database we ignore in our ATSs. Your ATS database might be the most underutilized resource for hiring that you have! We done a bunch of testing with organizations where we’ll take a list of one hundred previous applicants that applied but didn’t get hired and send out a nurture campaign using text messaging. From these campaigns we consistently see people coming back who are still interested and it creates high quality hires. The first step is to dig back into our databases and give some of these applicants a second chance! Start Swimming in some Different Pools! We all have some conscious and unconscious biases. When I dig into hiring data with an organization, we often see some common applicant pools we’ve just given up on. Sometimes it’s older people, sometimes it’s a minority or females in male dominated fields, we almost always see people with a prior record being ignored, even well after they paid their debt to society. It never works for force a manager to hire someone they don’t want to, but also we are often dealing with an “unconscious” bias. The manager doesn’t even know they are not selecting certain people. It can be difficult having these individual conversations, but it’s something we need to do. I find if we are not accusatory but use data to show that we have a gap in hiring, we can often to get managers to see the world in a different light and begin to open up their hiring pools, and most are pleasantly surprised by the talent they find. What we know is that doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the last decade, or longer, is not working. Every market, every industry will have continued challengers over the next few years to try and figure out how to fill their hourly roles. The organizations that continue to try new recruiting strategies and test out new and evolving technologies will have a foot up on the rest in this hyper-competitive talent world.
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Recruiting Tactics
Early Career Recruiting
On a recent episode of my RecTech Podcast I talked with CollegeRecruiter.com CEO Steven Rothberg about the early career recruiting space. He’s been helping employers recruit in this space for more than 20 years. I wanted to ask him his advice on how companies should approach recruiting in this critical segment. So here’s the question I asked him. If you were starting a college recruiting function today, instead of a large employer, how would you set that up? His answered surprised me. “So I wouldn’t set that up that way. If I was working for say, a Fortune 1000 company, a government agency, some employer that’s hiring at scale, I would not actually create a college recruiting function. And if I came in there and there was a college recruiting function, I would get rid of it.” They should have an early career or early talent function. Simply by naming it that way, and then setting up the goals or the rocks for that organization, you inevitably deemphasize the school, you deemphasize the major, and you start to become more inclusive of people like military veterans, people who went to boot camps, people who graduated from high school without good grades, without good standardized test scores, but who are just fantastic at software development or architecture or something, whatever that skill it is that you’re looking for. If you are CarMax, big car dealership company, and you’re hiring thousands of college students and recent grads a year to work as mechanics, to work as salespeople, et cetera, why do you care what school that person went to? Why do you even care if they went to college? You should be hiring them based upon what they’re likely to do for you. And you shouldn’t have to anymore look at the school or the major as a proxy. You can use assessment tests. There are plenty of really good ones out there. You can build one on your own for very little money. You’re looking to hire a mechanic? Bring somebody in and have them do something for 15 minutes. It’s like, “Do you know how to change a spark plug?” Well, I don’t, and they’d see that very quickly. And they’d say, “Get the hell out of here.” But Chris, if you know how to change a spark plug and you can tell them, “Oh, on this car, this is the catalytic converter” and blah, blah, blah, it’s like, “Okay, I can see that you’re probably well qualified to be a mechanic.” What difference does it make if you went to school for that or not? If you know how to do it, you should be able to do it. If you were in the army for four years and working in the motor pool, wouldn’t they rather hire you than if you just went to some trade school for a year and never actually had done the job other than outside the classroom? So I think that we’re starting to see this with more organizations. It’s a rapidly increasing minority of organizations are renaming their college or university recruitment departments as something to the effect of “Early career, early talent”, and I am really excited about that. I think it’s going to lead to much better matches between the organizations and the candidates. Early Career Recruiting Mistakes What mistakes do you think employers make today when it comes to recruiting students and grads? One of the mistakes that they make is that they are… especially the ones who are focused on on-campus recruiting. This is not all of them, but it is too many of them. They’re focused too much on the process and not on the outcomes. And what I mean by that is a lot of employers that are specifically targeting college and university students and recent grads, equate the school and the major with quality. And the data shows it’s just not the case. Now, certainly, there are some majors that are required in order to be in that profession. So you want to be a nurse, you have to have a nursing degree. You want to be a teacher, other than now, apparently in Arizona, you have to have an education degree. You want to be an engineer, you have to have an engineering degree. So hey, if you’re recruiting engineers, it does make sense that you’re going to be looking at engineering majors and not fine arts. But for almost every job out there, your major’s actually pretty irrelevant. Employers have come to understand that soft skills are far more important than hard skills. Ernst&Young, years ago, probably 5, 6, 7 years ago, one of the top recruiting people there, they were quoted as saying that, “We can teach you how to read a balance sheet, but we can’t teach you how to think critically.” Well, do you know who does teach you how to think critically? Your liberal arts or fine arts or whatever undergraduate program. You spend two years or four years learning how to think critically. And so the smarter, the better employers, like the E&Y’s of the world, they look at those students and they’re looking at, “Is this person likely to be productive?” And they’re not using proxies like, “Did they happen to go to Carnegie Mellon? Did they graduate with a computer science degree?” The better employers now are far more interested in, “Oh, okay, you’re applying to be a software engineer with us, show me some of the work you’ve done. Have you and your buddies built an app so that you can beat everybody at fantasy football? If so, you’re of a hell of a lot more interest to us than somebody who got a bunch of A’s on exams because we’re going to be paying you to build apps. We’re not going to be paying you to take tests.”
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Recruiting Tactics
How to Attract More Job Applicants
To win in talent acquisition today employers must begin to make job offers in a matter of days not weeks according to a new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG). They also need to streamline the mobile application process. It’s no secret that employers face a daunting hiring challenge. The numbers are staggering: 4.5 million people left their jobs last November, and there are 10.6 million active job listings in the US along with a net labor shortage of 4.3 million workers. In 2020 and 2021, the vast majority of turnover occurred in the hourly service sectors like hospitality, retail and food service. In response, many companies have gotten creative to compete in the hiring war for hourly workers, incentivizing potential employees with sign-on bonuses, increased wages and additional PTO. But this latest BCG report finds that employers need to adopt an analytical, data-backed approach to their pipeline to truly attract more job applicants and improve their hiring rates. “Our analysis shows that many successful companies employ a ‘test-and-learn’ approach to hiring. The right data that is accessible to the right people is critical to success, ” said David Welch, managing director and senior partner at BCG. Here are four things employers must do today to effectively compete for job applicants; Expedite the Hiring Process BCG’s analysis of proprietary data from ATS provider Fountain found that employers who present job offers in less than seven days yield 80% more hires on average than organizations with longer timelines. What’s more – each day removed from the hiring process improves that rate. The best candidates looking for work are applying to multiple positions, and the employer presenting jobseekers with their first offer are more likely to win that talent. Texting job s cam also add speed to the process. Broaden Your Screening Qualifications BCG’s analysis found that the quality of candidates can vary greatly across various job boards, and with myriad options to choose from, employers that explicitly balance hiring quantity and yield will improve business outcomes. Eighty-four percent of applicants reported applying for a position using their smartphone, so companies need to make sure they are targeting candidates more strategically. Location is a common screening tool that employers use when searching for candidates. While 70% of applicants seek jobs less than 15 miles from their homes, BCG found that applicants willing to travel farther were hired at an equivalent or higher rate. Job Postings That Articulate Company Benefits According to BCG’s report, 46% of job postings analyzed did not mention benefits provided. Yet analysis showed that offering certain benefits improved applicant yields and resulted in higher quality applications. Benefits that increased hiring rates most significantly included bi-weekly pay (34%), 401k (34%), medical leave (27%), tuition reimbursement (25%) and PTO (25%). Revise Job Requirements to be More Inclusive BCG found that employers need to continuously analyze certain criteria throughout the process of crafting job listings to increase the likelihood of improved hiring results. For example, positions without explicit age requirements generated more applicants but resulted in a lower hiring rate than positions with age requirements. BCG also discovered that companies attracted more applicants when they relaxed requirements tied to work experience, but saw double the hiring rate when they specified that experience. Finally, education requirements like a GED or high school diploma decreased applicant pools by 40% without improving the hiring rate. Hiring is both science and art. Organizations than can leverage data to improve the hiring experience will stand out to job applicants.
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Recruiting Tactics
High Volume Recruiting Tactics
With current staffing trends, many companies are having to utilize high volume recruiting to fill current openings and ensure a well flowing candidate pipeline. Although many candidates out on the market claim they have applied to hundreds of roles throughout their job search; it can still be difficult to source the right person for a role, especially when a recruiter is looking to fill a large number of positions at once. High volume recruiters can be faced with very high stress levels. They are often required to meet tight deadlines and fill multiple positions a day. Their compensation may be tied to their hiring metrics. While there may be a high demand and an overall large talent pool for entry level positions, the competition with industry competitors can often lead to no show interviews, candidates backing out at the last second, and bold counter offers. Targeting mid and senior level candidates poses similar obstacles. Companies are forced to find the competitive edge to stand out. Add in the requirement to finding several qualified people per day, and high volume recruiters are faced with a challenging reality. Creativity, innovation, industry expertise, and advanced research skills are just a few examples of how some recruiters beat out their competitors. Here’s some tactics to consider; Ensure job seekers can locate and understand your positions Work together with your technology and marketing experts to ensure roles are easily accessible. Are candidates able to find your jobs based on similar titles? Search optimization can mean a huge difference in audience reach. Is your job ad clear and accurate? Collaborate with hiring managers to ensure the job posting meets the expectations of the role. Implement automation into your job posting How many candidates see your job and keep scrolling? Even worse, how many start your application only to walk away after realizing your application was going to take an hour of their time? Think about ways your post can be streamlined to catch the eye of the candidate, remind them to follow through, and create a seamless timely application process. Remember, you represent the company to every candidate that applies Although, it may be difficult to personally respond to a high number of applicants, it is vital to not only securing the candidate who is ultimately hired but also keeping candidates who aren’t hired interested in future roles. Personal investment can have big returns on your ability to fill future openings. Initiate texting to speed hiring According to AIHR, when it comes to modern-day job seekers, over 90% of them use their mobile devices to look for that dream job. Our world is mobile. Recruiters have personal access to the device candidates are likely spending multiple hours a day checking for updates. Texting is a great way to reach people fast, reducing that wait time for a returned email and keeping them updated with the current application status. Give job seekers the tools to succeed Many applicants to entry level positions or blue-collar industries may not have the necessary means to land the job they are qualified for. Point candidates in the right direction by offering a resume builder, interview tips, coaching on interview etiquette, or preparing them for what to expect throughout your process. By providing this type of automated baseline support you could be gathering applicants that otherwise may have been passed over entirely. Treat candidates as human beings Remember that job seekers are putting themselves in a vulnerable position. They may be trying to provide for a family or get off the ground after a difficult lay off. Respecting their time and efforts goes a long way. The average corporate recruiter has dozens of job reqs to deal with. The ones that prioritze the candidate experience always win. With high volume recruiting, it’s important to never burn a bridge with your candidates whether they are hired or not. Keep them updated throughout the process. Advocate for them. Celebrate when they are extended an offer. Encourage them when they don’t receive an offer. Take a moment to offer them job search advice, resume feedback, and support. Even in a rejection, there are ways to be encouraging. Qualified job seekers should be urged to re-apply. Although they may not have been the best fit at the time, they can take away key tips and come back more prepared for your next opening. Stephanie Mauney is freelance writer and content curator specializing in Human Resources.
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Recruiting Tactics
Job Training as a Recruitment Tactic
Worker demand for skills and development training has never been greater, which is why so many companies are using job training as a recruitment tactic. “For employers looking for an edge in 2022, investing in training and development could make the difference in competing in the war for talent,” said Richard Wahlquist, president and CEO of the American Staffing Association (ASA). 80% of working adults told The Harris Poll they consider an employer’s development and training offerings an important factor when accepting a new job. Across all generations of workers interest in employers job training and career development was strong, according to the survey commissioned by ASA. At 84%, Millennials felt the strongest about the importance of an employer’s training program, yet only 50% said they were getting the skills training needed to maintain or grow their careers. The percentages were far lower among Boomers (31%), Gen X (33%) and Gen Z (37%). Job training for Recruitment This is clear evidence there’s an opportunity for companies to use job training as a recruitment tactic. In fact, because the pandemic is accelerating the rate at which many skills are becoming outdated and even obsolete by as much as 70%, workers are even willing to trade pay for training. PwC, the global consulting firm, says, “Job seekers are willing to trade an average of 11.7% of their salary for training and flexibility — and that figure rises to 12.4% among those who work in in-demand fields like technology.” So important is training that 37% of candidates told PwC they’re willing to take a pay cut to learn new skills. When companies use job training as a recruitment tactic, it’s not just the employees that benefit. Multiple studies and research leave no doubt that training pays dividends to the organization in a variety of ways including improved worker retention, higher productivity and the ability of workers to step into new roles. Job Training has Multiple Benefits In addition to those benefits, the job search site Indeed lists eight others, among them is improved worker mobility, an especially important benefit in light of the worker shortage. “When an organization needs professionals with new or specific skills, they don’t have to go into the labor market to employ new professionals from outside sources,” says Indeed. One overlooked benefit of training is its value in increasing a company’s diversity. Ryan Carson, CEO of an online technical coding school, told the Society for Human resource Management, “Upskilling is a powerful way to improve diversity.” Pointing out that diversity is most common in low-level and entry-level positions, the SHRM article says training, “Can provide workers in those positions a path to higher-paying jobs while increasing diversity throughout the organization.” Job training as a recruitment tactic is more than just another tool for recruiters to leverage when filling jobs. Research by Gartner says Covid has caused the need for recruiter to change their strategy. Says Garnter, “To effectively shape the workforce, recruiting functions must consult on the skills acquisition decision, source from the total skills market and leverage labor market intelligence to drive the EVP’s (employer value proposition) responsiveness to candidates.” As candidates have become more selective about where, how and for whom they work, Gartner says organizations “need to rethink what they have to offer.” Job training as a recruitment tactic therefore has appeal not just to attract candidates to fill jobs now, but as a long-term practice for all companies. Contribution by John Zappe
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Recruiting Tactics
Talent Acquisition Strategies for 2022
Talent acquisition in 2022 is going to be more challenging than ever. That’s why your strategy for attracting candidates needs to “get real” about putting together creative strategies that can move the hiring needle. There is essentially a new normal when it comes to recruiting. The 2022 Hiring Trends Report from Modern Hire offers some insights for hiring practitioners in what they define as the “next normal” in talent acquisition. They have identified several trends that will be most important to hiring teams this year. Adjust your talent acquisition strategies accordingly. Set up for long term agility in hiring. Organizations can’t expect today’s labor shortage to solve itself; rather, staffing needs to change to adapt to the market to remain competitive. Recruiting teams need efficient, agile, responsive recruitment and hiring technology to deliver a winning model for hiring performance today and in the future. This includes AI and predictive analytics to enable data driven hiring decisions and the tracking and measurement of outcomes necessary for continuously improving hiring. Hire for potential over current skill. Unquestionably, technology today advances faster than ever before and as a result existing skillsets become outdated much quicker than in past decades. To combat this, organizations are wise to focus more on candidate potential than current skill. Job relevant competency-based assessment tools using advanced technology can help employers narrow the candidate pool quickly to those who will be able to learn and adapt to meet the challenges of your organizational future, while also having a more positive impact. Focus on the job in the candidate experience. By combining the right technology with human touch, recruiters can create personalized hiring experiences that effectively represent their organization. Giving candidates a realistic preview of the job enables them to be informed and engaged in the process, promoting a positive hiring experience, and encouraging employees to be their true selves. This includes providing job relevant information as opposed to games that don’t clearly connect to the job, and personality tests that aren’t predictive of on-the-job success. Organizations that paint an honest picture of the job are more likely to hire candidates who will stay for the long haul. Continued adoption of AI tech. Forward thinking hiring teams are already using AI-powered tools to anticipate hiring needs, identify internal opportunities, reduce hiring costs and turnover, and measure the progress of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In 2022, AI-equipped hiring solutions will be essential to enabling data-driven hiring decisions and for tracking and measuring outcomes necessary in the ever-changing job market. Recruitment teams will look to advanced, science-based AI solutions that include predictive analytics, automated interview scoring, and natural language processing to further boost new-hire performance, retain employees, and increase efficiency. These tools will be the clear differentiator for delivering ROI. “We will likely continue to see unprecedented recruitment and hiring challenges in the coming months which can only be met with a continued focus on impartial, efficient and effective virtual tools and data-driven techniques in 2022 and beyond,” said Borchert. “Enterprises must take action to modernize their hiring processes to ensure more personal, improved experiences for candidates and hiring teams, ultimately increasing hiring performance for greater success.” That quote pretty much sums it up for 2022. But I would add a few more talent acquisition strategies to this list. Bigger Focus on Mission/Purpose Today’s candidates are looking for more meaning from their work. The pandemic has changed the way look at their jobs. Employers must adapt to this by changing their messaging that leads with mission driven elements. Some experts are calling it the ‘great reset’ because many workers are taking stock of how, why and where they work. Your messaging will need to resonate with these job hoppers. Becoming a Remote First Company Some say remote first companies will eventually outpace their rivals. Maybe, maybe not. But what you can be sure of is that the 9-5, ‘in the office every day job’ is just about gone. In its place is flexible or ‘hybrid work’ that allows your employees to determine how and where they want to work. In person work will be relegated to just 2 days a week on average in my opinion. We’ll also see an increase in quartely all company meetings where the entire company can come together in person for a week. So get ready for another bumpy ride in the world of recruitment. It’s going to be interesting to see how companies talent acquisition strategies adapt in 2022.
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Recruiting Tactics
Subject Lines Guaranteed to Work
As recruiters, we love a great subject line! We love them because we have this belief that the subject line of our email or another type of message will get a candidate to open and reply. And actually, that’s true! There’s a lot of marketing research around why someone opens a message. The chart below shows why an individual makes the decision to open a message: This data makes complete sense, right? If you know the person, you are much more likely to open a message, and after that, the next main reason is what is being told to you in the subject line. The subject line should tell the recipient exactly why they should open the message or quickly just delete and move on. Scientifically based on the data above, I think I’ve created the most responded to subject line of all time! But it only works for me, I’m doubtful it would work for you! What is it? “Sackett” Yes, my last name in the subject line is by far the best subject line for a response that I use! Why does it work? Well, if you know me, then the data gives me a 45% shot you might open it. Also, if you don’t know me, someone just sent you their last name, which makes you think like you probably know me, but you forgot! Either way, the response rate I get with this super simple subject line is over 80%! Does this work for straight recruiting? Yes, but not at the same level as I’m getting, but it is worth you testing it out. This simple subject line works because it’s probably the opposite of what most people send. We put so much thought and effort into the subject line that often they sound like a recruiter or marketing or sales or mostly just something too close to spam! What are my other favorite recruiting subject lines? “Go Green!” – Okay, I’m a Michigan State Spartan fan, so if someone sent me a message with “Go Green,” I would 100% open it. So, “Go Green” isn’t really your subject line. It would be something similar for whatever college or sports team your candidate supports. How do you know what team they support? You do a bit of recruiting due diligence and figure it out! “I’ve got an outstanding career opportunity for you!” – Just kidding, this subject line sucks! Never use this! “This job pays $87,000” – This one works because even if the person makes more than $87,000, our curiosity wants to see who is paying this salary and where it’s at because we might know someone who isn’t making that much, and we want to pass it on to them. Famous song lyrics, movie quotes, etc., that the candidate would most likely recognize. – Again, takes a bit of recon work, but let’s say your candidate is a Star Wars fan. Use the subject line, “Do or do not. There is no try!” “I was referred to you by “pick a name” – Okay, this isn’t my favorite of the favs, but it works! Again, a quick social search of a candidate and you can easily come up with some names of friends, family, co-workers to make this a bit more personal. But, only use first names. So, “I was referred to you by Tim” can be really effective if they have a friend or associate named “Tim.” Now, when the person asks, which “Tim” referred you, you just say, “Oh, Tim in my office, a fellow recruiter I work with, found your profile.” Personalization is the key to great subject line open rates! It takes a little more work, but great recruiters put in a little bit of extra work to get great candidates to respond!
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