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Irrespective of which industry a business operates in, every organization requires a strong recruitment strategy. Such a recruitment plan helps ensure that the business benefits from efficient and talented employees. Moreover, a well-crafted talent acquisition strategy can help a business have an edge over its competition. There are different types of recruitment strategies, so every business should create one that best suits its requirements.
What are recruitment strategies? An efficient and effective recruiting strategy is the first step to ensure that your organization attracts the right talent. However, before we get into crafting a recruitment plan, let’s understand what exactly ‘recruitment strategy‘ means.
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What Are Recruitment Strategies?
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Why Do Organizations Need Recruitment Strategies?
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How To Build A Solid Recruitment Strategy
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Training and Upskilling
What Are Recruitment Strategies?
In simple words, a recruitment strategy refers to the plan that breaks down your recruitment process. Such a recruitment plan elaborates on which roles you will hire for, when you will hire them and how you will proceed with the hiring strategy.
Good strategies of hiring tie each step of the plan back to the organization’s key objectives and goals. Additionally, a well-thought-out talent acquisition strategy is easy to implement and simple to communicate. It also makes it easier to understand the organization’s recruitment goals and priorities and what steps will fulfill them.
Once the overall strategic recruitment plan is in place, HR teams can further break it into smaller, actionable tasks.
Why Do Organizations Need Recruitment Strategies?
Businesses and organizations use innumerable types of recruitment and selection strategies to attract the best talent and employees. While each strategy has its benefits, not all of them work for all organizations. Why? Because not all organizations have the same strategic hiring needs. This means that recruitment strategies for one organization may not work for another, even if they are within the same industry.
Additionally, not all roles in the same organization can be filled using a uniform hiring strategy. For example, a textile manufacturing organization will hire for roles in the design, technology, marketing, finance and artisan departments. As each of these roles has different expectations, the recruitment plan for them will also differ.
How To Build A Solid Recruitment Strategy
As mentioned above, every organization needs a unique recruitment plan, as each business’s needs and demands are different. However, HR experts can craft a talent acquisition strategy that works for their organization using the points below.
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Clearly Define The Employer Brand
Today’s candidates have more than enough opportunities that they can pick from. In such an environment, it becomes important to set yourself apart from the competition. One key way to set yourself apart as an employer is to define and develop a strong employer brand.
An employer brand is an important part of your recruitment plan as it tries to convince candidates on why they should work for your organization. A well-constructed employee brand reflects the organization’s values, mission, vision, culture and policies.
Focus on all the benefits of working with your organization and highlight any unique features or incentives you offer. Additionally, try and define the organizational culture to reflect what your employees want in a potential employer. From there, ensure that your business websites, internal communication, social media pages and ads align with the employer brand you have crafted.
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Define Your Ideal Target Audience
Although it may not seem like it, recruitment is an employee-focused form of marketing. As is the case with any marketing activity, defining your ideal target audience is the first step towards success.
When you craft your hiring strategy, consider what type of individuals you want to attract for any open positions in your organization. Define this ideal employee’s skills, qualifications, experience, behavior traits and other relevant factors. This will help you understand the right communication channels to target and help you craft a strategic hiring plan that attracts the right talent.
When you define your target candidate well, it also helps you understand what type of communication and marketing messages will resonate better. Consequently, you will be able to put together a highly motivated and productive team of talented employees.
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Write Concise and On-Brand Job Ads
Posting job openings to platforms like LinkedIn and other relevant job portals are often the first part of any strategic recruitment plan. It’s an incredibly important part of any talent acquisition strategy. However, it’s crucial to ensure that you write well-defined, concise ads in line with your brand voice.
The first step in mastering the art of effective job ads is to learn how to write impactfully. Irrespective of your writing skills, a dedicated writing course for marketers like Harappa’s Writing Proficiently will help you determine how to pick the right words, use the appropriate tone of voice and pick a narrative that can get you the desired results.
The program’s SCQR Framework helps you understand how to use the four steps of Situation, Complication, Question and Resolution to craft persuasive messages. This means that even if you don’t have a strong background in writing, you’ll learn how to craft emails, ads, job posts and more that help you get the results you want.
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Join Niche Job Groups and Platforms
While some roles are easy to hire for, others demand extra effort from recruiters. Jobs requiring specialized skills and senior positions aren’t as easily available on popular recruitment platforms.
Consider joining niche job portals, groups and communities if you find yourself in such a spot when working on your recruitment plan. Suppose your organization falls into a smaller, more defined product or service category. In that case, it makes sense to keep niche portals, groups and platforms at the very top of your recruitment strategy.
Depending on your industry, search for communities of potential employees, industry leaders and recruiters to find the ideal candidates.
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Maintain An Up-To-Date Talent Pool
Not many recruiters have talent pool-building and maintenance in their recruitment plans. This is unfortunate, as a well-maintained talent pool is a great resource for an organization’s HR and recruitment operations.
A talent pool refers to the database that contains detailed profiles of potential candidates who may one day be of value to your organization. Such talent pools have information about candidates who applied in the past but didn’t get selected. They also have candidates who want to apply in the future. There may also be profiles of people who were qualified and skilled but lacked certain qualities that didn’t fit within the brand’s values.
You can also supplement the talent pool with leads from popular job sites and niche groups. In any case, the value of having a talent pool in your talent acquisition strategy far outweighs any cons.
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Run Programmatic Job Advertisements
Programmatic job ads are optimized, published and purchased with the help of specialized software. Such ads help you show your job posting only to those candidates who fit your description of the ideal target employee. Such ads are highly effective and bring in tremendous returns on investment.
If programmatic job ads aren’t a part of your hiring strategy yet, it may be time to consider adding them to your strategies of hiring. According to a Jobvite 2021 survey, ‘improving quality of hire’ was a top priority for recruiters. As that’s an emerging trend in the industry, programmatic ads are a great way to ensure that your ads are targeted to high-value leads.
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Employee Referral Program
Employees who are already working with your organization have keen insight into the workplace. They are usually in line with the organization’s values, mission and culture, making them an asset for finding like-minded candidates. When such employees bring in referrals, these new candidates are more likely to stay at your organization, be more engaged and show greater ownership towards their responsibilities.
To make the best of this, ensure that your recruitment strategy has a strong employee referral program. Such a program should be easy, incentivized and should offer a chance for recognition within the organization.
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Think Beyond Qualifications
Every recruitment strategy aims at bringing in the most talented and qualified candidates onboard. However, we know that the best employees aren’t always those with the highest qualifications. Many other factors like interpersonal skills, accountability, agility and professional attitude come into play when selecting the best employees.
Make sure your recruitment plan doesn’t get caught up in qualifications only. Focus on understanding the candidate in a more holistic manner.
How excited are they about the role? Do they have a clear vision for their professional future? Will they add value to your organization’s culture? What made them apply for this position? You will have a clearer idea of whether a candidate fits the bill beyond their technical skills and qualifications by answering these questions.
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Training and Upskilling
Any recruitment strategy is only as good as those crafting and managing the execution of that strategy.
No matter which industry your organization belongs to, it’s important that your recruitment and selection strategies come from well-trained people dedicated to upskilling. Harappa can help you create recruitment plans and perfect your negotiation skills.
If you are serious about taking your organization’s recruitment strategy and its execution to the next level, you can check out Harappa’s Select A Strategy pathway.
