It’s not always easy finding the right talent, but it is out there! We have used our knowledge to bring you 5 top tips on how organisations are responding to the shift in the way people are increasingly looking for work, gaining competitive advantage and recruiting the high class talent they need to succeed.
1. Forget the cost per hire agenda
Employers with the most effective resourcing strategies will thrive in an age where talent is key, but this will need financial investment – fact! Businesses need to see talent acquisition as a core growth function that requires the level of investment other core functions receive.
For tech companies, whose products and services are dependent on recruiting particularly high-level expertise for particularly fast-changing circumstances, readily available funding for ever more agile recruitment programs is undoubtedly important.
2. Modern Recruiters must become Marketeers
The key to unlocking the talent your business needs, is working out how to engage your audience. Effective marketing strategies are your ultimate tools to ensuring top-rated talent considers your business, through high levels of brand visibility and high perceptions of brand equity. Recruitment is now marketing and can elicit the same cynical reactions.
There are two simple ways of doing this; through marketing content and improving brand equity. Modern Recruiters need to be highly skilled in promotional copy and creative writing, as more and more candidates prefer to be contacted about job opportunities via engaging written form. Then engage your candidates by creating a compelling proposition that improves their brand equity. Get these two easy things right and your marketing is done done for you.
3. Engage candidates by building communities of talent
Modern Recruiters are Community Managers, perfecting the art of social selling. They need to build communities of top-rated people and manage these communities to engage with candidates well before they start looking for employment. It is this relationship-building that will enable the recruiter to become known, liked, followed, and, ultimately, trusted.
The technology to facilitate this exists, and warrants investment. Recruiters should not be reactive any longer. Instead, through a presence in key networks, they should anticipate and build alliances with talent, ready to respond to their career moves before a competitor can.
4. Engage face-to-face via meetups and networking events
Recruiter-candidate communities do not need to be exclusively online. Although social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter make networking virtual, tools like Meetup (www.meetup.com) take online networking and translate it into a physical event.
The need to network is at the heart of every knowledge worker’s ‘Sharing Economy’. Using online tools to create face-to-face engagement is a powerful evolution in the response to this need, and one that recruiters urgently need to harness.
5. Shake up the PSL and engage better-quality candidates
More often than not, the Preferred Supplier List (PSL), on which businesses maintain their recruitment agencies, is something of a relic.
Businesses need to ensure their agency PSL is shaken up to include only highly specialised agencies. The large IT generalists, for example, should be ditched in favour of leading niche Recruiters. In particular, recruitment agencies should be benchmarked primarily by their sourcing methodologies.
Businesses should choose agencies that use complementary resourcing methodologies to ensure strong coverage on both the active recruitment side and the passive engagement and relationship-building side.
Needless to say, reputation is everything – so businesses should work only with agencies that have strong brand equity, as they will lose out on candidates if their agencies have a poor record of candidate trust.
Want access to new pools of talent? Then get in touch with Third Republic today!
