Recruitment Strategies to Attract and Retain Talent

What’s the purpose of making recruitment a strategic process? As per research by Josh Bersin, Principal & Founder of Bersin Research, companies spend 3 times more on recruiting than on employee training. Owing to high employee turnover rate (around 20 percent of all workers change their jobs every year), recruiters are continuously in the hiring mode, advertising jobs, sourcing, screening, interviewing and onboarding candidates. With so much complexities involved, thinking of recruiting in a linear fashion wouldn’t bring out the best results. You need to have a recruitment strategy that makes the process more efficient and helps achieve the desired results.

What is a recruitment strategy?

Recruitment strategies define the approaches to be used in order to get the best talents from the job market. These are a combination of choosing the right recruitment processes, right target audience and the right approach to make the best hiring decisions. It is a plan of action in place to successfully find and recruit high quality candidates.

Recruitment strategies to attract and retain talent

• Data Driven Recruiting Strategy
• Work on Passive Recruitment Techniques
• Adopt Creative Recruitment Strategies 
• Develop Strategies to Recruit Global Talent

Use Data Driven Recruiting strategy

A huge amount of data is generated in recruitment every day; during the application process, while screening candidates, while communicating with them or assessing them after hiring. The advent of tools that can analyze this “Big Data” and provide actionable insights has led to the development of data driven recruitment strategies. Recruitment teams using data driven recruiting are more likely to reduce their hiring costs and improve the recruitment efficiency. Tracking data at every juncture of the recruitment process can result in real cost benefits. For example, tracking source of hire to determine which channels bring the best candidates will allow better budget allocation for job advertising. Similarly, tracking the conversion ratio of applications from one hiring stage to another can show the efficiency of the recruitment funnel and unearth any underlying issues which might be impacting the recruitment performance. Using data driven strategies, you can easily build a business case for further investment in technology to better utilize the available data.

(Also Read: Big Data in HR: Why it’s here and What it means)

Work on Passive Recruiting Techniques

Most recruiters are so occupied pursuing active recruitment strategies that they do not have any time or patience for passive candidates. Passive recruitment refers to attracting potential candidates who are not actively looking for a change. While this might seem counter-intuitive, passive candidates can actually serve as a great investment as the competition for them is the least. In addition to the cost benefits, candidates hired through passive recruitment techniques tend to stay longer with the employer as they will take the decision to change their job based only on strong reasons. However, to make passive recruiting successful, patience and communication skills are necessary as the whole concept of passive hiring is based on reaching out to interesting profiles, following up with them and gradually building a trustworthy relationship. In active recruiting, job ads discuss skills and experience required. However, in passive mode recruiters are in selling mode, and until you talk about opportunities and growth, you are not going to excite the passive candidate to leave his well settled job. Passive recruiting work best for leadership roles as most candidates on executive level are not actively looking for job change.

Adopt Creative Recruitment Strategies

Creativity is not meaningful only for so-called creative professions. In today’s age, as much emphasis is laid on being technically equipped, equal value is given to creative thinking. Recruiters can also be creative while planning their hiring plan for the year. How, you may ask? It depends on your target audience. If you are targeting millenials for a role, then using quirky social media posts for attracting their attention could be a good idea. A good example is the Hubspot’s Pinterest page which introduces jobseekers to its work culture and office.

(Also Read: Hiring trends in 2018 That You Can’t Ignore)

The famous fast food chain, McDonald uses Snapchat to find relevant candidates. It runs 10 sec ads on Snapchat where its employees talk about their working experience in McDonald. PwC hosts a monthly podcast to discuss workplace challenges, Johnson & Johnson uses the text recruiting app Text.io to review the language of its job postings, and Walmart goes even further by using virtual reality to attract potential candidates. With the advancement in technology and development of online social tools, we are living in a barrier free world where nothing is stopping your creativity to come up with next winning recruitment strategy.

Develop Strategies used to Recruit Global Talent

When economies are going global and we hear talks of inclusive growth and development, limiting your recruitment process to a very miniscule target audience of your city or state will be a regressive step to say the least. Growing economies also need more talent and if a jobseeker who stays in another state or country is qualified and willing to move, then why not hire them? Also, if the nature of work allows candidates to stay at home and work remotely, your hiring strategy should definitely be global. Global talent adds diversity to workforce, and brings a different perspective to any business problem.

After all, your prime responsibility as a recruiter is to attract and retain top talent, as it is the key to remain competitive. However, you need to do some extra work for hiring an offshore employee. Taking care of aspects like different time zones, communication styles, cultural difference now become a priority. Doing due diligence in these areas will make sure your rest of the recruitment process goes as planned. But first you need to make your employer brand such that it becomes a talent magnet for jobseekers globally.

(Also Read: How to Improve Your Human Resources Department?)