This is part six in the 'Eight Biggest Challenges Facing Recruiters' series by Smart Recruit Online. Download the full eBook here. 

I said in my opening article on this topic, that every recruiter is looking for the secret sauce to this challenge, but what I meant was, every recruiter is looking for a simple and easy to execute solution to this issue.

Well there are both short term and long term solutions to deploy that we will explore within this article.  As with most areas of recruitment, there are a number of elements that are intrinsically linked to one another, that combine to influence the outcomes.

Short Term Strategy

• Advertising copy
• Advertising deployment strategy
• The package
• The recruitment process

Long Term Strategy

• Company brand and reputation
• Talent pooling & PR
• Grass roots strategy

Advertising Copy

Poorly written adverts that are not well optimised are at the heart of many company’s problems when it comes to attracting more quality applicants to their vacancies. The most recent statistics generated by Google and even more recently by Indeed, confirms the growing number of job related searches performed by people who are currently in employment. It is estimated that more than 90% of all online job related searches are now performed by this demographic and therefore job adverts need to be designed to be found and then appeal accordingly.

The single biggest difference between someone in work and someone who is not, is the degree of commitment there is to finding a new position. This is demonstrated by the average amount of time that they spend during each job related search session and their capacity to drop out of the process if they are not managed effectively.

Job adverts simply need to avoid early screening and focus on selling the opportunity in order to appeal to more passive applicants. The tactic should be to encourage more suitable individuals to hit the apply button and screening should be more tactically deployed in stages beyond that.

Advertising Channels

You may be very surprised to hear that most job adverts do not get advertised in the best channels, where the best results can be generated. Choosing the best range of advertising channels will have a significant impact on both applicant quality and quantity.

73% of all job related searches start in Google, so establishing where this majority go, is not a bad place to start. Candidates usually search by job title and location, so replicating that isn’t a bad idea. Around 65% of all applicants that run that search will click into at least one of the top 3 natural results. The natural results are those that appear directly under the 3 sponsored results at the top of the page. (Note: If one channel dominates all 3 natural results, then candidates will scroll down to the next alternative channels).

Buying advertising credits for these top three results can be expensive, so it might be worth looking at one of the fixed price recruitment providers, who can often provide exceptional value for money and cover the vast majority of channels on the first page of Google results.

So that is your paid for advertising covered, but to compliment that you should also consider utilising your own career page, social media channels (and groups) and then deploying a referral scheme across your existing staff and into your own talent pools.

The package

It seems fairly obvious that you need an attractive package in order to attract the best applicants. A little research can go a long way here, even if it involved running a few searches on the main job boards, to see what salary level is being offered by the companies that you will be competing with.

Advertising a salary band that goes beyond what your competitors are offering will remove salary/package as a barrier to entry.

However, the way that you package and describe the job is also a major influencer. Describing the company culture and the opportunity to grow, develop and progress will all contribute towards influencing the candidate that your opportunity sounds better than the one that they currently have.

The Recruitment Process

This topic is probably not even considered and discussed by many companies embarking upon their quest to source talent, yet this is often the biggest determining factor in deciding whether the candidate accepts the job at the end of the selection process.

I have yet to ever hear of one single person that said that they accepted a job because the recruitment process was slow, frustrating, unstructured or unconvincing as a method for effectively identifying the best applicant.

Much of what I recommend here comes back to the fact that the vast majority of applicants are in employment and have varying degrees of commitment to finding a new job that subsequently places them in the ‘highest risk’ category for dropping out of the process.

Yes we need to screen, qualify and measure the applicants and ironically most applicants that you hire after a professionally comprehensive process will tell you that the challenge of getting offered the job was part of the appeal. However, we must never lose sight of the strategy to nurture and romance the best applicants throughout the screening processes while we perform our due diligence.

If the stages and components of the recruitment process are agreed and established so that everyone involved understands and can communicate what happens next at every stage, then a combination of both screening and nurturing can work in harmony.

It is important to remember that the glue that holds these processes together are the people within the company that are responsible for recruitment and they need to accept that direct human engagement is an essential part of that, because nothing can influence more than a human being at the end of a phone or who meets and engages with the applicant at interview.

Long term Strategies to attract more quality applicants

Company Brand and Reputation

Given that we have already dealt with this topic in a previous chapter in this series, I will just summarise how this element affects the hiring strategy.

The foundations of the company brand start with what your current employees say about you. So this is a long term strategy that companies need to address and manage, as it has an effect on the way that potential employees feel about the company, via the communications they have with their connected networks.

The recruitment process itself needs to be seen as a branding exercise and every applicant treated like they could be the successful applicant, up until the point that you have declined their application of course.

Talent Pooling and PR

People who have previously applied to your company, the people that follow you on Twitter or Facebook, or have joined the groups that you manage on LinkedIn etc. are your talent pools.

Larger organisations that regularly struggle to recruit certain skills sets are tactically building connections with the people that have these skills, so that they will have a better chance of persuading them to consider roles within their organisation in the future.

Long-term strategies to build talent pools and to establish relationships with quality individuals ahead of trying to recruit them, is something that most companies struggle with.

This tactic is not a quick win and requires not only patience, time, funding and resources to execute it effectively. The conditions to justify this strategy need to be present and the long term support by the business and access to the right resources to deliver against it are essential. I would suggest that most companies need to ‘recruit in’ the expertise if they want to do this well.

I included PR in this section, because the way that we communicate our message via the talent pools is effectively a PR exercise to raise the company profile, as well as trying to establish ourselves as an authority.

Grass Roots Strategy

Taking a long term view of recruitment requirements, rather than a knee jerk response is definitely a more intelligent strategy. Succession planning to either replace or expand is also a great way to feed the business from the ground up with fresh new talent.

Building relationships with local/relevant universities and colleges and introducing the best young talent straight from education on graduate schemes and internships is an efficient and cost effective way of growing the company and developing the skills sets to support and replace individuals leaving the company for any reason.

Of course, people leaving education will have a different set of agendas that the company will need to satisfy in order to attract the best new talent.

Read the previous article in the series here. 

Read the next article here. 

About the Author

This article was originally published on the Resource Library. Mark Stephens has over 20 years of business management experience, across Sales, Marketing, Recruitment and technology environments. Mark is a serial entrepreneur and is the current joint MD of the F10 Group and the founder of Smart Recruit Online, Ask the Experts, Websmart UK and most recently the Recruitment Alliance.