Digital Recruiting

What is this digital recruitment, and how has it changed the recruiting game? Well, digital recruitment is when recruiters use online tools to attract and hire talent to fill roles. Sounds simple, right? However, the entire process is more than posting a job on your website or on a job board like Indeed. Rather, digital recruitment encompasses the entire hiring process, from planning to fill a vacancy to onboarding a new employee.

This method of recruiting is more than a perk of the new digital age. Rather, it has become an essential approach to recruiting. Pew Research has found that “the internet is a near-universal resource among those who have looked for work recently.” Roughly 84% of recent job seekers have applied for work online, and 90% have researched jobs online.

There are several benefits to digital recruiting:

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• Better Hiring Efficiency - Digital tools allow you to recruit faster and easier, allowing your recruiters to handle a high-volume candidate pipeline without sacrificing quality.
  
  
• Better Quality Candidates - With greater exposure and efficiency comes a better quality of candidate. This is simply because your recruiters can reach and screen more candidates than with traditional methods.
  
  
• Better Candidate Experience - The digital age brought with it a culture that expects results and fast. The recruitment process, with an average time-to-hire of more than 40 days across industries, runs against this expectation while digital tools allow you to cater to it.

Methods of Recruitment

Again, hiring online is more than posting to a job board. There are many methods of recruitment available to digital recruiters. Some of these are based on traditional methods that are improved through digital resources, and some are entirely new approaches that came with this new age of digital recruitment.

For example, we now have direct advertising techniques that utilize some of the same strategies employed by marketers to reach their customers. Placing job positings on your website and job boards is nothing new. However, social media has also become not only a norm for day-to-day users but an excellent resource to tap into to improve your candidate pipeline.

Then there are tools such as applicant tracking systems, or ATSs, that track applicants during and after your hiring process. ATSs help recruiters handle large candidate pools and allow recruiters to resurface past applicants for future roles. After all, previous candidates to your job postings offer a pool of applicants who have expressed interest in working for your company and may possess talent that you would like to work for you in the future.

Employee referrals are also another common strategy that can be supplemented by digital tools. Your current employees can now recommend people they know to apply with you with a few simple clicks of a mouse. This makes the referral method easier for your employees, candidates, and recruiters alike.

What is Online Recruitment?

When we ask what is online recruitment, it’s important to note there is a nuanced difference between it and the general digital recruitment process. Digital recruitment utilizes digital tools while online recruitment is specifically focused on using tools available on the web to recruit candidates.

Online recruitment includes utilizing your company website to attract candidates to apply for open positions. Your webpage is your first opportunity to showcase your employer brand to potential applicants and share your workplace culture. This is about building your reputation as an employer that candidates want to work for.

And this brings us back to using social media. Although LinkedIn is often the first place you might think of here, other social platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are just as important. These platforms allow you to target the demographics of your ideal candidates and potentially reach them via job ads and relevant PR material.

Digital Recruitment Strategies

There are many digital recruitment advantages that are simply not found in traditional recruitment methods. Digital recruitment grants improved efficiency as modern software allows recruiters to automate much of the clerical work that has historically slowed the recruitment process. Eliminating these bottlenecks allow recruiters to recruit faster and provide a better hiring experience overall.

With the labor market as competitive as it has ever been, recruiters need more than the right tools. Of course, these are essential. Knowing how to use recruitment tools to their maximum effect is equally important.

There are many digital recruitment strategies to consider when you’re moving your recruitment approach online. When you’re looking for the perfect candidate for hard-to-fill roles such as senior positions, it helps to create a candidate persona for your ideal candidate. This persona will combine your data on previous hires and desired qualities in your preferred hire. These qualities should encompass experience, motivation, aspirations, and mindset toward work.

In terms of data, review the common traits of successful past hires, not just for the position in question but in positions across your organization. This information will allow you to build a persona for a candidate that will mesh well with your existing workplace culture.

Another important digital recruitment method includes ensuring candidates have an enjoyable hiring process. According to CareerPlug, 58% of job seekers have declined a job offer due to poor candidate experience.  Ultimately, improving your candidate experience means building a responsive and reasonably paced hiring process.

Ensure you have the right tools to reach out to candidates quickly and enable your recruiters to screen even faster. To this end, consider utilizing on-demand interviews to interview candidates as quickly as possible and on their terms in the process. This approach to interviews allows your recruiters to interview 24/7 and expedite the screening process to as little as five minutes.

Digital Recruitment Trends

Any experienced recruiter will tell you that it pays to be adaptable. The modern labor market is constantly evolving and employers must change with it to remain competitive. As such, it is important to stay up to date on the most recent digital recruitment trends and apply them when possible. No one wants to lose that perfect candidate to a competitor because they’re operating on outdated information.

Then there’s the matter of automation, as we mentioned before. Technology has already allowed us to automate much of the current recruitment process. According to CareerBuilder, 72% of employers predict that recruitment automation will continue well into the next decade.

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To stay on top of these trends, identify the best recruitment marketing platforms today. For example, Qualifi provides an innovative on-demand phone interview platform that allows recruiters to interview 24/7 and screen applicants quickly.

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