Recruiting Best Practices

Every recruiter has the same goal in mind: matching the best talent to the right role. That’s simply the profession. However, that can be a challenge. Today’s labor market is incredibly competitive. According to Forbes, the best talent is off the market in as little as 10 days. That’s an incredibly small window to source, screen and hire them.

You’re going to need more than a job posting. You’ll need to follow today’s recruiting best practices to find that perfect candidate before the competition does. So, let’s take a look at exactly what these practices are and the strategies you can use to consistently be the first to make an offer.

Types of Recruitment Strategies

Recruitment as we know it today has been around for several decades now. How it’s done may have changed, but the principles remain the same. As such, there are several types of recruitment strategies out there that have developed over the years. So, let’s discuss some of these recruitment techniques before we dive into best practices.

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• Employee referral programs - So, you’re a recruiter. You more than likely know other recruiters. The same can be said of absolutely every other role out there. That’s why employee referral programs can be a powerful recruitment strategy that allows you to tap employee networks for talent. It’s just a matter of encouraging them to reach out to people they think would be a good fit.
  
  
• Past applicants - Many employers have a wealth of data right under their noses - past applicants. These are candidates that have already expressed an interest in working for your organization. Although they may not have been the best fit for the role they applied for, they may well be perfect for future roles. So, it never hurts to review the data already at your fingertips.
  
  
• Social Media - Social media is too often overlooked by recruiters. It’s a wonderful tool that allows you to share job postings with your network and engage in two-way conversations with potential candidates. Even if you don’t reach someone directly, it’s likely the job posting will be shared with someone who’ll make a wonderful hire.  

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Best Practices for Hiring Top Talent

Regardless of the recruitment strategy you use, there are best practices for hiring top talent you need to consider. Let’s take a look.

Focus on Employer Brand

In the world of recruitment, a good reputation as an employer may as well be gold. Strong employer branding shows candidates the value you bring to your employees. Just like you would market to customers, focusing on your employer brand will help you attract the best talent on the market better than any job listing copy.

This is in part through what you offer your current employees such as benefits and prestige. However, during the hiring process, recruiters are your very first point of contact with a potential hire. They’ll be your ambassadors for your employer brand and what candidates can expect from your work culture. A negative candidate experience at this junction risks damaging your reputation as a whole. As such, you need to take particular care to tailor a positive experience.

Hire Faster Without Sacrificing Quality

Every recruiter knows the challenge in the quest to build the most efficient hiring process possible with a fast time-to-hire and stellar quality of hire. For many, this seems impossible. Scheduling and holding the initial interview alone can take hours of work for a single candidate. It’s a logistical nightmare.

But it doesn’t have to be. Modern recruiters have access to tools like Qualifi that let them eliminate the tedious chore of that first interview. It’s simply a matter of automation. An on-demand interview will eliminate the scheduling bottleneck entirely without sacrificing that personal touch that candidates crave.

Revamp Your Employee Benefits

Salary obviously attracts candidates. That’s no secret. It’s a job seeker's chief concern. That’s likely why we often overlook benefit packages until after an offer is made, and this is a missed opportunity. Revamping your employee benefits can play a serious role in recruiting and retaining employees.

Benefits are all about showing candidates and employees alike that working for you is a sustainable life choice.

Let’s look at flexible hours as an example. With the big shift to hybrid and remote work in recent years, modern talent has grown to value jobs that let them work when they want and where they want. Providing this flexibility gives them what they want and costs you nothing.

But that’s certainly not all. Consider wellness and education stipends. These benefits provide an opportunity for personal growth outside of work as well as contribute to developing a healthy and highly skilled workforce. All the while, you’re creating programs that make talent want to work for you.

Then there’s mandatory time off, parental paid leave, holidays, student loan forgiveness - really the list can go on for quite a while. The bottom line is there’s more to attracting and retaining talent than salary.

Build for Accessibility

Your ideal candidate is out there. You just have to reach them. However, that also means they need to be able to reach you.

Building for accessibility in recruitment means utilizing the right tools to make the process available to as many people as possible. The biggest barrier to this is actually the traditional interview.

The traditional interview isn’t accessible to everyone for several reasons:

• Not every candidate is available during the standard 9-5 interview window.
• Candidates with busy schedules simply can’t take the time away from other work to interview.
• According to the FFC, 19 million Americans lack access to a fixed broadband service at threshold speeds. So, that makes completing even a video interview difficult.
• Traditional interviews often favor neurotypical applicants. Roughly 15 to 20% of the United States is neurodivergent, a hue portion of the American workforce.  

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Simply put, the traditional interview is limiting your candidate pool more than you may realize. On-demand phone interviews, on the other hand, are available to everyone and anyone with a phone — something most of the population has access to — at any time of day.

Assess for Unconscious Bias

Unconscious bias may well be standing between you and the perfect candidate. Take particular note of “unconscious” here. No one is free of bias, and that can pose a problem when you want to make a fair and equitable hiring process.

You’ll want to assess for adverse impact to begin your journey to mitigate bias. Thankfully, this is a simple process. Identify a group that represents the majority of your hires. Take the number of hires and divide that by the number of applicants. Now do the same for a given minority group. Divide the minority group’s quotient and divide that by the majority. If the result is less than 80%, an adverse impact is present.

Once you’ve identified there is a problem, you can take steps to correct it. Correcting for bias can include taking a look at how you perform background checks or evaluating your job postings for exclusive language. It could also be a matter of creating a uniform interview experience for everyone.

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