Let’s take a survey. How long does it typically take for your company to fill a vacant position? According to Josh Bersin, the average in 2024 was 44 days. If your company routinely takes longer than this, then you might want to look at ways to speed up your time to hire. An effective recruitment strategy might be the answer.
The world of recruitment is full of challenges. It’s a buyer’s market for some industries that have experienced massive layoffs over the past year. But it’s also a highly competitive market for in-demand skills—especially those associated with AI or software development. To combat these challenges, companies need to think strategically and get creative with how they attract and hire new talent.
This article will walk you through four steps to create an effective recruitment strategy in a competitive talent market.
Why is a recruitment strategy important?
In times when good workers are scarce and there’s deep competition for in-demand skills, even small errors in the hiring process can become a problem.
Recruitment has a cascading impact across an organization. If it’s not operating at peak capacity, then this will be felt throughout the company’s operations. The more difficult the job market, likewise, the smoother and more effective the recruitment process should be.
A well-structured recruitment strategy is a key first step to success. It lays the foundation for successful hires who will make a positive long-term impact on the company.
4 steps to a successful recruiting strategy
Whether your company has an entire team dedicated to recruiting staff or hiring is one of the many tasks that employees juggle alone, approaching the topic from a strategic point of view is important.
Here are four steps that you can take to create a solid recruiting strategy.
1. Find what makes your company special as an employer
To tell your employer brand story, you first have to know it yourself. To do this, look inward and try to identify what unites and excites employees at your company. Talk to colleagues from different parts and levels of the organization, and across geographic locations.
“Ask people why they come to work everyday (apart from earning a paycheck), and what motivates them to do what they do,” recommends Karim Gharsallah, former Talent Acquisition Lead at Tellent and current Global Talent Acquistion Leader at Remeha.
The answers to this survey are likely to point to several common themes about your company. These themes can be used to inform your employee value proposition, which in turn can be used to inform how you craft and present your employer brand.
2. Define your recruiting goals
When identifying what you want to do and achieve as a recruitment team, it’s helpful to think in terms of SMART goals (specific, measurable, attractive, realistic, and time-bound). This will allow you to set goals that are both attainable and fall within a defined time period.
When doing so, make sure that your goals are highly relevant to those of the wider organization.
Quick tip:
Quick tip:
If the company needs to hire a large number of people with a specific skill set quickly, then a short-term recruitment goal could relate to finding an efficient way to source and process candidates with those skills.
By considering what types of candidates the company needs, and how you effectively recruit them, you can begin to create processes for effectively sourcing, screening, and onboarding candidates who fit within an ideal persona.
3. Review and evaluate your existing channels and processes
Which job platforms bring in the most applications? Which ones produce the best results and often lead to retained hires? These are questions you need answers to when setting a recruitment strategy.
Take a closer look at your recent hires, and the path they took from applicant to new employees. Then, take a look at where you saw a lot of drop in your candidate pool, and map back to the most common sourcing channels. This will give you an idea of where good quality and poor candidates come from most often.
Applicant tracking software like Recruitee from Tellent offers this information as part of its analytics features. Recruiters can set up dashboards to track their most effective sourcing channels, allowing them to funnel time and energy into the best sources.
4. Onboarding recruitment technology to help you scale
Manual and time-consuming tasks and processes are one of the main reasons that recruitment timelines are too long, inefficient, or unsatisfactory for the company and candidate. A modern ATS can digitize and automate many of these processes, helping decrease time to hire.
Here are some examples of how:
- Use Recruitee by Tellent’s AI features to write compelling job descriptions
- Publish your job opening on multiple platforms with just the click of a mouse
- Automatically send email confirmations after each application is received
- Automatically assign tasks within a team as soon as candidates confirm an interview time
- Append notes about the candidate to their profile within the ATS
Recruitee by Tellent helps you to simplify and accelerate the many steps in the candidate journey using automated actions.
3 tips for successful recruiting: today and in the future
Once you’ve laid out a solid foundation for your recruitment process, and onboarded the necessary technology and automations, you’re ready to start testing and refining your workflows.
To ensure that your recruitment processes are successful not just today, but in the future, we have three future-looking recruitment tips from recruitment experts to share.
1. Don’t stop questioning the status quo
The lesson? Stay open to new things, and keep testing your current strategies, processes, and tools.
2. Don’t make too many compromises
When filling new or vacant positions, many companies focus on clearing bottlenecks or filling skills gaps as quickly as possible. One question is often overlooked: What will happen to the candidate and position in 18 months if we compromise on who we hire?
“The perfect employees are not always the ones with the perfect CV,” says Kira Niklas, Director TalentService at onlify by XING. “Therefore, if you lose all skills and abilities, don’t lose sight of cultural fit.”
3. Be honest and transparent in your employer branding
Niklas also recommends “speaking about your company in a really authentic way going forward.”
Today’s candidates regularly Google potential employers, and quickly find testimonials from current or former employers on platforms like Glassdoor.
“If this does not match the information provided by the company or the employees’ own experiences, culture shock can easily occur post-hired,” warns Niklas. When this happens, she explains, employees are at a higher likelihood of disengagement and attrition.
Conclusion: Tailor-made hiring solutions beat one-size-fits-all
“Every company tries their best when it comes to finding and hiring the right people. Nobody wants to fail,” says Aleksandra Gurskaite. “Regardless of how complex and sophisticated, refined and productive the recruiting measures are, there is always room for growth, experimentation, and optimizations.”
This fact makes it all the more important to keep a close eye on your own recruitment process. Continually re-evaluate them and experiment with new approaches. Don’t copy what others are doing. Instead, develop your own sourcing and selection processes, and use flexible solutions like Recruitee from Tellent to create customized workflows that are the right fit for you and your company.
