When attracting and recruiting top talent, you need a refined approach. Sure, you might get lucky and find the best candidate just by tossing out a job advertisement to a couple of websites, but with the increase in top talent entering the workforce and an influx of new companies across myriad fields, the well will eventually run dry and you’ll be left struggling to fill that empty chair. Here are some of the top issues recruiters often face, and ways in which they can be addressed to ensure long-term success.
Take A Look at Your Current Team
If you’re noticing a high turnover rate at your company, you have two problems that need to be addressed. The first is the obvious: Why are people leaving? The second is less obvious: Are you ready to replace them? Obviously the first point impacts the second, so when interviewing new candidates, you should come up with a line of questioning to ascertain their commitment to the role. Beyond the details of the job and the potential for growth within the company, what other perks are in place to help keep employees satisfied? This shouldn’t be viewed as a one-time assessment, but rather a consistent practice that not only ensures the happiness of your team, but also the efficiency and effectiveness of your recruiting process and methods.
Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
Is your company on LinkedIn? Is your site optimized for mobile? If you’re not utilizing every online avenue in your recruiting plan you’re sabotaging your own efforts. Mobile is quickly becoming the number one way potential employees access the Internet, while sites like Facebook and Twitter are great ways to do a little spying on potential candidates to see if their personality is seemingly a perfect fit for a specific role. With LinkedIn, you can delve deeper into a candidate’s professional background, as many profiles tend to list aspects of past and current positions that might not otherwise be included on a resume.
Time is of the Essence
Given the frequency at which employees come and go, recruiting should never fall into a passive state. Whether recruiting from within an agency or as a human resources director, you should always be prepared, lest you find yourself scrambling to fill a vacant spot without the proper resources in place. This means staying on top of the best companies, who the best candidates are, and what competitors are doing to stay at the top of their game. This also means having a plan in place to not only approach the top talent, but hire them before they’re snatched up by another company.
Ignorance is Not Bliss
Business doesn’t operate in a vacuum, so to stay competitive in the field of recruitment, you not only need to know the industry and how it operates, you need to know the competition. This is especially true for larger companies, as they tend to have a different view on the recruitment and hiring process than their smaller, more modern competitors. By not working to actively compete with them, you run the risk of hiring on top level talent then immediately losing them.
This is, however, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to staying ahead of major recruiting issues. You should routinely take a step back and see where you stand in the current climate to see if your approach needs to be refined.