How to make your recruitment process work for you
We love recruitment and we bet that if you're reading this article, you love it as well!
But it often bewilders us that some recruiters go out of their way to make their job more difficult than it needs to be. Perhaps they love the excuse for late nights in the office, slogging over a huge workload and complaining about the stress…
…but we doubt it.
More likely is the fact that they haven’t thought about how they can make the recruitment process work for them. By taking a different approach to how you recruit, you can increase the quality of your results AND make your process work better for you. In this article we run through exactly how you can do this with some practical tips.
Digital first
Just like the majority of other professions, recruitment is now primarily executed in a digital space. For those that are still using more traditional methods of recruitment you may be missing a key way to make the process work better for you.
Take for example the effort that goes into calling 100 potential candidates for a job role, explaining the opportunity and working out whether they are interested and whether they are suitable for the role. Using digital methods such as online job boards can get your vacancy in front of millions job seekers in a fraction of the time.
At eRecruitSmart we use our long-term relationships with job boards to get job ads in front of 10 million+ job seekers across Monster, CV library, Reed and Total Jobs as well as niche boards relevant to your business. Coupling this with excellently written job ads means a large number of relevant applicants come through in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort of traditional methods.
Sell, sell, sell
Understanding that recruiters are in the business of selling goes a long way to helping you make recruitment work for you.
Instead of focusing your energy purely on convincing individual candidates on the benefits of working for you, undertaking marketing to promote these benefits widely will prequalify your business with many job seekers as to the viability of working for you. This makes the process of convincing individuals much easier.
One way to do this simply is to identify common candidate pain points and advertise exactly how you can remedy those issues for them. For example, if the industry is notoriously bad for salaries, workload or office cultures you can work to highlight how your business will mean a better experience for candidates.
Distance interviews
Meeting candidates in person is almost always a must before you offer employment.
However, to make both your life and the candidates lives easier, offering initial distance interviews via video services such as skype will allow you to only invite those in that really hit the mark in terms of suitability for the role.
Smart software
There is a whole host of software businesses out there dedicated to making the lives of recruiters easier. For example, all of eRecruitSmart's packages include access to an award-winning Applicant Tracking Software to make recruitment management easy.
This software can make various elements of your job significantly less hassle. These pieces of software touch on everything from using keywords to prequalifying and whittling down suitable applications. They can also help you to store and find applications, allowing you to sort and call on them at a time which is convenient to you.
Outsource the leg work
The biggest challenge in recruitment is undeniably the amount of time it takes to work through the process. We can employ tactics such as changing our approach to finding candidates and using clever software to lower our workload.
However, one of the best ways to make the process work for you is to outsource the most time consuming or challenging elements to external providers. Doing this not only makes your life easier, but it also means that you can spend more time focusing on what you are best at and enjoy.
Businesses like eRecruitSmart can take tasks like job ad writing and distribution off your hands at a much lower cost than you might expect.
Incentivise referrals
Those that already work in your business are likely to be working and socialising in the circles where your best potential candidates are.
Instead of putting a huge amount of effort into pushing your business into these spaces, turning your employees into brand advocates is an easier way to access these pools of individuals and attract the right candidates for your job roles.
Offering employees incentives for referring candidates that eventually get employed by the business is also a good way to prompt them to actively seek new connections and network with those that might be a good fit for your business.
Create a pool of talent
When you update your recruitment process, using job boards and smart software to make the process to work better for you, you simultaneously start to create a pool of talent that can be called upon for future roles.
Often a number of candidates are a suitable fit for a role, although you can usually only pick one. Those that are not successful for a particular role may be the perfect match for a vacancy just around the corner.
By ensuring that you are able to recall on these applications allows you to stop wasting time in advertising, finding and extensively interviewing new candidates.
It is clear that recruitment doesn’t have to be as stressful and long winded as many recruiters make it to be. By following a few simple steps, changing how we approach our processes and focusing on what matters we can really make it work for us.
The tips we have highlighted above are just a start in making this happen. By constantly assessing, testing and tweaking your recruitment process you can always improve both the quality of the outcomes as well as making it a more enjoyable process.