When you know you have an important position to fill, the last thing you want to hear is that it’s going to take three months to land the perfect candidate. The good news is, it doesn’t have to take that long. I’d like to walk you through a number of techniques and approaches that can help you find, nurture and hire candidates quicker.

Often when we think recruitment, we think talent pool re-engagement, cold outreach and paid job ads. Well, whilst each of those avenues can serve up good results, I am here to tell you that marketing and recruitment shouldn’t work in silos. Utilise the knowledge and expertise in your marketing department to help generate better quality applications and fill that open position quicker.

Employer brand  

Employer branding, in a nutshell, is your reputation and image as a place to work. Your employees, prospects and ultimately your own voice, play a role in forming your employer brand.

Work with your marketing team to build a winning employer brand process by following these steps:

1. Research your target audience - where do they spend time and what kind of content do they digest.

2. Create your unique value proposition for each audience – whether it’s monetary, brand values, benefits or simply your company direction.

3. Build content – based on your research you should know what type of content your audience like to consume. Whether it’s video, blogs or thought leadership, you now know what to start working on.

4. Test, measure and refine – never sit still, look at what content is getting the best engagement and copy, paste, repeat.

Search engine optimisation

SEO, simply put, is how easy we make it for search engines like Google, to find our content to display to the people looking for it.

To give your job the best possible opportunity to reach candidates, you’ll want to focus on creating a job description that is SEO friendly and loading it with keywords relevant to your role.

Alongside your job description, you will want to make sure your meta data is perfectly crafted to ensure search engines can find and display your content to candidates.  

This may all sound very technical but in reality it’s easy to get started, your marketing team should be able to assist here but failing that, feel free to book a short call with me here to discuss further.  

Careers website

This might sound basic but have you got a careers page on your website? You’d be surprised at how quickly some teams jump the gun and go straight to promoting a role without having a beautifully crafted careers page.

Your careers page is the window advert to your business. Candidates will make a quick judgement of you and the opportunity on offer in just a matter of minutes. If you want to avoid drop off rates, you really need to hone in on creating a careers page that is not only attractive but gives the prospect a real taste of life at your company.  

Building a careers page is actually fairly straightforward. Especially if you have a platform like Stryve in place that comes with a built-in customisable careers page. Just make sure your branding and message is on point to really capture those interested candidates.

Recruitment technology

It’s not exactly news but technology helps us improve the speed, efficiency and quality of many of our daily actions. But why do we drag our heels when it comes to hiring?

Historically recruitment technology was never that accessible. Today however, there are many more tools available to suit a range of budgets. By taking advantage of the right platform hiring managers can:

• Improve the candidate experience

• Save time

• Build a better brand experience

• Gain competitive edge

Getting going with recruitment technology is far easier than it used to be. Systems like Stryve can be live and ready within the space of 24-48 hours, without lengthy onboarding training.

The important thing businesses need to focus on is, what do I need tech for? Don't feel the need to buy everything and get overwhelmed with too many features or tools to handle.  

Today we are talking about finding candidates quicker, so you will want to find a solution that can help you do that. For instance, would a candidate sourcing tool appeal to you? Having candidates delivered right to your inbox all without lifting a finger. Or perhaps the ability to promote your open position to 1000’s of job boards at the click of a mouse? (spoiler alert, you can in Stryve).

But what about once you have those applications coming in? With 62% of candidates losing interest in a role due to slow communication, you can’t afford to let anyone slip through the net. Therefore, finding a tool that can help you automate personalised messages for every application should be top of your list.  

Tools of the future

I’d like to round off with a closing note on how you should approach technology to gain a competitive edge.

Take a chance, foster an environment of experimenters. Encourage your teams to research and test ground breaking technology and platforms. Gain a competitive advantage by being the first to adopt a new approach to hiring.

Consider engaging with social influencers. As businesses we need new ways to reach untapped audiences, selecting the right influencers can give you access to a pool of untapped talent.

Top tip: Don’t feel the need to go after accounts with millions of follows, micro influencers (10k-50k) have a deeper connection with their audience so you’ll likely to get a better ROI.

I hope you have found this useful. If you have questions or would like some advice on how to get started, don’t hesitate to book a short call with me here.