14 Ways To Step Up Your Recruiting Game

According to Trading Economics, the US unemployment rate unexpectantly increased from 3.5 to 3.6 percent in January 2020 from the previous month’s 50-year low. And the whole situation with the covid crisis made these numbers skyrocket in 2021.

Additionally, 139,000 more people claimed to be unemployed. As such, the job market has become increasingly more competitive.

While you might think that an increase in unemployment might make it easier to find qualified and committed team members, the reality is that today’s recruitment environment has just gotten that much more difficult.

With that in mind, today, we’ll discuss 12 ways to strengthen your competitive recruiting game to find the best talent for your organization:

  1. Develop your employment brand
  2. Promote your employer brand
  3. Be a great employer
  4. Offer a competitive compensation and benefits package
  5. Take social recruiting seriously
  6. Encourage employee referrals
  7. Nonstop recruiting
  8. Offer a realistic job preview
  9. Improve hiring managers interviewing skills
  10. Revisit former employees
  11. Start using pre-employment testing
  12. Focus more on blind hiring
  13. Make it easier to apply
  14. Utilize the technology to be more time and cost-effective

Let’s dive in!

1. Develop Your Employer Brand

We’ve spoken regularly about the vital role that your company’s culture plays in attracting top talent, but there’s a lot more to it if you want to compete in this recruiting environment.

To find the very best talent for your organization, you first have to understand what makes your firm unique and then make sure anyone and everyone knows about it by developing your employer brand.

The employer brand refers to your reputation as an employer. It’s the reason your current employees love where they work and the reason potential employees will want to work with you.

It’s the secret sauce that makes your business different. Spend some time thinking about what sets you apart and use it to recruit the very best, and make sure to check out our comprehensive guide on employer brand.

2. Promote your employer brand

If you’re going to recruit in today’s market competitively, you must also PROMOTE your employer brand using multiple channels.

Start with a great company website, and make sure that it is mobile-friendly. If not, make sure that you’ve allocated resources and budget to upgrading your site since so many of today’s job seekers search for jobs using their mobile devices.

Open positions should be posted to your website and distributed across all social media channels and job boards.

Additionally, if you’re going to stay competitive, your recruiters should start taking media requests to promote your company’s brand.

Our post on recruitment marketing might come in handy here.

3. Be a Great Employer

Building on the previous point, once you’ve identified what makes your company so unique that other people want to work with you, even when you don’t have any open positions, continue onward toward the path to greatness by being a great employer!

Earning the title of “best place to work” is a very real thing, so don’t hesitate to strive for it and apply for the official title. When it comes to competitive recruiting in today’s labor market, awards and titles may set you apart from other organizations and promote your organization and culture.

Be sure to also attend and SPEAK at HR conferences and other industry-related conferences. These are great opportunities for professional development, to share your company’s best practices, and to network with other professionals. You never know when you might bump into a potential employee.

4. Offer a Competitive Compensation and Benefits Package

Employee compensation and benefits have always been topics for discussion when it comes to competitive recruiting. That conversation is even more relevant as the job market gets even more competitive.

Take a look at what you have to offer concerning compensation and benefits for new employees so that you can be externally competitive. However, make sure that what you’re offering is also internally fair. The last thing you want to do is to encourage your current staff to look elsewhere.

5. Take Social Recruitment Seriously

Social media channels are often easily overlooked by the recruiters, making them miss a vast talent pool.

Depending on the job position you are trying to fill and the industry you are hiring for, you will use different social media channels. But regardless of that, you should have a high social media presence established to strengthen your employer brand further.

You can read more about social media recruiting here:

  1. Social Recruiting – Comprehensive Guide [Written by Experts]
  2. Social Media Recruitment Strategies [In-depth Guide]

6. Encourage Employee Referrals

Employee referrals are, by far, the most cost-effective way to increase candidate applicant flow.

If your employees are being encouraged via some sort of compensation to refer in potential talent, then they are more likely to promote your company.

You may also want to consider adding alumni and seasonal staff to your referral network if you want to strengthen your competitive recruiting strategy.

7. Nonstop Recruiting

The days of recruiting when you’d only ever recruit for an open position are long gone. Competitive recruiting means you should be recruiting all the time.

Even when you don’t have an opening in your firm, look for ways to keep potential employees engaged. Regularly send email updates and use social media to create a community where job seekers can learn more about your company.

8. Offer a Realistic Job Preview

Just as you must employ competitive recruiting strategies, job seekers are also trying to stand out in a sea of top talent. They will likely be doing their homework before applying for a job with your company.

Give them a reason to want the job more by creating a career portal where they can see what a typical “day in the life” of an employee looks like.

Start with making your job descriptions more readable, realistic, and relatable. But also use video to capture real employee testimonials to give job seekers a taste of what it’s like to work at your firm.

9. Improve Hiring Managers Interviewing Skills

Just because an employee has done what it takes to be promoted to a management position does not necessarily mean that they have what it takes to conduct an interview. Interviewing is more than having a conversation, and it’s definitely more complicated than it looks.

Competitive recruiting in today’s market means making every interview count. As such, recruiters should help hiring managers improve their interview skills and understand the connection between cost per hire and turnover so that you can hire the best person for the job.

10. Revisit Former Employees

If you want to stay competitive in this recruiting market, then leave no stone unturned. That includes former employees or boomerangs.

While this strategy won’t work for every situation, revisiting former employees (or even long-term subcontractors for your firm) might be a strategy worth exploring.

Former employees know (almost) exactly what to expect with your company but can return with new skills and a fresh perspective, assuming you address the reason they left to begin with.

11. Start using pre-employment testing

Employment personality tests are great for assessing how someone might handle a situation within the workplace.

It can also give us insight into how that candidate will work with the team, solve problems, apply practical knowledge, lead others, deal with stress, handle pressure, follow the rules and regulations, and more.

You could use many pre-employment personality tests, but choosing the right one for your case might be tricky. To be fully prepared for this, make sure to check our posts on this topic:

  1. Employment Personality Test [Complete Guide]
  2. Personality Testing in The Workplace – Pros and Cons According to HR Experts

12. Focus more on blind hiring

Having a diverse workforce is a must in the third decade of the 21st century. It helps you have a better and more desirable employer brand and creates better performing and more productive and innovative teams.

However, there is a lot of unconscious bias going on when it comes to recruiting. And being informed about them and why they arouse is an important step in overcoming this.

Many hiring software, like iReformat, specializes in blind hiring and can hide all the information from the CV that could make the recruiter biased.

We won’t bore you with this matter too much here because you can find all the needed information in the posts we have created on blind hiring and biases:

  1. Do You Need To Try Blind Hiring?
  2. Hiring Bias – How to Make Unbiased Hiring Decisions
  3. Blind Resume Software – Start Making Unbiased Hiring Decisions

13. Make it Easier to Apply

Have you ever, personally, tried to find and apply for a job within your own company?

No?

You should so that you can understand exactly what applicants are going through.

Can they find all the information they need easily? Is the information understandable?

Can the application process be completed through mobile devices?

Is the flow frictionless?

How is the candidate’s experience?

Make sure that candidates can frictionlessly apply via their mobile devices and ensure that they are updated with the hiring process.

14. Utilize the technology to be more time and cost-effective

If you want to strengthen your competitive recruiting game and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your HR team, you should have a good applicant tracking system.

If you are a staffing agency, then you also need a powerful resume reformatting tool.

Good recruiting systems can automate many time-consuming tasks that make your recruiting game lacking if you do them manually. Some of them being resume reformatting, job posting, mass emailing, resume storing, tracking the candidates, and all the information and communications.

Recruiteze is a perfect ATS with built-in CRM for in-house recruiters and staffing agencies alike.

Recruiteze gives your job candidates the ability to apply online and is added to your database immediately in a user-friendly way. End-users can access resumes online and make changes quickly and easily.

Recruiteze also comes with a custom job board to make tracking talent organized and effortless.

Candidates and customers have trouble-free access to your job information, which creates a level of professionalism that’s expected in today’s marketplace. Recruiteze also allows users to reduce the time it takes to format resumes for free.

This automated applicant tracking system add on formats resumes without any hassle or time-consuming processes.

Recruiteze is also fully compatible with a resume reformatting system, iReformat, which can help you with blind hiring and reformat dozens of resumes in under a minute.

Click here to try Recruiteze and iReformat for free!

Additional reads:

  1. 10 Innovative Recruitment Ideas
  2. Biggest Hiring Challenges Faced by Startups and How to Overcome Them
  3. Recruitment Challenges in Healthcare Industry

Try Recruiteze Free Today!