8 Proven Recruitment Strategies

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Most businesses don’t utilize a well-balanced and effective recruitment strategy. We showcase 8 proven recruitment strategies you can use to attract top notch talent.

What is a recruitment strategy?

A recruitment strategy summaries your recruitment goals and needs as well as a way of achieving them. A good strategy contains;

  • The goals of the business and a strategy of achieving them
  • How and where you plan on finding employees
  • A way to evaluate your strategy to determine if it is working
  • A list of seasonal fluctuations in recruitment and a way of meeting the fluctuations
  • A recruitment budget

GOALS OF A RECRUITMENT STRATEGY

A firm considers its objectives before deciding on the recruitment strategy to use. The goal of a recruitment process not only determines the strategy to be used but also the job description for the vacancy.

However, many human resource managers have no idea how to set goals and its importance in their organization. Before we look at some examples of goals that you can set for your recruitment, let us look at the importance of setting the goals and objectives.

Importance of setting goals

A report carried out by Kaplan and Norton revealed that;

  • 60% of companies do not link their budgets to strategy
  • 90% of organizations do not execute strategy
  • 5% of all employees understand the strategy
  • 85% of the executive team spend a maximum of one hour every month discussing a strategy
  • Only 25% of the managers have incentives that are linked to strategy

The statistics are reason enough to wonder why organizations do not take strategies seriously. It could be because of a lack of understanding of the importance of the goals or they do not know what they are.

Goals and objectives: answer four main questions

  • What am I supposed to accomplish?
  • Why am I engaging in what am doing?
  • How well must I do it?
  • How am I currently doing?

When employees answer the four questions, they feel comfortable and they actively contribute in the recruitment process.

Goals serve four main purposes

  • They facilitate planning; once the goals are set, the employees have to forge a way to meet the goals, they therefore plan towards fulfillment of the goals.
  • Act as inspiration and motivation for employees; goals are set to meet a need, when the need is identified, then employees work hard to meet it.
  • They give direction and guidance; the employees get to know where the organization is in terms of recruitment and where it needs to be. Besides, employees refer to the goals before making decisions.
  • They act as a strategy to evaluate and control performance; without accountability, you can stagnate in one position for a long time. When you compare your performance with your set goals, then you can make adjustments to fully meet the goals.

When employees understand the goals of recruitment, their performance is affected in four ways;

  • Goals energize employees; employees exert more energy than usual especially if the goals are challenging
  • Employees go an extra mile to learn new knowledge that will help them attain the goals
  • Employees direct their efforts and actions towards fulfilling the set goals
  • When employees understand the goals, they become more persistent to achieve the goals

 

RECRUITMENT STRATEGY GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

Now that we have looked at the importance of setting goals and how they affect the performance of the recruiters, let us look at some examples of goals that you can set as a recruiting organization.

Prove the Strength of your Brand

To prove that your brand is strong; apply techniques that other successful employer brands are applying. Consider what the best brands do and then try to emulate them. Also, consult successful candidates and find out how they found the recruitment process.

For genuine answers, talk to candidates that were employed more than six months before consulting them. Was it easy? Any hurdles? What needs to be improved? You can also test the process by choosing to go through it but with a different name. That way, you will get a feel the process as the candidates experience it.

Come up with a target for open/fill ratio

Open positions in an organization means that other employees have to work extra to cover up for the missing employee. If the open positions are many, then the employees are likely to feel overwhelmed and their performance might go down.

So, you need to come up with a realistic ratio and the date when the ratio has to be met. Inform the team about the dates you are working with, identify any challenges that you might be facing and solve them. Besides, create a strategy to ensure that recurring roles are always taken care of, even when there is a gap in the organization.

Lower your immediate employee turnover

Immediate employee turnover is the rate at which new employees resign from their positions. This rate is different for every organization and also for different positions.

If the rate is high, the hiring process becomes expensive for the organization. This is because, you will have spent a lot of money, resources, and time when advertising for the position, interviewing the candidates, and training the new hire.

It is estimated that the cost is equivalent to 20% of the salary of the employee who turns down the job. You can lower the rates by carrying out the necessary background checks, increasing the assessment quality, and screening the reference.

Diversity

Diversity prevents an organization from being discriminative. This can only be achieved during the hiring process. Unfortunately, when companies realize that they lack diversity, they result to a last minute rush in hiring.

The rush leads to improper planning, immediate employee turnover, and at times, it can lead to hiring the wrong employees in terms of qualification, education and company policies. To avoid this,

  • Make your hiring process easy and you will not need to worry about diversity
  • Create accountability for your diversity hiring careers page and ensure you follow what the pages say
  • Make every effort to ensure that the HR department, your team, and the hiring manager understand that diversity is among your top priorities
  • Identify internal barriers and deal with them through learning and training
  • Find out certifications, universities, competitive companies, job titles and other factors which you can use to make diversity hires more effective

Establish a rating for the hiring manager satisfaction

In most cases, hiring managers meet with professional recruiters to come up with a scoreboard which is used to assess the hiring manager’s satisfaction rate.

The scoreboard includes a section for weaknesses, goals, and strengths. The assessment takes place on a monthly or quarterly basis. If you do not have a scoreboard, you can start by addressing the following topics.

  1. Increase Candidate Experience Ratings: Candidate experience ratings serve as a reminder to you and your team that your candidates are also your customers and clients. Therefore, if they feel appreciated, they will rate you highly. During a survey, 52% of the candidates felt like they were not treated like individuals. Another 40% said that the time between initial conversation about the vacancy and the follow up conversation was unacceptable. For better rating, you need to improve in these areas.
  2. Rate source of hires: As a matter of priority, you need to determine where your most talented hires came from. The best sources are those that provide high quality employees, those that offer the highest tenure rates and finally, that are keen on diversity.
  3. Reduce the rate of quality candidate dropout: Quality candidates abandon the application process half way down. Mobile job seekers have a 40% abandonment rate. As a recruiter, you need to find out;
    1. Why they abandon the process,
    2. The number that abandon the process, and
    3. What you can do to reduce the dropout rate.
    4. To do this, former candidates can provide valuable information. Some of the reasons for the abandonment include poor communication, lack of familiarity with mobile devices and or applicant experience. Getting the exact metrics will guide you on how to improve the recruitment process.
  4. Prioritize the recruitment efforts and resources: If you do not have a recruitment strategy, then you most likely do not prioritize the recruitment process high enough. If that is the case, then you do not have a way of allocating your efforts and resources to the recruiting process. As a start, you need to come up with areas of priority in the recruitment process. The most efforts and resources should be focused on these areas. By so doing, you will be able to meet the needs of the business in an effective and timely manner. So, ensure that you communicate this to your team members.
  5. Measure the rate of your quality candidates: Quality candidates are those that meet or exceed experience and skill expectations of the hiring managers. First of all, find out the number of quality candidates that you are supplying to the hiring manager. Out of that number, evaluate the number of quality candidates provided. Regardless of the current rate, set a target for yourself and work towards meeting it.
  6. Cut Down the Time Taken to Hire: On average, recruiters take 25 business days to hire. The average time to hire has been that way for the last 13 years. However, remember that the longer you take to hire, the more expensive it becomes for you. Consequently, the candidates’ satisfaction rate goes down and in the long run, everyone is frustrated. With careful planning and a good strategy, you can find ways to reduce the time by at least two working days. It might not seem much, but it will make a difference. To reduce the recruitment time, you can reduce the interview rounds by implementing an ATS with an automated rating system or using video screening.
  7. Culture of reporting the metric: Maintaining recruitment metrics helps in accountability and better planning. But maintaining the metrics without sharing does not help. So, make sure to set aside some time where your hiring managers, recruitment team, and the executives report their metrics. It is important that you decide on the metrics to report about: these should be the metrics that directly influence the process of recruitment. Note that the executives, recruitment team, and the hiring mangers all need to report on different times. This is because the three groups deal with different kinds of metrics.
  8. Reduce Compliance Complaint Reports: The complaints can ruin your employer brand to both the candidates and hiring managers. The complaints can be used to determine your effectiveness and efficiency. For that reason, set a sort of a ceiling for the complaints and make sure they never go past that level.

Learn more about recruiting metrics from this insightful panel discussion.

 

HINDRANCES TO A SUCCESSFUL RECRUITMENT PROCESS

Two factors affect a recruitment policy: Internal and external factors. Internal factors are those that the organization can control while external factors are beyond the control of the firm.

I will discuss the two types of factors with specific examples. Your knowledge of these factors will help you plan ahead on how to overcome any hindrances.

Internal factors

Internal factors can be controlled.

The recruitment policy

A recruitment policy lays down the organization’s objectives for recruitment and the framework to be used to implement the recruitment program. Part of the policy includes coming up with a system to be used to implement the procedures and the programs by selecting the most qualified candidates. A good recruitment policy should provide the following;

  • Its main focus should be to hire candidates whose skills and experiences exceeds the set requirement
  • Should be unbiased
  • Help employees to realize their full potential
  • An equal opportunity for all employees and ensure that every candidate is treated with respect and dignity
  • Transparency, be a merit based and task oriented type of selection
  • It should abide by the relevant public legislation and policies on employment and hiring relationships
  • An avenue to integrate the needs of the employee with those of the organization
  • Approval authorities to be used in interviewing and filtering candidates while optimizing manpower

Factors affecting recruitment policy

  • Cost of recruitment and financial implications
  • The objective of the organization
  • Sources of recruitment
  • Needs of the organization
  • Government policies on reservations
  • The organization’s personal policies together with the competitor’s policies

Human resource planning

The human resource department is solely responsible for determining the number of employees’ needed, the timing of recruitment, the job description, and the candidate’s qualifications. As long as the information is available and it is well organized, then the recruitment process takes a short time.

However, if the human resource team has not gathered or arranged the information, then a lot of time is wasted gathering the information. Since the process might take place in a hurry, the hiring team might end up hiring the wrong candidate. In some cases, the candidate might be over or under qualified for the position.

Size of the organization

An organization that plans to expand will require more employees so that they can handle its expansion operations. Unfortunately, an organization with no expansion plans recruits few number of employees as it already has enough workforce in place.

Recruitment budget

For an organization to successfully handle a recruitment process, the budget per person has to be low.

External factors

There are factors which the recruiting organization has zero control over; they are called external factors.

Supply and demand

The recruitment process depends on the availability of employees both outside and within the organization. This means that for the process to go on without delays there must be readily available candidates.

Otherwise, if there are no suitable candidates, then the organization will have to look at the qualifications of their current employees. In some cases, the organization will have to train its employees to occupy the vacancies available.

On the other hand, if there are many qualified professionals available, the organization will experience massive applications. This is a good challenge and the organization is likely to get candidates whose skill and experience exceed the expectations of the hiring managers.

The candidate reject job offer

In some cases, a qualified candidate turns down the job offer. Losing a top talent is a big blow to the organization so most organizations give counter-offers in such a case. If the offer is good, the candidate is likely to take it and reject the other job. The top talent may be put off by the terms and conditions of the new organization.

Therefore, the candidate rejects the offer. People want to change jobs because of unconducive working hours, the pay, benefits and location of employment.

Image of the company

How people view the recruiting company determines if a high or a low number of candidates will apply for the position. If the company has a positive image among people, then it is likely that many candidates will apply for open positions.

In addition, candidates are likely to remain in the organization for a long time.

Social and legal environment

Legal regulations like rights against discrimination and regulations set by trade unions hamper the recruitment process. This is because; the candidate that the organization hires has to meet the requirement set by the government and the trade union.

In addition, the applicant has to meet the organization’s skill, education, and experience requirement for the position. The situation is almost impossible if the organization does not have many candidates to choose from.

The unemployment rate

The unemployment rate determines if there will be many or very few applicants. The economic growth in a country determines the employment rate. If there is high unemployment rate, then there will be a high number of applicants. In such a case, the recruiting team will have to spend a lot of time in the recruitment process.

According to a Resource and Talent Planning survey by CIPD, there has been a 73% increase in the number of under qualified candidates. Since the hiring team has to sort through all applications to separate the ‘wheat from chaff’, they waste a lot of time. In other instances, they are unable to give all applicants the required attention.

Sage conducted a survey where it found out that 7% of employers in UK said that lack of suitable candidates slowed down their recruitment process. CIPD also reported that 75% of the organizations found it ‘somewhat challenging’ or ‘very challenging’ to find suitable candidates. 72% of those organizations said that they lacked technical or specialized skill within their locality.

Competitors

The recruitment policies of your competitors can either attract or keep candidates form applying for jobs at an organization. Competition in business affects even the recruitment process such that candidates prefer to apply for jobs in organizations that have friendly policies.

To overcome this, try to align your policies with your competitor’s. That way, you will remain competitive.

8 PROVEN RECRUITMENT STRATEGIES

As a recruitment company, you need to be aware of the various recruitment strategies available. Besides, you need to evaluate how they will benefit you and in which ways they might not help you.

Even as you consider the strategies, remember to consider the job that you want to recruit for as it determines the strategy to use. For better efficiency, you can combine the strategies to reach a wider audience. Let us have a look at each of the strategy.

Strategy 1. Recruitment agencies

Employment agencies help organizations to find long or short term employees. Before you work with them, agree on the fees and terms. Some common questions that they will ask include;

  • Your organization’s name
  • Location of the job
  • Safety and health risks associated with the job and the measures employed to deal with the risks
  • Time period for the work if it is on contract
  • The job description
  • Hours of work
  • Salary or wages of the employee and any other benefit
  • Job requirements in terms of qualifications, authorization, and training required by law or professional body

Advantages of using recruitment agencies

  • Knowledge of the market – Recruiting agencies are the ears and eyes of organizations. They know;
    • Where to locate valuable talent
    • The salary expectations
    • How to reach talented candidates
    • Hiring complexities associated with various professions
    • Skill set for different job titles
    • Alternative methods to reaching the specialized candidates
  • A wide reach – Some talented candidates are hard to reach due to their nature. They may be passive or selective in the job they want. Still for some, they may feel like they are not qualified for the job while others just do not take time to look for jobs on a full time basis. If the candidates have relationships with recruiters, then the recruiter will reach them concerning a job opening. The agents working in a recruitment firm, be it a candidate, collaborator, client or consultant, they all have networks they can reach top talent even without advertising the job.
  • Market employer brand – Marketing and developing an employer brand attracts talented pool of candidates. However, big organizations invest a lot of money in this. If you do not have the large sums of money, you could work with a recruiting agency in a way that they provide the candidates with real insights about your company. The insights could include;
    • A glimpse of working at your organization
    • The organization’s culture
    • Benefits of working in your organization
    • Career development opportunities while working in your organization
    • You can invite an agent from the recruiting firm to your organization to interact with the managers and employees for a better feel of the organization.
  • Quick help – When an employee resigns from their job without prior notice, it can really disorient you especially if they were holding a key position. If you were to apply the recruitment process, it would take a long time before filling the positions. Agencies come in handy because they are able to fill up a position within a short time.
  • Qualified applicants – Some agencies prescreen the applicants and some provide a test that the applicant must perform well to be considered for a job. The practices ensure that the agencies always have a pool of qualified candidates waiting to be employed. When the agency shortlists such candidates who have gone through a pretest and prescreening, you can be sure you will have a competent employee.
  • Long term employees – When you hire candidate from an agency and then you realize you need their services, you can hire them for long term basis. The short contract can act as a way to test the capabilities of the employee.

Disadvantages of agency recruitment

  • If you decide to hire a long-term employee, the agency requires you to pay a percentage of the employee’s annual salary
  • The cost of recruiting through an agency is high. On top of the employee’s salary, you will need to pay include the agencies profit
  • As a hiring manager, you have no control over the shortlisting and hiring of the candidates. This is a challenging position as you would like to participate in the process. Unfortunately, you do not have that privilege
  • The agency does all the recruitment so you have no prior meeting with the candidate as a hiring manger. This might make you anxious not knowing whether the recruitment agency carried out the process in a professional way and whether the proposed candidate is the best fit for you. This uncertainty can affect your working relationship with the candidate especially if you have not dealt with the agency before.
  • Communication problems can arise due to misunderstandings or information that is not well communicated. The consequences range from hiring the wrong employee to extra charges amongst others. To avoid this, document all communications.

Strategy 2. Professional associations/ specific interest groups

Specific interests groups are groups where its members share a common profession. Companies can therefore target groups depending on the professionals that they want.

Advantages of recruitment from professional associations

  • You are sure to find the right candidate. The members of the group offer helpful information to each other. Besides, they challenge each other to develop professionally through attending trainings, short courses and participating in discussions on forums.
  • Since the groups are made up of professionals, the candidate will behave professionally

Disadvantages of recruitment from professional associations

  • The candidate may have high expectations if the groups instills such mindsets
  • If anything unpleasant happens to the candidate while at work, the group supports them

Strategy 3. Referral

Oracle carried out a study dubbed ‘the shortest path to better hires’ which revealed that recruitment through referral is one of the most successful strategies of recruitment. The study further revealed;

  • Some companies rely on referrals for up to three quarters of their recruitment
  • It takes only 10 hires to get the right candidate
  • Referral candidates positively respond to job offers 15% more times as compared to regular candidates
  • In a typical company, 24 to 33% of all hires come from referrals
  • Referral hires have a 3-15% better performance compared to other others

When using referral programs, you ask your employees to refer competent candidates to fill up vacancies in your organization. However, the candidates must be qualified for them to be considered for the positions.

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Advantages of using referrals

  • High quality candidates – The people who refer the candidates to you, our employees, ensure that the candidates are qualified for the position. So, the first screening takes place even before the candidate is referred to you. Since you are likely to have more than one candidate, then you will have a pool to select from. To encourage your employees to refer the best candidate, you can give them an incentive for that. The incentive will make the employees to make sure that they refer the most promising candidate. Further, the employees know that their reputation is on the line when referring a candidate so; they will only refer candidates who are qualified.
  • Cost effective – It is cost effective as you will not need to spend money on advertisements and on expensive recruitment processes. It is also simpler and has little or no hurdles.
  • Convenience – Some positions require specialized training or skill which is not easily available. In such instances, employee referral program is the best to use. Employees interact with people with the same profession: the networks could be a valuable source of the rare talent.
  • Saves time – It takes a shorter time to interview and recruit an employee referred to you compared to employees who apply for the job through job sites and recruitment agencies.
  • High retention rate – Candidates who get employed through the employee referral program have a high retention rate. This can be accounted by the fact that they already know a lot about the organization from the person who referred them so they have a few preservations for the job. Since they know someone from the organization, they take little time to adapt to their new job. Jobvite found out that about half of the referred employees stay for more than one year on the new job. The retention rate is 22 more times than for employees hired through job boards and 33% of candidates hired through career sites

Disadvantages of employee referral

  • If an organization relies on employee referral most of the times, then you can be charged with discrimination by the candidates that they reject.
  • If you fail to give the agreed upon compensation for a referral, the employees are likely to be disillusioned by the whole process.
  • It does not give room for diversity so you might end up having quick hires to meet your diversity requirements.

Strategy 4. Events

Some organizations like Microsoft hold events where people get an opportunity to interact and network. The events attract professionals from all over. The purpose of the event is for people to network.

Advantages of recruitment through Events

  • Events give companies an opportunity to interact with top talents so they have a wide pool to choose from.
  • Some of the events are paid so you are sure the attendees are serious about heir profession. When you hire such people, you can be sure that they are talented and will perform highly.

Disadvantages of recruitment through Events

  • The interaction time is little so the company might not gather enough information about the candidate.
  • Due to competition for the top notch professional, you may have pay them a lot of money to beat the competition.

Strategy 5. Social media

1.590 billion people are registered on Facebook, 400 million use Instagram every month, and 320 million use Twitter every month. The statistics have set up social media platforms as marketing sites. Recruiters have also taken to social media to grow their brand identity and to hire job seekers. Between 2010 and 2015, Twitter’s influence as a recruiting platform grew by over 9%. Facebook grew by 11% and LinkedIn grew by 15%.

Social media provides a platform where job seekers get an opportunity to have a sneak preview of the organization and its culture before applying for a job. Besides, the company gets to know the personality of the candidate before hiring them.

The website Personnel Today through their blog, HR Space, reported about a study they did on 300 candidates. They said that 91% of the employers screened the candidate’s social media pages before hiring them. Out of those that screen the social network pages, 11% rejected the candidates after looking at their social profiles.

To effectively carry out social media recruitment, companies should focus on three main things;

  1. Empower your employees to evangelize: Monster carried out a survey where it found out that 65% of candidates respond to a job advert if someone they know told them about it. Encourage the employees to tweet, blog and post about positive things about their jobs. Have a social media platform where the employees can post pictures and engage between themselves and people from outside.
  2. Focus on social talent brand: The organization’s talent brand is how the vision, corporate culture, and mission are understood in the social web. If the community on the web has a positive understanding of the vision, corporate culture and the mission, then it easily attracts top talent. Maintain a consistent image of your brand on all social platforms in pictures, videos and images
  3. Create a positive social web culture: Keep the social media updated on what is happening in your company. Write blogs and engage with both visual and written content. Use hashtags that reflect and attract people to your organization on Twitter. Ensure that all your activities on social media reflect a positive culture and make sure the same happens on the ground so that candidates do not get disillusioned when you hire them first.

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How to build a social media recruitment strategy

More than ever, brands are continuously looking at social media platforms as places to not only market their goods and services but as a place to find talented candidates.

As you consider recruitment through social media, a strategy is very important for you to reach talented people. There are five main steps that you need to follow. I will explain the five steps to you so that you are better placed as you launch your social media campaign.

Step 1. Build your team

Social media has fast response rates so you need to have people on standby otherwise the response will be overwhelming. Come up with a team and set aside the protocols to be followed throughout the process.

The size of your team is determined by the finances available and the structure of your organization. The most important thing in this stage is to have able people to handle the work in good time.

Step 2. Build your content

The content posted should sell a job and attract talented people to apply for the job. So, you can use employee testimonials, showcase organization values (mission and vision) and how they apply to the day to day running of the organization and finally, talk about what makes your company to stand out.

Step 3. Finding the right audience

Every social media platform appeals to a certain demographic group. Therefore, examine the demographic that you want to reach out to before deciding on the platform to use. The table above can help you in making this decision.

Step 4. Targeting your audience

After you decide the group that you want to reach out to, then it is time to send out the ad. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook provide paid targeting and promotion services which you can use to reach the targeted people.

Step 5. Prove your ROI

Retweets, likes, and shares are used to measure the ROI. This measurement will help you in better decision making next time.

How to use different social media platforms

Even if opening an account on social media platforms is free, you need to spend a lot of time and be creative in building your presence on the sites. This is because; people will not come running to your account if you do not attract them. Let me show you how to take advantage of the various social media platforms as recruitment tools.

  • Facebook: It is the largest social media platform so it enjoys a sort of autonomy in being a place to grow business, market goods and serves, and search for people. It currently has 1.3 billion users which is more than half the next social media platform. For Facebook, start by creating a company page and get people to like it. As long as someone ‘likes’ your page, they will be able to see your ads and updates in their timelines. After your audience grows, you can then invest in paid Facebook pages and Facebook ads. When you use paid Facebook pages, you organization ranks higher in search engines compared to the unpaid ones.
  • Twitter: It is the second largest social media platform in the world. Messages on the site are called tweets and hashtags (#) is used when posting a status update. The tweets are 140 characters long. After you send a tweet, anyone, anywhere, and at any time can view it.  For better targeting, use hashtags in front of a tweet. You can use #jobseeker.
  • Instagram: The platform offers you three ways of advertising your company: First, you can take and share pictures with your followers. As an example, you can add pictures about fun activities, workplace pictures, and job ads. Secondly, you can add a video (15 seconds long). Just like on Twitter, you can use hashtags for better targeting.
  • You Tube: Creativity is important on You Tube for your content to stand out. The site has half a million daily shares.  You can create corporate page where you share videos and job ads.
  • LinkedIn: LinkedIn stands out as it focuses on attracting professional. Currently, the site has 320 million users who are engaged in different industries. The members are encouraged to display their profession on their profiles. It is therefore easy to find niche candidates on the platform. You can also take advantage of the paid search tools which increase the ease in sharing ads and job posts.  In addition, you can join professional groups to flow the discussions and spot an ideal candidate. LinkedIn groups have rules so make sure before posting a job, you are aware of the rules.

Advantages of social media recruitment

  • Reach passive candidates – For niches with a shortage like engineers and developers, the candidates do not actively look for new jobs but they would be interested if a better opportunity came up. For such candidates, you can reach them through social media as other strategies like job boards are limiting when looking for such niche professional.
  • Create brand awareness and identity – An organization’s website and social platforms are a great place to display what your company is about. You can post pictures, press releases, and post latest posts. If you represent your brand well, then you will be able to attract top talent in all your vacancies.
  • Saves time – As a recruiter, you can reach talented candidates within a short time. Since there is a large audience on social platform, if the message is shared, it reaches many people within a short time. Actually, it has been proven that of all daily internet users, 60% use social media each day. Some of the people would have been unreachable through traditional means. In addition, social media candidates respond to messages very fast which reduces the time taken in the recruitment process.
  • High quality employees – Companies that use social media as a hiring platform have high quality employees. Part of the reason is because people who are active on social media tend to be techno savvy and innovative. They therefore keep up with the trends in their profession. This leads to high productivity. Since the individual’s skills match the needs of the organization, the rejection rate is low and retention rate high.
  • Cost effective – It is free to post a job advert on the company’s Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. If a company wants to open a social media account, it does not cost them anything. However, if you want to post a job on the paid advertisement section, it is still cheaper than advertising on other platforms.
  • Convenience – The recruiter can relate with the candidate easily to determine if they fit into the organization’s culture
  • Easy to target – Since you already know the kind of candidate you are looking for, you can post your job advertisement on niche groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Besides, you can also use Twitter hashtags for better targeting.

Disadvantages of recruiting through social media

  • Time consuming – If an employer wants to gather important information about a candidate by looking at their social media profiles, they would need a lot of man power to do the analysis for all the candidates. This is because most candidates have accounts in more than one social media platforms.
  • Lack of control – It is difficult for a candidate to control what their friends and people following them post on social media. So, using the information on a candidate’s social platform to evaluate their personality is not accurate.
  • Informal – It is an informal way of adverting for a job. Some platforms are purely for networking so the members therein will not take the job advert seriously. If the company does not use a good strategy, it could paint a bad picture of the company.

Strategy 6. Internal recruitment

Internal recruitment is a strategy where internal employees are promoted and vacant positions occupied by other internal employees.

Advantages of internal recruitment

  • Morale for the employees – Internal recruitment tends to award hard working and diligent employees when it is done in a transparent way. In such a case, the employees will be motivated to work hard so that they may be promoted to a better position.
  • Saves time and money – The hiring team advertises the open position on the company’s intranet and bulletin board which does not cost much. For the interview, there is for need to an extensive interview since the employees’ capabilities and talents are already known by the hiring team. The recruitment process takes a short time which frees the hiring team to work on other things. In addition the employees rarely turn down the offer.
  • Better performance – For stable and successful organizations, internal hires perform better compared to external hires.
  • Little break in time – Since the employees are acquainted with the culture of the organization, they take little time to adapt to their new role.
  • Multiple recruitment – Internal recruitment opens up more positions which lead to multiple promotions in the organization. Apart from that, it leaves the lower positions vacant which means the organization uses external hiring for ‘entry level’ positions. ‘Entry level’ recruitments give the organization an opportunity to instill organization culture at a very early stage of recruitment. Entry level employees grasp the culture easily than new employees who join highly ranked positions.
  • Job security – Internal promotions increase job security for the employees which lead to high retention rate. Talented candidates are also attracted to the company due to job security and opportunities for growth.

Learn more about the differences between internal and external recruiting.

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Disadvantages of internal recruitment

  • Limited choice – The candidates selected to fill the open positions do not offer any fresh skills to the organization. This denies the organization a chance to tap into new and fresh talent from outside. External employees bring with them new ideas which can lead to growth in the company. Again, since the number of current employees suited for the open opportunity is small, then the recruiters have a limited pool to choose from.
  • Conflicts – Employees may feel that they need to out-do the others in order to be considered for promotions. In as much as this is true and can increase morale in employees, it can also lead to conflict between employees as they struggle to be noticed by the hiring team.
  • Lacks of competition – The internal employees do not need to face competition from outside to get the job available as there are no applicants from outside. Besides, the employees are promoted even without acquiring extra knowledge or talent. The employees therefore become complacent and make no effort to self-improve themselves through education and trainings.
  • Favorism – The executives and hiring team are likely to favor their friends and relatives who might not have any talent in them. Therefore, the organization suffers as most people are not qualified for the particular positions.
  • Disillusionment – The managers can hold the employee for some reason which can be very frustrating for them. Other managers may find employees who apply for internal positions disloyal and so frustrate them by giving them a lot of work or using other tactics.  Company policies about internal recruitment may hinder talented and ambitious employees from getting the job. Some companies have clearly laid out tenure on how long the employee needs to have worked in the company to qualify for internal recruitment.

Strategy 7. Campus recruiting

With campus recruitment, recruiters target top notch campuses and technical institutes before the final year candidates sit for their exams. Candidates who are willing to join the company participate in the selection process.

Advantages of campus recruitment

  • It saves time for the organization – In campus recruitment, the organization does not have to incur advertising, travelling, and huge costs incurred during recruitment. The recruiting team visits targeted campuses and gathers hundreds of quality candidates from which to screen to get the right candidate.
  • Grab attention – For companies located in rural areas and places with high cost of living, they find it challenging to attract young talent. Campus recruitment gives the companies an opportunity to advertise to young talent and to get some to work for them.
  • High quality candidate – The recruiting company gets the best candidates. Besides, the candidates are energetic, eager to learn, fresh for new assignments and excited about the opportunity. Market extension has led to a rise in new roles that require stringent qualifications. To tap into people with the specific skills, companies have to invest heavily on advertising and interviews again.
  • Many candidates – The company enjoys a wide talent pool to choose from. Since there are many qualified candidates to choose from, the company can apply diversity in its recruitment process. As an addition, the organization gets an opportunity to mentor a candidate for a specific position. This is because, the graduates are ready to learn new things and they look forward to new challenges.
  • Establishment of a loyalty bond – Students feel welcome to apply for internship and summer trainings at organizations that recruit from their campus. The organization benefits by having a pool of talented candidates to choose from during their next recruitment season.

Disadvantage of campus recruitment

  • Costly – If the candidates do not perform as expected, the organization has to replace them which is an extra cost for the organization. It is expensive to train the candidates since they do not have previous work experience
  • Competition – To keep up with globalization, organizations have to employ talented candidates to remain competitive. The quality of service and products has to be top notch for an organization to compete with others in its industry, country, region, and the world. The young and fresh minds offer the organization a fresh breathe of talent needed to achieve the competitive edge. Unfortunately, all organizations are targeting fresh graduates so the organizations are forced to offer better payments and higher incentives to attract the campus recruits. It therefore becomes expensive for the organization.

Strategy 8. Job board advertisement

Job boards refer to physical or electronic platforms which employers use to post jobs and market their brand while job seekers use to find job opportunities. Physical job boards are currently uncommon even though they remain in use in some companies and especially in universities. Most companies have their own career portals or use the services of online job boards.

Categories of job boards

Job boards may be categorized in two major ways: government and private, and free and paid job boards. Government job boards are owned by the government while the private job boards are privately owned by companies and individuals. Almost all job boards are free to use by the job seekers which is a strategy that ensures the sites get more traffic. However, not all are free for employers to advertise.

Besides these differentiations, job boards may also be classified according to the specific niche in the market that they address. For instance, there are those that focus on professional networking such as LinkedIn, career specific job boards like Techcareers which deals with technology related jobs, and Reliefweb which focuses on humanitarian careers.

Features of efficient job boards

  • They are easy to navigate and one can do a targeted job search.
  • They offer additional services such as email alerts or mobile applications.
  • They have apply-on-site capacity.

Advantages of job boards

  • Huge traffic – Job boards get great traffic from millions of users worldwide. This means that a company’s job advertisement is likely to reach a great number of qualified candidates.
  • Cost effective – There are many job boards that offer the service for free to employers or at a minimum fee. This makes it one of the cheapest ways of sourcing for applicants.
  • Branding – Some job boards post reviews of organizations by employees and also give more information on the company. This can be a great way of marketing for companies with a great employment record and will attract more job seekers.
  • Simple application process – Job boards simplify the application process by making it possible to apply on the site.
  • Time saving – Job boards help the employer to easily get qualified candidates applying for the job, reducing the time it would have taken to do so through other means.
  • Source for passive candidates – Job boards that offer the option of posting resumes are potential sources for companies to find highly qualified candidates who may not necessarily be actively looking for new jobs.

Disadvantages of job boards

  • Large volume of applications – While this may initially be the aim of the employer, the volume may well exceed his or her expectations as the numbers of job seekers who view the advertisement are many. This eventually makes the filtering process too long as employers have to sort through many unqualified candidates.
  • Absence of the human contact – In electronic communication, as opposed to personal communication, there may be a lot that employers may miss on the applicants which might be critical in selecting the best candidate.
  • Excessive reliance on job boards – Since job boards offer fast and easy solutions for recruitment, it may lead to employers heavily relying on them instead of developing their own capacity in searching for candidates.
  • Vulnerability to con artists – Unscrupulous characters may take advantage of a company’s use of job boards to manipulate candidates looking for jobs with the company. This may hurt the company’s image as job seekers lose trust in their job advertisements.
  • Junk mail and advertisement – After subscribing to the services a job board, employers may then be bombarded with junk mail and unnecessary advertisements from the site

CONCLUSION

Recruiters cannot deny the fact that there have been changes in the way they advertise for job opportunities. Even as employees embrace the new ways of recruiting, you have to come up with a strategy that ensures that the employees are retained for a long time. You also need to look for a way to recruit successful and within a short time.

A good recruitment process gives all qualified people an equal chance to apply for the job and be evaluated if they fit in the position. There are many options available so you need to choose the one that suits the position you are recruiting for and your budget.  With a well thought out strategy, you can attract and retain top talent for a long time. It is therefore important for you to revolutionize the way you recruit to align it with modern trends.

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