In the United States, it takes about 23 days to find and hire the perfect candidate.
In business, this is a long time. Sure, it takes time to find top talent for your organization, but every day the position goes unfilled equals money lost. The longer you take to make the hire, the more money your company will lose.
This is why you need to have a good talent recruitment strategy. Without one, you’ll not only take a long time to find a hire but also increase your chances of making the wrong hire.
Not sure how to go about recruiting talent?
Continue reading for talent recruitment tips that’ll give your business an edge.
1. Anticipate Your Recruitment Needs
As a business owner, you don’t want to dive into the labor market unprepared. Yet, this is usually the case for business owners who don’t anticipate their recruitment needs.
Yes, there are times when an employee will resign abruptly, leaving you with no choice but to kickstart your recruitment machinery immediately. In most cases, though, these are scenarios you can anticipate.
When you’re aware of your recruitment needs, it’s easy to prepare for a hiring process long before it’s needed. This way, you have ample time to prepare job descriptions, write up job ads, and make other arrangements that will leave your business ready to make a hire when needed.
2. Maintain Low Employee Turnover
It’s inevitable. At one point every organization will need to recruit new people.
However, you don’t want to spend most of your time recruiting. This will cost you time and money.
If you don’t want to be on a perpetual recruitment drive, aim to keep your employee turnover low. When no employees are leaving your firm, you’ll only enter the labor market when your business is looking to add new people, not replace lost employees.
The question is: how do you maintain employee turnover?
Simple. Make your organization a place people would want to work in. Implement policies that promote workplace diversity and fairness, and ensure your organizational values and mission resonate with what your workers.
3. Build Your Employer Brand
Making your organization a place people want to work in isn’t just great for your current employees. It’s also great for your future employees.
The modern job seeker isn’t just looking for a job that pays a decent wage. They want a job that gives them meaning. According to a recent survey, 4 in every 5 job seekers said they give more preference to a company’s mission when looking to apply for or accept a position.
If you thought you can just throw lucrative salaries to top talent and hope to attract them to your organization, you’re mistaken. This, though, isn’t to say that salary is no longer important. Of course, to attract and retain top talent, your company has to offer a competitive compensation package.
A lot of things go into building your company into an irresistible employer brand. Some of these things, like culture, take time to implement, but if you want to have it easy when recruiting the best talent, you have to do it.
4. Know Your Ideal Hire
Are you the kind of business owner who steps into interview rooms with an open mind? Do you believe in hiring on impulse?
While this strategy works for some employers, you can’t count on it to deliver consistent results. Even if you’ve got a great record of hiring the best employees on impulse, there’ll come a time you will make a snap decision on to realize the employee wasn’t the right one.
An effective strategy is to have a clear picture of your ideal hire before you start the recruitment process. What human characteristics, for instance, do you want your ideal hire to have?
When you know what you want your ideal hire to have, it’s easy to sift through interested an applicant and narrow down to a manageable number. From here, you can then choose the most suitable one.
5. Know Where to Find Your Ideal Hire
Knowing your ideal hire is a good step in the right direction, but that’s not all. You also must know where to find them.
With some research on the labor market and a good understanding of your industry, you’ll be able to hunt for top talent where you’re most likely to find them.
For instance, gone are the days of newspaper job ads. Today, job seekers are looking for open positions in online job boards. Professional networks, such as LinkedIn, also play host to millions of job seekers.
When you know where to find your ideal hire, you’ll enhance your chances of making the right hire within a shorter time.
6. Build Your Own Talent Pool
You don’t have to start looking for top talent from scratch every time you need one. With your own talent pool, hiring can be as simple as going through your files, picking one job seeker, and contacting them to see whether they’re available.
Building a talent pool is a continuous process. Every time you’re recruiting, you’ll receive applications from qualified applicants. Although only one will make the cut, don’t do away with these applications for good. Keep them in a file.
7. Outsource Hiring to a Recruitment Expert
At the end of the day, you’re an entrepreneur, not a recruitment expert. And without the necessary recruitment expertise, hiring top talent might be a tall challenge for you.
This is why outsourcing this task to an expert makes business sense. And not just any recruitment expert, but an expert who specializes in your industry. If you’re an IT firm, for example, you want an expert who specializes in IT recruiting.
These services cost money, but they are your best shot at hiring the best talent.
Bring Top Talent to Your Business
Hiring top talent might seem like a preserve of the top firms in your industry, but this isn’t always the case. As long as you have an effective recruitment strategy and your organization has a good reputation, you can land the best job seekers in the market.
Keep tabs on our blog for more business tips and insight.
