Fast-growing companies usually need fast-growing teams. For recruiters, that comes with the challenge of keeping up with dozens of open positions and up to thousands of candidates.
But with the right processes and tools, even fast-paced, large-scale recruiting processes can become manageable.
In this post, we’ll share:
- Why modernizing your recruitment process makes a difference
- 7 recruitment tips & tricks to capture top talent more efficiently
- The best recruiting software to modernize your process
Why modernizing your recruiting process makes a difference
2023's hiring landscape is very peculiar. After years of candidate-driven recruiting, mass layoffs and hiring freezes have flooded the job market with thousands of highly qualified active candidates.
Still, that doesn't mean that you should neglect your hiring process. Companies that don't optimize their recruiting to remove friction and accommodate top talent will have a hard time when the market shifts. Create a smooth experience for your candidates, even if they’re currently open to more exhaustive screening and longer processes.
On the other hand, your recruitment process is the first sample of your company’s culture and operations that a candidate has. A poor recruiting experience can turn into a negative reference that hurts your reputation as an employer.
You can't change your recruiting culture from one day to another, so offering a competitive recruiting process regardless of market conditions will pay in the long run.
Additionally, by modernizing your recruiting process, you will:
- Reduce your time-to-hire
- Give stakeholders full visibility into the information they need to make hiring decisions
7 recruitment tips & tricks to attract top talent in 2023
A modern & effective recruiting process relies on four pillars:
- Cross-team communication
- Efficiency
- Automation
- Talent/employer branding
To implement these pillars, we recommend:
- Developing a shared recruiting and hiring system
- Building a shared source of truth
- Investing in your employer brand
- Automating your screening process
- Leveraging data to optimize your recruiting efforts
- Invest in granular resource & recruiter capacity modeling
- Personalizing every candidate touchpoint
Cross-team communication: Develop a shared recruiting & hiring system
As a talent acquisition leader, one of your priorities should be to stay aligned with all relevant stakeholders. That way, recruiting and hiring can work as a single, effective, and predictable process for keeping track of the hiring strategy and delivering on it.
To make it possible, build a common workflow working together with your HR and Finance teams. And make sure to include your hiring managers as well, so they are bought in and understand the process.
A robust headcount management tool will help you make it possible. It should include an org chart, hiring tracker for visibility, requests and approvals, and more.
Additionally, don’t forget to give your teams a breakdown of the different tools they need, such as ATS, HRIS, and the headcount management tool. This is a great way to engage people and help them understand how they can be most effective and successful, in the least amount of time.
Cross-team communication: Build a shared source of truth
Aside from having a shared process, it’s key for stakeholders to work with the same information. If your finance team has a version of your hiring budget and you have a different one, you’ll be operating in two different realities. This could lead to friction, severe budget variance, and an unfulfilled hiring plan.
Prevent data silos and build a common source of truth for all stakeholders. The right headcount management platform can help you achieve it through real-time integrations with your Finance, HR, and Talent stacks.
Automation: Simplify your screening process
When you’re dealing with a small candidate pool, screening can be time-consuming and prone to biases. But as the number of candidates increases, proper screening becomes nearly impossible.
That’s why the most competitive recruiters rely on:
- Resume parsing
- AI-powered screening tools
- Skill assessments
Efficiency: Leverage data to optimize your recruiting efforts
Keep an eye on which aspects of your process are working and which aren’t. That way, you’ll know what you should double down on and what you should reassess.
You can get started by asking yourself these questions:
- Where do your best candidates come from? How much does it cost you to get in front of them?
- What are your least successful talent acquisition channels?
- What do your best candidates struggle with?
- At what stage do your candidates drop off?
- What’s the most time-consuming part of your recruiting process?
You should be able to get data-driven answers from your current recruiting stack. If there’s any information missing, it may be time to reassess your tools.
Additionally, you’ll want to make sure all stakeholders are aligned around key success metrics. As Bev Carleton, founder at True North Talent Advisors said when discussing the 6 pillars of Talent, these metrics will usually be determined by executive leadership.
But as a Talent leader, it’s key for you to:
- Know what these metrics are
- Use them to guide your hiring strategy
- Use them to evaluate recruiter performance
Efficiency: Invest in granular resource & recruiter capacity modeling
Your talent acquisition efforts won’t go very far without the right resources. But, do you know what these resources are?
Proper recruiter capacity modeling will help you to:
- Advocate for the resources you need to meet your talent acquisition goals
- Provide a good candidate experience
- Stay on budget
- Understand what factors could lead you to overrun your budget
We recommend you:
- Review your recruiting funnel, considering the market you’re going into and position you’re hiring for
- Get a clear sense of the number of recruiters you’re going to need and what ratio of recruiters to candidates is ideal for you
- Assess previous experiences and the costs associated with hiring for similar positions
- Evaluate potential friction points & create a contingency plan
Branding: Invest in your employer brand
Attracting top talent is about making your company a place where talented and dedicated professionals want to work. This can be partially achieved through powerful employer branding.
Employer branding is the process of creating a company image that represents the organization’s values and culture. It includes the company's mission, vision, and unique selling points that differentiate it from other employers. In short, your employer brand aligns your company’s ethos with concrete benefits that the candidate will enjoy after joining the team, and a common company mission. It will dictate:
- Your tone when communicating with the candidate
- Your screening priorities
Every candidate touchpoint should be infused with your employer brand.
If you’re targeting candidates in a highly competitive discipline, employer branding is a must. While it may not be in your hands to lead your company’s branding efforts, you can be an advocate and consultant.
Branding: Personalize every candidate touchpoint
According to Gem, recruiting emails with personalized subject lines get a 5% higher open rate than generic ones.
Your best candidates are used to receiving cold emails from recruiters, so a generic message won’t cut it. Position yourself as a detail-oriented employer, while humanizing your brand: Personalize all your communications with candidates. From your first cold email to the last communication you have with a candidate, make sure every single touchpoint is sensible to:
- The position your candidate is applying for
- Who your candidate is
- Your candidate’s background and skills
- Previous experiences your candidate had with the company
The right CRM will help you make it possible.
The best recruiting software to streamline your recruiting process
You can build a modern recruiting process with spreadsheets and tons of manual work. But it’ll be time-consuming, error-prone, and unscalable.
The best talent teams usually rely on:
- A headcount management platform
- A robust CRM
- AI-powered resume analysis tools
- A powerful ATS
In this section, we’ll cover what you should have in mind if you’re looking to replace or expand your current talent stack.
A headcount planning platform
Without proper headcount planning, talent acquisition will be inefficient and untrackable.
Talent isn’t the only team to leverage a headcount planning platform. This tool is usually shared by Finance, HR, Talent, and hiring managers. And that’s why it’s so powerful.
The right headcount planning platform will help you to:
- See a dynamic org chart
- Stay on top of hiring managers’ needs
- Establish an approval process for new headcount
- Understand Finance’s budget & forecasts
- Track budget allocation
- Keep key stakeholders updated on your progress
- Leverage real-time data to guide your efforts
Look for a headcount planning tool that:
- Integrates with your current recruiting stack
- Has a smooth learning curve
- Includes collaborative features & precise access management
A powerful ATS
While your CRM helps you stay in touch with your candidates, a good ATS (Applicant Tracking System) will help you keep an overview of your entire recruiting process.
Gravitate towards a platform with:
- Powerful integrations
- Analytics and forecasting features
Ideally, you’d want your CRM and ATS to be bundled together into the same platform. That way:
- You won’t have to be constantly switching from one tool to another
- You’ll be able to centralize workflows and candidate data
Additionally, working with a tool that’s both a CRM and an ATS may be more cost-efficient than getting two separate platforms.
A robust CRM
A Candidate Relationship Manager (CRM) is a tool designed to manage candidate interactions throughout the hiring process.
A good CRM is more than just a kanban.
It will help you to:
- Keep track of candidate information and communication history
- Schedule follow-ups
- Personalize your outreach
- Centralize your candidate sourcing
With the right CRM, you will streamline your recruiting process and significantly improve the candidate experience.
An AI-powered resume analysis tool
If you have hundreds of candidates to assess, consider using AI-powered resume analysis tools.
These tools can be great for:
- Building a short-list of potential candidates
- Preventing unconscious biases
But they’re not perfect. These tools can only analyze CVs superficially, guided by keywords or grammatical patterns. They’re great for filtering out spam candidates, but they shouldn’t be your only candidate screening solution.
A skills assessment platform
As the candidate pool grows, effective screening becomes increasingly challenging. Fortunately, you can get reliable insights into your candidates’ actual qualifications through automated skills assessments.
The right tool will:
- Integrate with your current stack
- Include question randomization and other anti-cheating features
- Offer scalable pricing, such as a flat fee for unlimited candidates
Gravitate towards no-code tools, so you don’t have to rely on web developers to update your tests.
The ultimate collaboration hub for Finance, HR, Talent, and hiring managers
In this post, we covered all the tips and tricks you need to modernize your company's recruiting process. But your recruiting efforts will only go so far if you’re not aligned with the rest of your stakeholders.
That's where TeamOhana comes in.
TeamOhana is a people management solution that allows you to:
- Get real-time employee and candidate data without having to look at a dynamic org chart.
- Get rid of back-and-forth communication between HR, Talent, and Finance teams.
- Optimize your headcount budget.
- And much more
Curious? Book a TeamOhana demo today →
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