Our strengthening economy has led us to the tightest labor market in almost seven years. Quality candidates are becoming more scarce with more of our population now currently employed. Companies are competing for skilled candidates and are pressed now more than ever to attract in-demand workers.
New research by Indeed reveals these key trends about the current state of talent attraction:
The workforce is active.
- 71% of people in today’s workforce report they are actively looking for or are open to a new job.
Shortage in Talent.
- There are only 1.7 unemployed job seekers for every job opening as opposed to 6.2 unemployed job seekers for each job opening only six years ago.
Recruiting is Transforming by Data.
- Businesses are now able to optimize their recruiting budgets, test the success of job descriptions and identify areas of improvement for every step of the hiring process.
So how do we best optimize these trends for top talent acquisition in 2016? Here’s 9 tips on attracting quality candidates for your business:
1. Embrace the Active Candidate.
Aim recruiting tactics towards active candidates. Recruiting active candidates first with inbound traffic has provide more effective than seeking out passive candidates through outbound recruiting tactics. At least 58% of adults are looking at new jobs each month, according to a recent Indeed Study conducted by Harris Poll. Let’s back up for a second here and define what exactly is meant by “inbound recruiting” and “outbound recruiting”.
Inbound Recruiting involves attracting candidates that are already involved with your brand, searching for new employment or are open to new opportunities, even though they may not yet be ready to apply for those opportunities. Examples include people finding you through an online job search, referrals who apply with your company, career fairs, applications from social recruiting efforts, referrals or connections, or visitors to your business’s employment website.
Outbound Recruiting proactively searches for candidates who are not currently looking for new employment opportunities. Examples for outbound recruiting include methods such as contacting people through resume databases or professional networking sites, reaching out to former employees that may have left in good standing for a better opportunity that you can now provide, or even calling referrals by current or former employees could also be considered outbound recruiting.
Active candidates have already shown an interest in your job, your company, your brand, utilizing this already present interest to reel in your skilled, qualified candidates. This will make recruiting efforts faster and more effective when bringing new employees on board.
Check out this video by Indeed showing that “Successful Recruiting Starts with Inbound Candidates” here:
2. Build a Brand that Brings You Talent.
No one wants their time wasted. That is why it is best to provide the candidates with as much information as possible about each position and the environment they would be working in so that you are not wasting your own time targeting candidates who are not qualified for the position, or are not the right fit for your company.
3. Assess the Candidate’s Career Path Rather Than Tenure.
People in today’s workforce are not as focused on the duration of their employment as they once were in the past. People are opening themselves to more opportunities in order to learn new skill sets that they may not have or because another opportunity offers more money.
The time that a candidate spends at a company is becoming increasingly less important than their experience and roles at each organization. A candidate that has worn many hats often has the qualities of being hard working and driven by learning. The opportunity for growth and advancement is becoming more of a motivator than ever in today’s job seekers. In a job market where the average tenure is only 4.6 years, it is important to harness this shift in mindset by giving candidates plenty of space to grow and thrive within the company.
4. Remember, Your New Hires are Still Active Candidates.
When does a candidate stop being a candidate? The simple answer to this question is never. Just because you have been hired by a company does not solidify their loyalty to your company. 65% of people look at new jobs again within 91 days of being hired at a new company. Businesses have been known to recruit their candidates from their competitors, so it is important to create a workplace that is optimal for employee retention.
Investing in onboarding and continuing educational opportunities for your employees will help them feel as they are being well-equipped to handle the requirements of the position yet still challenged in their work. This continual process for growth and expansion of knowledge and skills often leads to greater new hire retention.
5. Implement Flexible Work Options
The ‘live to work’ mentality is much less present in today’s labor market than it has been in the past. Instead, a ‘work to live’ mentality has been implicated and a clear mission of respect of the work-life balance has become increasingly more important to today’s skilled, active candidates. The very best talent, if felt trapped in a position that does not value this mentality, will demand better for themselves and will gravitate towards opportunities that are employee-centric. The ultimate test for employers is being flexible enough to understand what matters most to individuals while being open to accommodating their requests to attract them.
When considering offering flexible working options such as remote work, first evaluate if the role is such that can be performed remotely. Also ensuring that the candidate’s personality and work styles are best-suited for these kinds of arrangements is very important as well. Over the last two years, job seeker interest in remote work has grown an incredible 85%, so we expect that this trend in interest will continue to grow and options such as remote work will become increasingly more attractive to today’s top talent.
6. Create Your Own Talent.
With such a huge talent shortage, it is becoming increasingly necessary to be creative in recruiting strategies and figuring out how to source talent at a grassroots level. In particular, recruiting programs within the university level have shown much success in finding tomorrow’s talent today. The earlier you can get to them, the better, especially if your brand is not as recognizable as some of your competitors.
Sourcing college level talent is a great way to fill your job needs in the future. Adding creativity to your university recruiting campaigns by interacting with students at multiple touchpoints (career fairs, internships, and ambassador programs) to most effectively build your employer brand among the most impressionable generation.
7. Determine Your Success Metrics.
The emergence and ever-growing stream of data sources has allowed us to focus on the effectiveness of our different recruiting strategies. This effectiveness includes methods of prioritizing, assessing quality and value, and using analytics to continuously improve your recruiting process , but first – metrics must be identified as to what will be considered “successful” for your business.
If candidate quality is a key metric of success for your organization, measuring the source of hire can help you determine the ways that your best candidates are finding your positions. For example, if you’re looking for entry-level hires that will thrive into managerial roles, “source tracking” can help you determine how to best optimize your sourcing budget to attract these quality hires.
8. Gather Hiring Success Insights from Your Employees.
Employee surveys are an effective way to get real-time data on the success of your business’s hiring process. Surveying hiring managers, recruiters, and other employees involved with the hiring process can help your business get an accurate measure of which sources provided the highest quality candidates and hires.
Knowing these sources is extremely important for recruiting quality candidates for your company because by identifying them, you can develop the best strategy – custom to your business – for recruiting today’s top talent.
9. Trust Your Data.
Knowing the data is one thing, acting upon it is another. The biggest development you can make for your company through utilizing these different sources of data is marrying them together with a set of activities that will capitalize on what the data is telling you.
Communicating the importance of recruiting data in your organization can be challenging. It is essential to educate your teams on how to utilize this data as recruiters and hiring managers may sometimes think that they already know the optimal ways of recruiting their talent. But by analyzing your data and implementing strategies that integrate your findings, you can ensure that you are not wasting any amount of money in your recruiting budget.
The Takeaway
With talent becoming more and more difficult to find, it is important to keep these trends in mind. Employers that explore creative solutions and merge these solutions with their new-found data into the developing of their recruiting strategies will prove the most successful in attracting today’s top, outstanding talent.
Has your business already implemented some or all of these strategies? What success have you seen? Or does your company plan to integrate these tips into the development of a new recruiting strategy? If so, which ones do you feel are the most relevant to your business? Let us know in the comments section below! We look forward to hearing your feedback.