How to Help Your HR Department Attract the Best Employees

In today’s fast-paced economy, recruitment isn’t about filling vacant positions anymore. It’s about sourcing and engaging with the best available talent. Because in the long run, hiring a talented employee saves time and money.

But how do you find and hire talented candidates?

Here are four strategies to help your HR department attract the best talent on the market.

1. Browse LinkedIn for Talented Candidates

Talented candidates don’t spend their time on job boards and don’t actively look for jobs. Most often, they’re already employed. One place they do frequent is social networking sites like LinkedIn.

So, even if talented candidates aren’t looking for a job, a well-written job description on LinkedIn might catch their eye. Think about it. Talented candidates know how to make resumes that get attention. Likewise, your recruiters need to know how to write engaging job descriptions that grab the attention of talented candidates.

Train your team to search for profiles that reflect the unique skills and qualifications the potential hire should have. Then, have them develop attractive recruitment messages that target these niche skill sets. After, your team should build a candidate database to keep track of professionals with these skills so that your recruiters can respond quickly to interested candidates.

2. Make Recruitment More Personal

Larger businesses can receive hundreds of applications after advertising an open position. That’s when your team might forget that these pieces of paper represent real people.

With the amount of time talented candidates spend optimizing their resumes to match your carefully written job description, it’s not surprising job seekers expect a personalized approach to the recruitment process.

If word spreads that your recruitment process is impersonal or that you didn’t treat undesirable candidates well, you can lose out on attracting the best talent and your brand can suffer.

Every time you engage with a candidate, you’re representing your company. So, the recruitment process should be as well-designed and efficient as every other part of the business.

Train your HR team to personalize their approach. Start by familiarizing them with different departments within the company and roles within those departments.

Allow them to gain insight into the specifics of a team or position by observing the best employees in action. That’s how they’ll learn what makes these professionals successful in their environments.

Encourage recruiters to examine the worst candidates from past recruitment processes as well. It will help them see what types of candidates to avoid.

Put recruiters in touch with team leaders who have a clear idea of what they want in a future employee. Team leaders know the daily routines of their teams. They’re the ones who can tell what type of person is the right match for the position. So, they can help recruiters find talented candidates and communicate with them in a personalized way.

3. Keep Your Recruitment Process Short

The average hiring process lasts around 22 days, which is just over three weeks.

HR statistics show that lengthy recruitment processes cause talented candidates to reject offers. And more than half (56%) of recruiters confirm that lengthy processes hold them back from recruiting top talent.

That’s why a shorter hiring process is key to snatching up top talent. To do so, consider creating checkpoints with 24-hour turnaround periods at critical steps in the process. For example, train your staff to have offers drawn up within 24 hours of a favorable decision after an interview. And make sure that your team schedules interviews within 24 hours of selecting a promising candidate.

4. Focus on Past Achievements to Make a Prognosis for the Future

Companies that actively source talent increase their revenue by more than 200% over organizations that don’t.

That’s achievable if your HR team looks beyond skills and qualifications. Instead, HR staff should concentrate on the quantifiable achievements of candidates. For example, when a candidate writes on their resume that they’ve increased sales by 8%, you can make a safe bet that they’ll be able to do it again.

At the same time, teach your HR team that it’s not enough to rely on numbers that directly impact ROI or revenue. An Administrative Assistant that cuts costs also contributes to increased revenue at the end of the day.

Key Takeaway

Sourcing and engaging with talent should become the priority of your team, especially if you’re hiring for a sector that suffers from a shortage of skilled candidates. Use these four strategies and your team will be on their way to hiring the best talent on the market.