In a competitive and dynamic market, attracting top talent is a key challenge for any organization. How can you stand out from the crowd and showcase your unique value proposition to potential candidates? In this article, you will learn some creative ways to attract and engage top talent, based on the best practices of talent management.
Your employer brand is the perception that candidates and employees have of your organization as a place to work. It reflects your culture, values, mission, and benefits. To attract top talent, you need to define and communicate your employer brand clearly and consistently across all channels, such as your website, social media, job postings, and referrals. You also need to align your employer brand with your customer brand, so that candidates can see the impact and purpose of your work.
In a competitive and dynamic market, trying to attract top talent can be challenging. To distinguish yourself from competitors, it is essential to have an awareness of the top talent within your industry. Then you can proactively create and nurture relationships in order to gain insights into the motivations behind the choice of a particular organisation.
Hosting a creative contest or challenge that invites potential candidates to showcase their skills and talents. For example, I once organized a hackathon for software developers that required them to create an app or a website that solves a real-world problem in 24 hours
Craft a compelling employer brand by meticulously defining and consistently communicating it across diverse channels. From your website and social media platforms to job postings and referrals, maintain a unified and coherent portrayal of your organization.
When defining a brand, ask existing employees what they think of the current culture. Use feedback surveys and engagement data to paint a real picture of what the organization is all about. Be sure to highlight both the great things, but also the necessary requirements. What does a day in the life of the company look like? - Hard-working culture? - Collaborative Working environment? - Career growth opportunities? These are just some of the key areas you can highlight to attract the right talent to the organization. Be open and honest about what they can expect when coming in so there are no surprises.
Shine inside if you want your brand to shine outside. It all starts with mission, vision, and values. Too often, companies check the box when it comes to these. They often mix mission and vision together, and the values end up being words like "trust," "fun," and "integrity." Although these are critical table stakes for being a human at work, they do little to differentiate your employer brand. Mission is your reason for being, vision is what you will build over the next 10 years (a giant step in service of your mission), and values are the minimum required behaviors needed to get there. These are tools to inspire team members to unify and move forward with purpose. Culture is what employees do when you're not looking. Shine with MVV! ??
Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and engaging content to attract and nurture your target audience. Instead of pushing your job openings to passive candidates, you can use inbound marketing to showcase your thought leadership, industry insights, employee stories, and success cases. This way, you can build trust and credibility with potential candidates, and generate interest and curiosity about your organization.
Shift the focus from pushing job openings to creating a candidate-centric engagement model. Tailor your content to address the needs, concerns, and aspirations of your target audience.
This is one of the more difficult methods for companies to do consistently. Due in part because it's difficult to quantify the results. The easiest way to get started is to create a communication loop to talent acquisition when any post goes out from marketing. The recruiting team can connect with anyone who reacts/responds.
Your employees are the most critical marketing vehicle. Give them time to contribute to the organization's greater good by generating new content to help others on the same career track, present and write about what excites them about your product/company, work with underserved communities, and get training and new certifications. Celebrate them when they create this content or achieve something on social media. It feels good to be appreciated, and it will show potential candidates the types of opportunities they can get if they work for you. Also, video is way underutilized in employer branding efforts. Invite your employees to create videos, share what they love most about your culture, and post to your social media and website.
Social media is a powerful tool to reach and connect with top talent, especially the younger generations. You can use social media to showcase your employer brand, share your content, promote your events, and interact with your followers. You can also use social media to source and recruit candidates, by using hashtags, keywords, groups, and influencers. You can also encourage your employees to share their experiences and referrals on social media, and amplify your reach and reputation.
Collaborate with industry influencers to amplify your employer brand. Identify thought leaders, professionals, or influencers in your sector and establish partnerships. Their endorsement and shared content can significantly enhance your brand visibility and credibility.
Espeically being a Tech Recruiter, you can't just go to the job boards to find the Techies. I frequently use Podcasts to invite hiring managers on to talk about the "Actual" culture and the challenges that the team actually face. I learnt how to code two years ago, as my passion is always been Technology, suddenly I am collaborating with Techies on coding Projects! It's probably the most out of box thinking ever! But if things was different and I didn't love meeting new people or solving problems for businesses one at a time, I would be a Data Engineer myself!
Empowering, training, and equipping your people to use their voice, share their story, and build a personal brand (especially on LinkedIn) is hands down one of the most powerful ways to get creative with your recruiting. Here's what will happen: - You'll build trust with top talent - You'll become a place that people line up to work at - You'll build a strong talent pipeline - You'll retain your current top talent for longer. Gifting your people with the permission, the time, the know-how, and the tools to show up on social media and authentically represent your company brand will pay dividends on the hiring front for years to come!
Social media can be powerful, especially when you create content employees can share. Include real-life office stories and experiences. What is shared on social media should be open and honest and something you are proud of sharing. If there is bad culture, either be up front about it or change it. Otherwise, you run the risk of constant recruitment campaigns and high turnover rates. It is important to get to the root cause of the problem rather than putting lipstick on a pig.
Although candidates may follow your corporate social media brand, I consider it an obligation of corporate leadership to be active on social media like LinkedIn. Use the corporate brand accounts to promote the opinions of your employees and vice versa. We work with and are typically inspired by, people, not companies, so it's important that candidates have an opportunity to follow, get to know, and directly engage with those responsible for running the ship.
A talent community is a network of candidates who have expressed interest in your organization, and who you can keep in touch with through regular communication and engagement. You can create a talent community by inviting candidates to join your newsletter, blog, podcast, webinar, or online forum. You can also use platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Slack to create groups or channels for your talent community. By creating a talent community, you can build long-term relationships with candidates, and keep them informed and interested in your opportunities.
Posting a "Create your own job" job listing alongside all of the other open positions you have listed is a great way for candidates who identify with your company culture mission, vision, and values but don't see a job opening that resonates with their expertise and interests. Adding candidates in your pipeline to your regular newsletter and marketing communications is a nice way to give candidate a flavor of the experience you provide to your business prospects and clients. Lastly, it's imperative that every existing employee feels appreciated and, ideally that the exit is amicable. Alumni communities can be a great source of future job candidates and businesses. Host events to get alumni together and treat them well!
Flexible work options are becoming more and more important for top talent, especially after the pandemic. Flexible work options can include remote work, hybrid work, flexible hours, or project-based work. By offering flexible work options, you can show your candidates that you value their work-life balance, autonomy, and productivity. You can also expand your talent pool and access candidates from different locations, backgrounds, and skills.
If your business requires structure work hours and a work environment, be up front as to why you have this expectation. Some businesses that have customers that need to be served face to face or manufacturing will often require staff to be on site. In other areas of the business, unless the individual is actually required to be present, considering flexible work options can also increase the talent pool beyond physical boarders and sometimes even timezones. This can have a positive impact from both a motivation and productivity perspective.
It's imperative that instead of resisting remote and hybrid work, employers lean into the future of decentralized, autonomous, and multi-modal work. Unless you are manufacturing tangible goods in a plant, in which case it could make sense, culturally, to house all employees in an office, there's nothing but talent strategy upside to having a hybrid workforce. That said, most people managers are least familiar with managing teams remotely. For more junior teams and team managers, it makes sense to meet in person more frequently and then taper back to a more infrequent but still consistent cadence of in-person meetings or sessions. Leadership training is critical! Even "100% remote" teams benefit from getting together once every few months.
Flexibility and Remote Work Options Idea: Offer flexible work schedules or remote work. How: Use a trust-based system and technology to manage remote work effectively.
The candidate experience is the impression that candidates have of your organization throughout the hiring process. It includes aspects such as the application process, the communication, the feedback, the interview, and the offer. To provide a positive candidate experience, you need to be transparent, respectful, timely, and helpful. You also need to showcase your culture, values, and benefits during the hiring process, and make the candidates feel valued and appreciated. A positive candidate experience can enhance your employer brand, increase your acceptance rate, and reduce your turnover rate.
Hiring is responsibility Especially when we work for global team ,where there are large projects to be delivered as a recruiter we have dual responsibility one from employer prospective to deploy right resource ,client satisfaction and ontime recruitment along with this candidates responsibility apart from technical selection giving them full insight no last minutes surprises ,smooth hiring process as person is trusting leaving his current job and joining us. As a recruiter its always important not to show stars or moons be realistic share right information and thats the key for effective hiring. Regards Shireen Anis Talent Acquisition Manager Xitricon Dubai
Send all of your applicants a note letting them know if they have been rejected with a brief explanation. I've had candidates who received a personalized rejection letter from me respond with "Thank you for writing me. I've applied to so many jobs, and it's just crickets. I appreciate your outreach and for letting me know." Your hiring process is the first leg of your employee experience. With so much technology in the form of personalized and automated messaging, there is no excuse not to do this. Show empathy and start your employee experience on the right foot.
The most important thing is to be genuine and authentic. I’ve had far too many experiences where it clearly seems fake. This is not a good experience because the leader gets in and then feels out of place. We must show up authentically and the same should be expected across the board.
Attracting Talent is only one part of the equation. You can have great job postings and opportunities, but when an organization has a culture that deters talent or doesn't provide clear alignment can lead to costly staff replacements. Consistently doing an internal culture pulse check is important and checking in with staff through stay interviews and an open feedback culture can create an environment where people want to work. A people-first organization will not only attract more talent but often leads to greater productivity and profitability. Finding talent is just as important is consistently developing internal staff and ensuring the culture and environment evolve with the people's needs.
Whilst working with a few retailers, thing I managed to do was to convince them to use their applicant pipeline as a marketing tool for their core brands. By doing this, the conversation internally within the organisation changed from HR/recruitment/people being a cost centre to a state where the HR/people function was able to prove its worth as a profit centre. In turn, this enabled the transformation and associated cost of delivery to be signed off. As people have mentioned above, current employees as well as alumni, are huge assets in terms of espousing an authentic and definitive employee experience that can be marketed to like-minded individuals to secure top talent…