What is Connected Recruiting?

Last week I attended Erik V. 's highly engaging and engrossing talk at Recruitment Agency Expo . Bullhorn ’s Sales & Strategy Manager for Automation & AI discussed the company’s strategy for engaging candidates throughout the talent lifecycle: Connected Recruitment.

Now, I was already aware of what Connect Recruitment is. But listening to Erik articulate and advocate for the benefits of this strategy got me thinking. We’re seeing a clear shift towards more sustainable and equitable hiring strategies. And it’s a great thing.

In this week’s edition, I’m going to be discussing not just Connected Recruiting, but other contemporary strategies (some of which I might have mentioned before!), that are solving recruiter’s pain points.?

I’ll be looking at:

• What is Connected Recruiting?
• How to implement it
• What the benefits are
• How it fits with other strategies
• Why these strategies represent the future of hiring

What is Connected Recruiting?

Connected Recruiting is a strategy that empowers recruitment agencies to engage throughout all four steps of the recruitment process. By leveraging Connected Recruiting best practices, staffing firms can ensure an incredible experience for their talent, create an ever-growing and consistently engaged talent pool, and lower their cost of talent acquisition.

A candidate-centric strategy

Connected Recruiting comes from a need to overcome the challenges being faced by Bullhorn CRM and ATS users. Namely, the need to engage talent at every stage of the talent lifecycle.? The importance of this from the candidate’s perspective was highlighted by Bullhorn’s recent GRID Talent Survey of over 2,000 permanent, freelance, and temp workers in North America and the UK. It showed that 70% of candidates want human interaction during the search and placement process.?

Shortage of talent is a big challenge for recruiters. In fact, 63% of agencies think it’s their biggest challenge, according to LinkedIn’s Top 100 Hiring Statistics 2022 . So that begs the question: How can you consistently engage with talent throughout the stages of the recruitment process in a way that gives you an advantage in an evermore competitive market? That’s where Connected Recruiting comes in.?

Bullhorn’s new methodology is designed to empower recruiters to engage with talent during all four recruitment process stages. The aim is to deliver on what 70% of candidates want most: human interaction. Moreover, it’s about treating your talent database not as numbers, but as a community.

How does it achieve better engagement at each stage?

By implementing Connected Recruiting you can optimise the four steps of the recruitment process. Then you can test and tailor the strategy, fine-tuning it to suit your needs. This enables you to transform each step of the talent lifecycle, thus improving both the talent and client experience.?

This is what Connected Recruiting looks like at each stage:

Attract?

The first of the four steps of the recruitment process is where it’s imperative that you pull candidates in through various channels and follow up straight away to avoid losing them. This enables you to get more from your job board spend and improve the candidate experience from the get-go.?

Engage?

This is the stage of the recruitment process is where it pays to be targeted. When effectively engaging with new candidates and those already in your database, timing is important, and using the right message at the right time for the right opportunities will deliver results. You will see increases in conversion rates from your existing database and re-engaged candidates in your ATS. Not to mention a decrease in your cost of acquisition.

Onboard?

Think of your ideal candidate journey from application through to the first few weeks at the company, and deliver it. Frequent and impactful interactions increase your retention rate, and the resulting seamless experience creates a positive client and candidate experience.??

Nurture?

Building strong relationships with your talent enables you to easily engage them for their next role. This increases your ability to engage them through multiple channels and extend their assignment or redeploy them. Doing this with all your active candidates extends your talent pool, creating a lasting community that produces more referrals and satisfied clients.

What are the benefits of using this strategy?

A more engaged talent community?

Connected Recruiting enables you to create a community through targeted and impactful engagement, prioritising the right candidates, at the right time, with the right message, and for the right opportunities. The strategy has enabled Conexus to achieve an average response rate of 10% .?

Lower acquisition costs

By implementing Connected Recruiting, you can make more placements from your candidate database and achieve more with your existing job board spend. This is achieved through consistent communication from the very beginning. A good example of this is Allen Recruitment , who, by leveraging Connected Recruitment, is making 60% of placements from its existing database.?

Higher redeployment rates?

Connected Recruiting helps improve the candidate experience and increase candidate satisfaction and redeployment opportunities by providing a seamless end-to-end onboarding experience. Signature Consultants , for example, have been able to achieve a redeployment rate of 30%.?

More satisfied candidates?

The application of Connected Recruiting will enable you to deliver consistent quality interactions that build stronger relationships with your talent and provide your clients with a high-quality talent community. This has the dual benefit of keeping both your candidates and your clients happy.

Connected Recruitment implementation tips

Start with your existing talent lifecycle?

Evaluate which of your current processes yield results and which ones need work. This will enable you to, as Bullhorn puts it, ‘Define what is important to your organisation,’ and ‘Design your business around people and experience.’?

Make sure everyone is on board?

Ensure all of your recruiters understand the process is key to the consistent delivery of Connected Recruiting. This is imperative in transforming the stages of the recruitment process to engage talent, maximise the potential of your community, and keep all parties satisfied.

A/B test to find strategies that work for you?

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all strategy. That’s why it’s important to A/B test and incorporate what you learn into your process. Feedback from your candidates and clients should play a key role.??

Always assess your levels of success

Measuring success is always important when implementing new methodologies. So when creating your Connected Recruiting plan, make sure assessment checkpoints are built in.

The similarities with other strategies

Those of you that are regular readers of this newsletter will no doubt have noticed that Connected Recruitment is similar to other emerging talent strategies. Perhaps not in its mechanics and features, but in its overarching aims and benefits.

Skills-based hiring

Like Connected Recruiting, the skills-first approach is a candidate-centric methodology and at its core, it’s focused on nurturing talent. It does this by recognising candidates for their skills and valuing and promoting work-based achievement over and above educational credentials.?

The aim of skills-based hiring, similar to Connected Recruiting, is to broaden the talent pool and find more suitable and engaged candidates for each role. Recent figures from LinkedIn show that, globally, companies that hire for skills increase their talent pipeline by over 900% when compared to those that hire based on credentials.

Both skills-based hiring and Connected Recruiting save time and money by helping hiring teams find the most relevant talent more quickly. The skills-based approach achieves this by simply matching candidates to jobs using skills, regardless of where that talent might be. Connected Recruitment does it by increasing the number of placements made directly from recruiter’s databases.?

The success of both strategies is evident in skills-based hiring’s 66% reduction in the overall time to hire and Connected Recruiting enabling Allen Recruitment to increase its database placements to 60% of its total hires.

Workforce pixelation

OK, so I’m aware that workforce pixelation isn’t a hiring strategy – at least not for agencies. But if Connected Recruitment is the talent management strategy that involves building a more engaged talent community for recruiters, workforce pixelation is the equivalent for employers and their existing employees. In some ways, workforce pixelation is the Connected Recruiting of internal hires. And it can also be viewed as a subset of the skills-first approach.

Like Connected Recruiting, workforce pixelation increases talent engagement. Only it does it by empowering workers to step out of their lane and take on additional responsibilities beyond their job description. This means employees can acquire new skills through experiential learning. And that is shown to promote internal mobility.

Because it involves getting more mileage out of employees without rewarding them in the short term, workforce pixelation doesn’t immediately appear to prioritise candidates. However, the broader skill set it provides workers improves both internal progression and career prospects in general. Like Connected Recruiting and skills-based hiring, it is about nurturing talent.

In summary, Connected Recruiting, skills-based hiring and workplace pixelation are divergent in the way they work. But they are all underpinned by a desire to improve the overall experience for candidates and provide better, fairer outcomes.

Will we see more strategies like this in the future?

Recent seismic events have caused a considerable shift in the way that we work. In the post-pandemic jobs market especially, employers are being required to offer greater flexibility, more hybrid working models, and more clearly defined progression opportunities to attract and retain the top talent.?

The same goes for recruiters. If they want to not only attract and retain but also redeploy the best candidates, they will have to implement strategies that ensure candidates feel valued throughout the process.?

Skills-based hiring and workforce pixelation do offer general hypotheses for how to achieve this. But, Connected Recruiting goes one better and provides a detailed strategy where every clearly defined stage contributes towards the overall goal.

For me, that’s what makes Connected Recruiting stand out. Right now, hiring teams need stability, certainty and the ability to do more with less. And this strategy, with its easy-to-follow process, provides all of those things and more.