6 Ways to Better Your Recruitment Strategy

Recruitment is Attraction, Excitement, Momentum, and Retention. It’s also about evolution.

Enablement of recruitment process evolution will keep your team moving in line with growth and the culture changes which inevitably come in tow.

Stands to reason that if your organization is changing, your hiring process cannot stay static, or risk having old dogs trying to perform new tricks and hindering growth progress.

Cast your mind back to a time when you were interviewing to fill a recent role. Were you looking for a set of skills and traits that upon reflection, are totally different to what you might’ve sought, say two years ago?

What message does your hiring process imprint onto your successful candidate, ahead of their start day and beyond?

Do your existing team feel they’re valued, through your development, package, and perks offered? Are they feeling disconnected by the new wave of candidates joining?

So much to consider and in total honesty, no 100% water-tight solution to cover every base. The concerns and driving factors, vary from person to person.

With churn rates high (see our blog post on this), renew and refresh your process:

1) ‘Sell’ your business to candidate’s

To some, an obvious notion. To others, totally alien. Today’s candidates are picky about who they work for, especially with current high employment rates. If you can’t think of USPs as to why your company is great to join, that a whole different story. Your business is great, joining you, will give the candidate an opportunity to progress, grow, earn big, be a part of something amazing. What is your story? Tell them your story and inspire them and in turn, yourself.

2) Don’t go straight to market

So often, hirers thrash out a job spec that’s ill-considered, is vague, or worse; over-engineered. Why waste your time attracting candidates whose skills aren’t matched your requirements? In short; nail your requirements and do not bother beginning searches until then, or risk making bad hires and wasting your time and gaining a reputation as a time-waster for future prospects in your market.

3) Keep up with the Jones’, don’t reinvent the wheel though

Don’t compromise your company’s core ethos, but don’t blindly ignore the world outside your window. Being innovative with perks and rewards isn’t a game-changer. Google might have sleep pods – maybe you just need a comfy couch area for team meetings. Water down and borrow from the concepts you read about with these tech corporates and voila – you can formulate perks that work for your business and keep your staff engaged and valued.

4) Listen to the motivator stats, for staff packages

Salary, holiday leave and pension are not ‘perks’. Don’t list them like that in your spec.

In a ridiculous twist of reality, Virgin and Netflix are offering candidates unlimited holidays, in return for hard work.

We can all agree, totally absurd and for 99.9% of businesses, unworkable. No employee in any walk of life thinks this is normal, not even millennials.

Saying that, stats show that (generation dependent) lifestyle benefits are the UK’s main priorities for job perks, above Luxuries, Trips away and free food.

The UK’s workers (really) want:

• Cheaper living costs
• More opportunity to have a life outside of work
• Great employer empathy and appreciation in the value of leading a less stressful existence

Base your package around these real and sustainable package pieces.

5) Un-wing your process

Maybe your hiring process is ‘organic’ and ‘humanized’. Here, I read ‘disorganized’, or even ‘ad-hoc’.

Want future employees to see you as a company that fumbles through a formal process? What tone does that set?

Don’t wing it. Create a fast, smooth and rigid hiring process. That doesn’t mean being a robot or putting candidates through the ringer, as that contradicts my first point about selling your business. If your hiring process has more steps than Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, chances are no candidate will be interested in seeing the pearly gates at the top.

Look at how long your recruitment process takes from start to finish.

Create markers to assess later, including:

• Skills
• Culture fit and personality
• Team ethic
• Values

If start to finish runs longer than 2 weeks, you can bet they’re being tapped up by other hirers and will have lost momentum (interest) with you.

6) Only offer when you know it’ll be a yes

Post interview, use your rigid process to create some real decision-making stats. Do this right away.

If you need to meet the candidate again, book it in for tomorrow or the day after, not in a week or two.

A delaying decision-maker is giving ammunition to other hirers who are also in talks with your candidate. If you’re not ready to make a decision, have you started hiring too soon?

Once you’ve reflected and analyzed, make an offer – but never, NEVER make an offer unless you know the answer is going to be yes.

This means – knowing what you’re competing with in terms of other applications underway, salary expectations, interest levels.

You need to know what the candidate is really seeking and what the offer needs to be in order for it to be a ‘yes’.

Don’t make blind job offers, work out the perfect offer balance and make the right offer.

As our own Director, Richard Jaye regularly tells his clients, with an offer ‘you only have one chance to make a first impression’.

Everything above, can be done with only a small amount of thought and work for perfect Recruitment Strategy. For a free process health check, contact, I’m always keen to help and offer my advice.

Get in touch with Twentyfour Recruitment today to take care of all your recruitment needs.