The scramble for top talent is on. Job seekers are carefully looking for location flexibility, alignment with a company’s ethics, salary transparency and more across corporate career sites, in job descriptions and within the overall candidate experience and communications. On top of resignations and job openings at record high levels, recruiters are also finding it common to have final candidates fielding multiple and competitive offers.
Getting top talent across the finish line to a happy hire is no easy feat these days. (Was it ever?!) While it may be considerably more challenging to combat the many factors driving candidate decisions these days, it’s essential that recruiting teams adapt to this new world of hiring and find ways to stand out from the recruiting crowd with a timely, informative, and personalized candidate experience.
Job creation is on the rise, widening the labor demand and supply gap.
An analysis by Citibank predicts that vacancies will pass the 20 million mark this year. While an increase in jobs paints a positive picture of a growing economy, we’ve seen over 4 million U.S. citizens leave their jobs since July 2021 seeking more fulfillment of their changing needs and wants.
Outshine your competitors by communicating the unique strengths of your employer brand across the hiring journey.
To successfully compete for top talent, you need to rethink your strategic recruiting plan including how to better communicate the value of your employer brand to the right audience. A whitepaper published by LinkedIn shared that knowing how to leverage your employer brand effectively and consistently across the hiring journey will not only make you an irresistible employer—it will also save you at least 25% in recruitment costs through lower voluntary turnover and faster attraction of qualified candidates.
So, how can you better communicate your employer brand to stand out and get those coveted hires? Check out these 3 #GR8Tips to get started on the right path:
1. Rethink your career site
Your career site is the first contact point between your company and potential hires. LinkedIn also reports that 59% of job seekers will visit your career page in detail to vet a job opening. To ensure that your career site exudes the strength of your employer brand, consider what your candidates want and how you present that experience. For example, showcasing your company’s mission and evidence of a clear commitment to DEI is a great way for candidates to see if their values align with yours. High-value candidates want more than a paycheck today—they want to be in an environment that reflects what they think is important. According to a mission and culture survey by Glassdoor, 77% of people consider company culture before applying for a job. Also, make sure your site is mobile-optimized. Research indicates that, for the first time, the number of jobs applied via mobile phones surpassed desktops applications.
Beyond your front-facing career site, keep your application process in mind. Consider the use of AI and intelligent automation to make the candidate journey smoother. Applicants will likely abandon an application process prematurely if they can’t get past (at the most basic level) a poor job search experience or inability to join a talent pool and easily opt-in for recurring job alerts. Further, we can all attest to the fact that excessive application forms riddled with redundant fields to fill in make it less likely for job candidates to complete the application. Be sure to audit and refine the length of the apply process too.
2. Text recruiting
Securing top talent is also about going to where your candidates are. Text messages have a record 98% open rate compared to 20% for email marketing. With text recruiting, your potential employees get more than just a quick experience—they start building a relationship with your recruiters in a way that exemplifies your employer brand. Recruiters can send links to videos, images and other content that define your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and confirm next steps in the hiring process faster, especially when that text is triggered by completed activities in the workflow.
To get started with text recruiting, you will need to make it easy and voluntary for candidates to opt-in to texts and consider scheduling your messages to avoid candidates receiving them at unideal times. Recruiters can also use templates to ensure consistency, personalization and efficiency. (Your text recruiting solution should be able to handle that!) Think of the time saved and more importantly, the competitive edge gained by beating an email from another organization attempting to hire your best lead with a personalized text from you.
3. Automated candidate nurturing of talent pools
Most organizations have struggled to achieve their candidate nurturing and engagement goals, with adoption often cited as the culprit—as few as 2% of companies say they use all of their Talent CRM software functionality. With responsibility falling to busy recruiters who are already trying to do more with less, it’s no surprise that these programs can run into trouble.
The next generation of Talent CRM recruiting software ensures that the system delivers qualified, interested and available talent through an automated talent pool model that eliminates the complexity associated with prior candidate nurturing and engagement efforts. Put more simply, it is a move away from talent communities that require daily management to talent pools that benefit from automated lead journeys tied to outcomes.
Pre-defined, rules-based journeys for talent pool leads (whether they are new to the organization, previously considered or even silver medalists) mean that recruiters no longer have to worry about continually creating outreach campaigns on an ad hoc basis when they have a few minutes to spare. Instead, the system works for them. Through automation that manages ongoing candidate engagement paired with pre-defined rules for the lead journey, built-in questionnaires assess each lead’s qualifications, interest and engagement along the way. The result is an actionable list of people recruiters can tap into immediately. We’re talking about high-quality candidates who have already expressed an interest in the organization who have enjoyed a personalized, timely and informative experience thanks to intelligent automation.
These 3 key strategies represent a huge opportunity for recruiting teams, particularly those that lack the time required by traditional approaches to communicating their employer brand messaging to drive candidate engagement and hires. Recruitment and the strategic approach to conveying the value of your employer brand to top talent is both a science and an art. With the right tools, expertise, and a willingness to adapt, you will beat economic dynamics, the recruiting crowd and effectively communicate your employer brand to attract valuable candidates faster, smarter and over time even easier.