How is the Talent Acquisition Process Nowadays?
The typical talent acquisition process can be defined as the set o steps involved in searching, shortlisting, and onboarding candidates who will contribute to the company’s success over a period of time. It involves 5 crucial steps which are fairly complex sub-processes in themselves:
1) Brand positioning of the company to attract the best talent pool
2) Reaching out to potential applicants through various channels, including social media
3) Verifying, filtering, and assessing the candidate’s profile-performance against set parameters
4) Actual employee-hiring and onboarding
5) Sustaining employee engagement and improving the hiring experience.
In theory, they are quite comprehensive and sound convincing. But as a TA specialist, you would be wondering what is actually going on out there? Because, if the steps are failure-proof, why is it that according to a JobVite study, 30% of new hires leave within 90 days of joining a company?
Further, in the 2019 State of Talent Acquisition Report by Mettl revealed that 74% of companies surveyed are still struggling to hire top talent.
Actually, the mindset of skilled candidates nowadays is not that different from that of buyers. They want value for their skill, experience, and eventual commitment to whichever company they end up joining.
And it’s not just about the money or work atmosphere alone. It includes all aspects of the employee’s experience with the company, starting with the company’s value proposition, and ending with the eventual post-exit memories.
Phew! It’s quite a handful and you wouldn’t be timid to feel that it’s like a mountain to climb, given the ever present pressures, and ever mounting burdens of belonging to the unsung heroes of the organization’s success story: the community of recruiters.
So how do you attract these top quality, highly skilled, and customer-mentality candidates and engage them well enough to extract the best results from their association with your company?
Read on to discover the top strategies to achieve that…
Strategies to Create Exceptional TA Experiences
There is no dearth of material on talent acquisition strategies on the internet and volumes can be written on it. But to draw meaningful insights, and make timely and successful hiring decisions, all you will ever need is the following seven winning strategies.
Inbound lead generation
This is a detailed and complex sub-process that starts with building a good employer value proposition, an attractive company website, posting the job description on the internet, job portals and boards, promoting internal recruitment, and pretty much all the activities that are aimed at attracting the best candidates from the talent pool out there.
Leveraging outbound recruitment tactics, including social media outreach
You need to spread your outreach program across various channels such as paid job ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., conducting career counseling sessions, promoting your jobs at job fairs, and even email marketing. Once the leads are generated, just reach out to them using email, text messages, phone, or even snail-mail if required.
Pro tip: When you are reaching out to candidates for a job opening via email, feel free to use cold email outreach. Most people won’t mind receiving a cold email regarding a job opening. Just avoid spamming them though, and make sure you let them unsubscribe, which is mandatory as per the law.
Nurturing the lead pipeline of qualified candidates
The candidates whom you reach out to may or may not respond initially. In some cases, they are simply not looking out, and in some cases it could be that they did not like your brand positioning well enough. But the secret recipe to success to overcome all these challenges is quite simply – perseverance. In marketing terms, this is called lead nurturing.
Filtering and selecting based on the set parameters
This strategy is fairly straightforward even though a little delicate. First, you need to have planned a clear set of parameters based on which to verify, screen, and filter the candidates. These parameters would include criteria such as educational qualifications, level of experience, work ethics, career goals, and culture fit. Plus, you need to also validate the candidate’s alignment with the company’s overall value system and philosophy.
Sometimes this may feel like a tightrope to walk, but if you avoid the common recruitment mistakes, you will do just fine.
Checking the authentic references
This is a very crucial strategy that is often not given due importance, and is treated as a formality. Whereas in truth, the effectiveness of a reference check depends on the way you gather the kind of information you are looking for from the referenced persons.
For instance, an ex-boss who has been given as a reference by a candidate is likely to give positive feedback first-up if you ask a generic question such as, “How would you rate this person as an employee?” But if you ask a pointed question such as, “What would be the three improvement opportunities that you had identified as the reporting manager of this employee, and how did he respond to your feedback in the developmental process?” will give you great insights into what the likely experience of the future reporting manager is likely to be in managing this candidate.
Reference checks are a potent weapon and if used well, they might even help you better assess the culture fitness of prospective employees.
onboarding the new employees
In terms of the activities involved, employee onboarding is about negotiating and finalizing the financial remuneration and other perks, terms of service, educating about the company’s policies and setting expectations.
For instance, you need to set the tone from the very beginning about what you expect from the employees, and even give them a sense of the typical day at work. It is also about how you make the new employees feel when they begin their journey with your organization.
Acting on the employee feedback to improve the hiring process
A lot of people tend to leave within the first few months of joining. This is probably because companies tend to forget the value of continuous reviews in the early days of the new hires. Getting regular feedback from them can be a truly winning strategy. Because, it would not only give you insights into why others have left, but you might also uncover underlying causes that drive employee turnover.
Pro tip: Have a dedicated HR person for collecting and processing feedback from the new hires. This will build trust and rapport, and will make it easy for the new employees to be open and provide uninhibited feedback.
Leveraging Technology for Successful Talent Acquisition
You need all the above strategies at your disposal to navigate through the various stages of the TA process – ranging from developing a clear TA strategy, to making win-win recruitment decisions. But being armed with the top winning strategies is not the end of it, but only the beginning.
In order to truly create exceptional talent acquisition experiences and make the process enjoyable for both the recruiters as well as the candidates, you need to put knowledge into action. And what better way to do it than to use advanced technology, such as a talent acquisition cloud like RippleHire’s ATS.
So make the move, take the leap (not of faith) but of a calculated investment, and you will reap the reward of making excellent hiring decisions – and even better, sustaining them in the long run.
And isn’t that all we ever want – to be a successful Talent Acquisition team?
