4 Great Recruiting Strategies to Attract the Best Candidates 31 Oct 2018

If you want to learn how to attract the best candidates for your open job positions, this blog post is for you. In this blog post, I will present 4 great recruiting strategies that will help you attract the best job candidates.

And don’t worry – implementing these 4 recruiting strategies is not complicated and costly – it only requires a bit of your time and effort. It’s a small price to pay in return for swiping the best candidates from right under your competitors’ nose!

Your Best Candidates Are Already Employed

If you’re struggling to attract the best job candidates, don’t worry – you are not alone. Glassdoor has found that an overwhelming 76% of hiring managers admit attracting top talent is their greatest challenge.

Why is this so?

Well, these days unemployment rates are lower than ever, which means that most people are already employed. Especially the best among them! In other words, your best job candidates are passive job seekers.

How to Attract Passive Candidates

If you want to hire the best candidates, using the most common recruiting strategies such as advertising your open job positions on job boards won’t get you far. Since the chances are the most talented people already have a job, they aren’t actively looking for another one. They won’t be checking out job boards so you can’t expect them to simply see your job ads and apply for your open job positions.

To attract the best candidates, you will have to change your mindset and implement new, proactive recruiting strategies. The best candidates won’t come to you. In fact, they probably don’t even know that you exist! So what can you do to get on the top talent’s radar and attract their attention, especially if they are not looking for a job?

Recruiting Strategies for Attracting Passive Candidates

To attract the best candidates, you need to transform your recruiting process from reactive to proactive. Instead of waiting for the best candidates to come to you, go where they are and present your employer brand in the most compelling way!

Here are my 4 favorite proactive recruiting strategies that are perfect for attracting the top passive talent. These 4 recruiting strategies are easy to implement and won’t cost you a fortune – just a bit of your time and effort.

1. Social media recruiting

The first proactive recruiting strategies I would like to talk about is social media recruiting. Using social media recruiting is one of the most important and effective recruitment strategies for attracting the best talent.

Why is that? Because social media sites are the perfect, if not the only, place to reach passive candidates. Passive candidates who aren’t actively looking for a job won’t visit job boards or your career site. Instead, they will spend time connecting with other professionals and their family and friends through social media networks.

In other words, social media networks are the perfect place to hunt for top talent. Especially the top young talent. A recent Aberdeen Group’s research has found that an overwhelming 73% of millennials found their last position through a social media site.

This is why it is absolutely necessary for your company that you learn how to promote your employer brand on social media effectively and efficiently.

2. Utilizing employee referrals

The second most effective proactive recruiting strategy for attracting the best talent is without any doubt utilizing employee referrals. Your existing top employees probably have many similar experts in their social networks, so asking them to recommend other great candidates is a very effective recruiting strategy. In fact, Dr. John Sullivan’s research has found that 88% of employers said that referrals are the number one best source for above-average applicants.

If you want to make the most out of this recruiting strategy, you need to set up a structured employee referral program in your company. This includes creating an official employee referral policy, continuous promotion of your employee referral programs and offering attractive employee referral awards.

3. Organizing educational events

The third proactive recruiting strategy for attracting the best candidates is organizing educational events. The logic behind this is very simple – top talent is passionate about learning and continuously improving their knowledge. In order to stay on top of the new industry trends and up to date with the latest best practices, these driven individuals regularly visit different educational events.

Get in front of the best candidates, sponsor, co-host or even organize your own educational event. It doesn’t have to be a big, international conference – it can be a lecture, workshop or a local experts meetup. If you’re striving to attract the best candidates from all over the world, utilize this digital era and organize an online event such as a webinar or a series of online lectures.

4. Keeping your career site up to date

The last, but in no way the least important proactive recruiting strategy to attract the best candidates is to create and maintain a great career site. In the end, all three previously mentioned recruiting strategies come down to this one. No matter if the top talent finds out about your company and its job openings on social media, some educational event or through employee referrals, be sure that they will inspect your career site carefully.

According to Talent Board research, your careers page is the number one place candidates go to research your company. This is why it’s of crucial importance to create an attractive and visually appealing, modern career site with a lot of interesting content. Finally, remember that your career site is always a work in progress. Regularly update your career site with great new blog posts, photos and videos to keep it relevant and fresh.

Bonus Tip for Hiring the Best Candidates

If you implement the above mentioned 4 recruiting strategies, I guarantee you that you’ll have plenty of great candidates lined up to work for you.

Once you attract the best candidates, your job is not done! Attracting great candidates is just the first step in the complicated process of hiring the best among them. Keep that in mind throughout your whole hiring process! Work hard to provide the best candidate experience for your candidates. Remember that they can opt out of your hiring process at any given moment!

My advice to you is to pay special attention to the interview phase of your recruitment process. According to LinkedIn, 65% of candidates say a bad interview experience makes them lose interest in the job! Avoid that happening to you by learning how to be a good interviewer and provide a great candidate experience.