The four main goals of your optimized recruitment strategy

With your audit complete and your A-team assembled, the next step is to imagine the candidate experience you want to offer. In an ideal world, how would you attract the best talent? How would you greet them, tantalize them, make them want to work for you? What would you want them to say about your brand, culture, people, even if they weren’t the right fit for the role?

To suit today’s candidate-driven market, we have identified four main goals, or pillars, upon which you can base your new-look Talent Acquisition strategy: Move fast, be competitive, emphasize culture, and rely on data. We’ll examine each of these in turn.

3.1. Move fast

Many (if not all) of your top candidates are interviewing for multiple positions, and may be close to an offer or a second round of consideration. If nothing else – if you know you can’t compete on the level of salary, or perks, or organization size – make sure your candidates can progress efficiently through your recruitment funnel. 

We recommend playing the part of the candidate, and testing your funnel from start to finish. Go through the process of applying for one of your roles, submitting a CV, scheduling an interview, and following-up afterward. The inefficiencies in your process are likely to be laid bare. Many of them, you will find, are easily fixed. 

Consider the following, as common weak points:

• Candidates do not receive an acknowledgement email after applying for a job, and submitting their CV
• Candidates have no easy access to the calendar of the hiring representative responsible for the role, and so cannot book in times or make proposals based on their availability
• Non-Talent Acquisition team members take too long to review top priority CVs (for instance, your Engineering team lead taking too long to review CVs for an Engineer role)
• Non-Talent Acquisition team members take too long to schedule interviews with candidates
• Too many follow-up interviews with different members/tiers of the organization
• Holding up early stages of the funnel with pre-employment personality or aptitude tests

3.2. Be competitive

Supply is low and demand is high, which of course means that you will have to pay more for top talent than you may have in the past. Last year, in the US, those who switched jobs saw their wages increase by an average of 8% (according to TIME). If you find that you are commonly losing out on desirable candidates, you may have to revisit your salary offerings across the board. This is not always easy, or possible, but salary is a major factor in hiring success.

The bottom line is this: If you can’t be competitive with salary, you need to double down on something else, be it perks or culture (or both). With regards to perks, you may have more wriggle room. What can you offer candidates, now, to sweeten the prospect of coming on board? Health insurance buffs, stock options, meal packages, and flexible work arrangements commonly top the perk lists of the world’s top companies.

Let’s talk about culture next.

3.3. Emphasize culture

Culture is everything. However, in this new world of remote working, its definition has changed. Culture is less about team togetherness in the traditional, geographic sense – it’s now more about meaningful connections and flexibility. You might even say that, in 2022, culture is flexibility: Over the last two years, LinkedIn’s Chief People Officer, Teuila Hanson, noted a 362% increase in LinkedIn member posts about flexibility. People want to work from home, or remotely, and they want a demonstrable commitment to employee wellbeing.

LinkedIn offers us another good example of culture in this regard: Their LiftUp! program, which boasts mental health resources, no-meeting days, calm leadership training, and “surprise and delight” moments. 

Why not emulate LinkedIn, and package the best products of your team culture into a branded product of its own? For little extra work, you have turned a loose list of value-adds into a compelling deal-sweetener.

More than ever, culture is also about your commitment to doing good. Are you particularly proud of your diversity and inclusion efforts? Your Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives? Your maternity and paternity leave policies? Talk about them often, and early in the recruitment process. These will help you win candidates, particularly young graduate candidates.

This brings us back to marketing. How are you showing off your culture? Are your people, your perks, your strengths on show? Do they sit at the top of your job advertisements, or are they buried in the footer? Are your ‘Careers’ and ‘About us’ pages attractive and dynamic testaments to your best attributes? If not, more emphasis is always a winning idea.

3.4. Rely on data

Your recruiting tool likely comes with a built-in analytics feed, or a set of basic visualizations. LinkedIn Recruiter, for example, helps you to track metrics like ‘quality of hire’, ‘sourcing channel effectiveness’, ‘time to hire’, ‘cost per hire’, and ‘candidate experience rating’. 

These metrics are useful in helping you understand how your recruitment funnel operates, and where it might be improved. Interestingly, however, many companies still don’t look deeply at the data they collect. LinkedIn points out that only 27% of their users track candidate experience ratings, and just 34% track candidate diversity. When you consider that 80-90% of candidates say a positive or negative experience can change their mind about a role or company, and that almost 60% of jobseekers have had a poor candidate experience, it becomes clear that tracking these metrics is of critical importance.

Recruitment data is a sprawling topic, and it can be hard to know where to start. Just what do you track, and what do you deprioritize? Assuming you have some kind of measurement tool or platform, here’s where we recommend you start (note: None of these metrics are bad, per se – it’s all about prioritization. Microsoft, for instance, focuses on one to two metrics per month).

As a side note, if you want to solve the great puzzle of hire quality, look no further than Sapia’s Smart Interviewer. Candidates participate in our chat-based FirstInterview and our second-round Video Interview, and the suitability results are filtered automatically to you. It’s fair, unbiased, and incredibly accurate – and it results in candidate satisfaction scores of more than 90%.