Step 1: Answer these 5 questions. Step 2: Begin attracting top talent.

To go about attracting the best candidates for your open roles, you can start strategizing with answers to the following questions in hand.

According to CNBC, nearly 48 million people quit their jobs in 2021. While this is, by far, an annual record, there are no signs that The Great Resignation is slowing down. The Washington Post reports that nearly 4.3 million people left their jobs in January 2022.

What does this all mean for companies eager to recruit fresh talent? One thing that is for sure: there is no shortage of available candidates. The challenge is to go about attracting the best candidates whose skills and years of experience help add value to your organization’s operations.

To begin with, start by answering fundamental questions, like “What are the growth projections for the organization throughout the calendar year?”, “How much revenue does the company need to earn to make target?”, and “Which departments will be leading the charge to attain that growth?”

With the fundamentals covered, you can begin to formulate how to go about attracting the best candidates for your most pressing roles. Keep in mind, highly skilled candidates are only on the market for approximately 10 days before they’re deep into an interview process with a new company. If you don’t have your hiring strategy firmly in place, you could miss out on exceptional talent.

Dive a bit deeper by considering the following questions as you begin your recruitment strategy:

1. Which departments require additional support to achieve your growth targets?

At this step of the hiring process, your recruitment team needs to consult with the department heads and senior managers across the organization. Have fully transparent discussions about performance metrics within each department so that you can agree on areas where an injection of fresh talent can help the team fulfill their commitments to grow the business.

Remember that in-house recruiters can have anywhere between 1 and 100 candidate requisition requests open at any given time. When there is this much volume in the candidacy pipeline, priorities need to be made.

That’s why it’s important while attracting the best candidates to map out any talent shortages in service to the growth expectations for the company. Departments that are most likely to directly contribute to revenue and growth should be prioritized in terms of attracting the best candidates to grow the capabilities of different teams. With the right priorities, a recruitment strategy can yield impressive results.

2. Where are the current skills gaps in your existing employee roster?

Once you know which department must take priority in the hiring process, you can discuss in greater detail with department heads about the specific needs on the team, highlight skills gaps and profile optimal candidates. Guide those discussions using leading questions to help identify the skills gaps on the team.

For example, when speaking with a head of sales, ask things like:

• Is there a sales approach that seems to get the best results?
• What type of personality traits are consistent among the top salespeople?
• How many more leads are forecast for the year, and how many new recruits are needed to effectively manage that inbound volume?

Similarly, for product or marketing, ask questions such as:

• What is the future direction of the product or the brand?
• Are there upcoming releases or campaigns that require immediate support?
• In what other ways could expanding the team’s capabilities further enable growth?

Answers to these and similar questions will help your recruiters develop an ideal candidate profile to fulfill the needs of each department. Profiles can be tailored around specific skills to ensure that, when attracting the best candidates, only ones whose skills and experience match the needs of the department qualify for in-person interviews.

3. How important is culture to the recruitment process?

Skills and experience form the backbone of a candidate profile. But there are more considerations to take into account when developing those profiles, including culture and compatibility with the existing team.

Hiring for culture doesn’t mean you should hire people who think and act exactly the same as each other. Instead, for attracting the best candidates, approach culture as an alignment of personality traits and values that mirror the values of the organization. By building culture around a shared subset of values, you’ll increase the compatibility of various team members that should deliver a boost in productivity that will further help grow the business, and you may even be able to develop an employee persona that aligns with the corporate culture of the company, and use this in future recruiting efforts.

4. How fast do you need to make hiring decisions to achieve growth targets?

You may have specific deadlines to meet when hiring talent. Growth forecasts for the year and how much time you have remaining in the year mark important measuring posts that guide how fast you need to make hiring decisions. Speed to hire is an important metric for recruiters, especially when pressed up against very aggressive growth targets and ever-shrinking timelines to deliver those expectations.

The faster you can make hiring decisions, the more you can evaluate the effectiveness of your recruitment process. Does faster candidate placement translate into scalable growth for the company? On the other hand, are tight deadlines decreasing the quality of candidates and resulting in high employee turnover?

Employee turnover can cost companies as much as 33 percent of the departed employee’s annual salary. If tight hiring deadlines are resulting in more turnover or poor performance among new hires, it means your hiring strategy is not as effective as it needs to be. Then, you can start to implement new solutions that will not only assist you with attracting the best candidates, but you’ll also improve speed to hire KPIs as well as the overall performance of new hires.

5. Are you leveraging the best forms of technology to assist with your candidate search?

The right technology stack can help immensely with attracting the most top qualified candidates. Companies that use the right mix of technology to improve their hiring strategies gain a competitive advantage over their non-technically savvy competitors. With the right talent acquisition platform, your recruiters could spend up to 70 percent less of their own time attracting the best candidates for open positions.

The right mix of technology frees up time for your recruiters and hiring managers to focus on things like:

• Improving the interview process for selected candidates
• Helping to integrate new hires with established teams
• Mapping out future recruitment tactics for the next wave of candidates
• Delivering on talent management strategies that further support growing the business

With answers to the above questions in hand, you will be armed with the best strategy for attracting the absolute best-fit candidates for your open roles, and best of all, you will be set up for ultimate success.

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