What Is One Best Practice For Talent Acquisition?
To help you follow best practices for talent acquisition, we asked hiring managers and business leaders this question for their best advice. From providing constructive feedback to rejected candidates to prioritizing diversity and inclusion, there are several best practices that you may adopt for your hiring process to help you acquire the best talents for your organization.
Here Are 10 Talent Acquisition Best Practices:
- Provide Constructive Feedback To Rejected Candidates
- Leverage Both Inbound and Outbound Talent Tools
- Host Virtual Career Fairs
- Follow a Comprehensive Hiring Process
- Leverage Data and Analytics
- Work On Employment Branding
- Incentivize Employees To Make Referrals
- Prioritize Your Talent Needs First
- Communicate With Candidates Who Didn’t Make The Cut
- Prioritize Diversity and Inclusion
Provide Constructive Feedback To Rejected Candidates
A best practice of talent acquisition is providing constructive feedback to candidates when they don’t get the role. While this may sound like an altruistic waste of time for some, ultimately the goal is to create promoters of your company. The quickest way to do that with someone you aren’t hiring?
Help them land that next role with constructive feedback. I have taken that approach in the years I recruited, and now that I manage a team I underscore how important the candidate experience is. When a candidate has a good experience they will tell their friends and colleagues, and this will generate referrals.
Bad experience? No feedback? The recruiter ghosts them or doesn’t close the loop in a timely fashion? They will also tell their friends and colleagues, and at a much higher rate than with the positive experience. This can negatively impact your brand, prevent referrals, and make recruiting that much harder. So do the right thing, and reap the rewards!
Sarah Peck, AEVEX Aerospace
Leverage Both Inbound and Outbound Talent Tools
Oftentimes, companies will only post jobs and interview inbound applicants or they will exclusively rely on outbound recruiting to bring in talent. While both are useful, they are even stronger together. Explore the free and low-cost sites you can post your jobs to, including (Indeed, LinkedIn, Talent, etc.).
Many job sites also offer free trials to post for free for a limited time so leverage those free periods if you haven’t already. If you’re able to hire remotely, research which cities have a high density of candidates you are looking for and post your jobs in those cities as well.
Some searches require very specific expertise that can be hard to find from job post applicants. This is where the value of tools like LinkedIn Recruiter and Indeed Resume comes into play. Use a wide range of filters to narrow down large candidate pools to just ones that fit your hard-to-fill job descriptions. Reach out to these individuals with a concise pitch on why they should join your company.
Colton De Vos, Resolute Technology Solutions
Host Virtual Career Fairs
If you have a large number of openings across many departments, and you are open to remote workers, hosting a virtual recruiting fair can help decrease the amount of time it takes to weed through your candidates.
You can have your team dispersed around a virtual networking room (in a platform like Preciate), and candidates can move around and have individual conversations with your team to see who connects best with your employees before you move to actual interviews.
Ed Stevens, Preciate
Follow a Comprehensive Hiring Process
Just because a candidate meets all the requirements for a job does not necessarily mean they are the best fit. To ensure you are bringing on someone who can excel in your line of work and become a great member of your team, the hiring process should be comprehensive. Job postings should thoroughly outline the job to attract prospective employees who meet the job requirements and are excited about the responsibilities.
Once you have a good pool of applicants the hiring process should be set up to assess the candidate’s relevant skills and personality to fit the company culture. Every new hire should align with your company’s mission, vision, and values. It is also important to run a background check on candidates as a final check to make sure you are making the right hiring decision and protect the organization from a number of risks.
Jeffrey Pitrak, Transient Specialists
Leverage Data and Analytics
Just as you wouldn’t dive into a marketing campaign without data, you shouldn’t launch a talent acquisition strategy without relevant and adequate data. Analytics will help you identify where your target candidates are, the company benefits that interest them, and what they are looking for in an employer.
Data will also help to optimize job descriptions, interview questions, pre-hiring assessments, and career pages, ensuring that the application process is streamlined and candidate-friendly. Leveraging data to attract and hire top talent also improves profitability for any size of business.
Joe Coletta, 180 Engineering
Work On Employment Branding
Defining organizational culture and company image are essential tasks for talent acquisition, as this differentiates the organization from other competitors in the market. Employment branding is especially related to the company’s reputation as an employer brand and can help improve workers’ perception of the organization.
The more positive the company stands in the labor market, the greater the chances of attracting qualified professionals to its selection processes. All this is built with a solid culture, offering attractive benefits, competitive salaries, etc.
Ricardo von Groll, Talentify
Incentivize Employees to Make Referrals
Employers encourage their employees through rewards to refer qualified candidates for jobs. Employee referrals are the best source of new talents for an organization. They provide immediate access to talent sourced through personal connections with employees. This practice saves on time and costs.
GISERA MATANDA, WeLoans
Prioritize Your Talent Needs First
Before you set out to find great talent for your business, you must first prioritize the areas in which you will require it. Determine what abilities and competencies will be required to fill the desired position and then proceed with the big pool of talent. Target your niche and tackle it strategically. Hiring the right individual is considerably easier with a good plan and framework in place.
Adrian Tan, Adrian Tan
Communicate With Candidates Who Didn’t Make The Cut
When you want to buTalent Acquisition Best Practicesild goodwill toward your organization over time (and ultimately build a good reputation as an employer), one of the best things you can do for yourself is to let people down nicely. That is, tell them they didn’t get the job instead of letting them hear nothing. This can be done at-scale with a good ATS. However, for the 50%+ of companies who don’t use an ATS, this should also be done, albeit with more manual steps.
Why? What’s at risk if you don’t do this? For companies who rely on their brand to sell, it can be devastating as those folks you’re not communicating with are potentially a big part of your customer base. For companies who don’t have a brand per-se, it can still leave a bad taste in your candidate’s mouth to not hear from you.
And good luck getting them to want to apply to your job again down the road when they might be a better fit. That’s why I consider this type of communication a key part of good talent acquisition efforts because it builds trust.
Justin Vajko, Dialog
Prioritize Diversity and Inclusion
When laying out a talent acquisition strategy, it is easy to overlook the importance of diversity and inclusion. But even the best acquisition strategy is ineffective if it doesn’t prioritize diversity and inclusion. One way to do this is to review job descriptions to identify and eliminate possible biases and optimize them to attract a diverse talent pool.
There is plenty of research showing that diversity in talent sourcing and hiring can give a company a competitive edge, strengthen company culture, and even boost profitability.
Paul French, Intrinsic Executive Search
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