Keeping up With Hiring and Recruitment in 2021
The past year saw the domain of recruitment plunged into a sea of chaos. Some companies were forced to stop hiring because of financial pressures, while others had to quickly adapt to the challenge of recruiting talent virtually.
The dust has finally begun to settle in 2021 and companies are now gearing up for strong recruitment campaigns. More than ever, there is a demand for top talent that is not only technically capable of delivering innovation but also adaptable enough to help the company thrive in challenging situations, much like the pandemic we’ve just seen.
In the midst of this growing wave of recruitment, companies have begun to implement a number of hiring strategies that can help them stand out in the market and successfully attract top talent.
These strategies are partly driven by the unique circumstances imposed by the pandemic and partly inspired by advances in recruitment technology. Let’s explore these in detail.
Embrace remote hiring
Although remote hiring (and work) was a reaction to the lockdowns imposed during the pandemic, many companies have come to realize the potential it carries. Remote hiring allows you to search far beyond the geographical limits of the company and tap into a greater pool of top-quality candidates.
It also takes away the bias that can come from bad first impressions during in-person interviews. With virtual interviews, you can ask a set of pre-defined questions and get an unbiased evaluation of each candidate. Moreover, it helps accelerate the recruitment timeline by a great deal since people no longer have to travel to take the interviews.
Companies that embrace this new reality and pursue remote hiring will be able to find exceptional candidates who thrive because of remote work. Google is one such company - it conducted its summer internships ‘virtually’ during the summer of 2020 and has recently announced that the internships will remain virtual in 2021.
Be transparent
To attract the right candidates who fit into your company’s culture and stick around, you need to be clear and transparent in your job description.
You need to put up information related to the salary range and demographics for each position. This will help you attract people who are willing to work on the mentioned salary and care about your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values.
It is also important that you clearly define the responsibilities associated with the position, the location (whether the position requires on-site or remote work), and the expected timings. Ultimately, taking these measures will make sure the right people apply to your job postings, they are motivated to work, and you do not have to waste time filtering candidates at later stages.
Optimize your career site
With hiring becoming increasingly virtual, companies must deliver an excellent first impression to potential employees by focusing on their ‘brand’. This involves first (and foremost) your career site.
Anyone considering applying for a role at your company will inevitably head over to your career site for information and guidance. The impression they get from your career site can determine whether they get motivated to apply or head over to your competitor’s website.
So, make sure that your site hooks the top talent: make it visually appealing, free of errors and bugs, full of useful information about the company and its culture, and containing a coherent and well-defined application process.
Head over to Apple’s career site to gain inspiration from its stunning visuals and persuasive copy.
Provide a seamless onboarding experience
Once you have found a quality candidate who has accepted your job offer, how you go about their onboarding can largely determine how long they stick around in your company.
If you send them a poorly formatted document that has to be manually signed and scanned, they may develop a bad impression of your company’s methods and switch over to some other company. The same holds if your replies are slow and unclear and if they have to ask you for important information.
Therefore, focus on providing a seamless onboarding experience to all of your potential employees. Keep a starter’s pack and a welcome-message template prepared, go for digital signatures, and be frequent and quick in your replies.
Put yourself in the shoes of the candidate and think:
What information will I need before starting?
What sort of behavior do I expect from the company during my onboarding?
Answering these questions will take you a long way in landing the best talent.
Request candidate feedback
Finally, make yourself open to feedback. Ask each candidate to fill a short survey describing their experience with your recruitment pipeline. Did they have trouble finding relevant information on the career site? Was communication timely and useful? Did they face any other problems?
This information will help you identify the areas which are hurting your recruiting success, and allow you to improve. You will be able to tailor your process a lot more to what your target audience is looking for.
Hiring and recruitment have changed rapidly over the past years. There is ever greater competition between companies, with each having to invest a lot of money and effort into implementing the best strategies to attract and retain top talent.
Why not let a specialist recruitment agency like Segen (already well-versed with all the best recruiting strategies) handle your recruitment pipeline?
The benefits are many: We take care of the sourcing and bring you the top-tier talent that helps your company grow and excel.