10 Recruitment Strategies to Win the Competition for Talent

Recent data from Zippia reveals that 90% of employers report struggling to find candidates with the right skills. From murky job descriptions to impersonal onboarding procedures, recruitment mistakes can exacerbate the problem. As a staffing agency that’s been in the business for more than 20 years, we know that talent you’re seeking is out there; you might just need to improve your search.

Keep reading to explore our top 10 expert-approved recruitment strategies that will help you make the right hires from the get-go. Or, if you’re ready to skip to the good part, feel free to contact us today to see how we can streamline the recruiting process for you (no strings attached).

What is a Recruitment Strategy?

At its core, a recruitment strategy is a formal plan or approach that a company uses to find and hire the right people for their job openings. It involves tasks like creating job ads, writing job descriptions, and searching for candidates—but it doesn’t conclude with a signed offer letter.

Effective recruitment strategies help ensure new employees start seamlessly, providing them with the materials and resources for success from their first day.

Basics of a Recruiting Strategy

As you get started on your recruitment game plan, here are some fundamental elements to consider—along with key questions to guide its development:

Defining talent requirements and addressing skills gaps
Crafting a unique employer value proposition
Exploring different candidate sourcing methods and tools
Selection process and procedures
Creating or enhancing onboarding procedures

Let’s explore each one in more depth.

Talent Requirements and Skills Gaps

What capabilities are lacking in your organization or team? Which coveted skills would you like to introduce to grow your team’s abilities or impact on the bottom line? Knowing the answer to these questions can help you pinpoint the skills, certifications, and experience to look for in candidates.

Employer Value Proposition

Your employer value proposition is what you bring to your employees, and it sets your organization apart from its competitors. What makes your company an attractive place to work? Job seekers should be able to answer this question by reviewing your job listing and learning more about your brand.

Sit down and identify this with your team. Later, when your job description is ready to go, invite a friend or coworker to read it along with other recruiting materials to see if they can easily spot what makes your company and the job opening unique.

Candidate Sourcing Methods and Tools

How will you find the right candidates for your job openings? Which recruitment tools or platforms will work best? This decision can have a big impact on your recruitment strategy, so it’s important to think about it carefully, considering what will get your job in front of top candidates.

At the end of the day, not all websites and job boards are equally suited to your needs, so you should choose ones that will best target your intended applicant pool. For example, Indeed tends to attract a lot of entry-level and mid-level job seekers, making it less effective for filling senior-level positions.

Sharing your job opening with your personal network on LinkedIn? This can help you access a targeted audience of people in your industry and boost the job’s exposure to qualified, credible connections.

Selection Process

Your recruitment plan should outline how candidates will be assessed, both before and after the interview, to choose the best person for the job. It’s time to outline the must-haves and nice-to-haves of your role. Will you need to involve multiple internal stakeholders in the interview and selection process? The more players involved, the longer the game may take.

Employee Onboarding Procedure

A robust workforce hinges on having an effective recruitment plan, but it’s true potential is only fully realized when coupled with a supportive onboarding and training process.

Ultimately, the goal is to retain more employees and hire less. Turnover costs add up fast. A key part of retention is a carefully considered onboarding experience to help ensure your employees start their journey on the right track. And don’t forget to have follow-up conversations at regular intervals.

The Upsides of a Dedicated Recruiting Strategy

Experience and research tell us that the well thought out recruitment strategies can:

Lower recruitment costs
Draw in high-caliber candidates
Enhance employee retention rates
Speed up the hiring process
Improve the rate of accepted job offers
Establish an ongoing talent pool
Boost your company’s reputation

10 Expert Recruitment Strategies to Hire the Best Talent

Optimize your job description
Use a variety of job boards
Explore creative candidate sourcing methods
Work on your employer branding
Take a second look at your careers page
Limit your “must-have” requirements
Run a competitive compensation analysis
Don’t fumble the job offer
Polish your onboarding process
Track key recruiting metrics

1. Optimize Your Job Description

52% of job seekers say that the job description plays a big role in their decision to apply, so you want to make sure yours is on par with the competition.

A winning job description is clear, lacks confusing jargon and cliches, and concisely outlines what the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities will be. These are the basic elements of a job listing, but to truly shine brighter than your competition, you need more.

Highlight Your Employer Value Proposition

As we mentioned earlier, your employer value proposition is your number one selling point. What in-demand perks and benefits does your company offer? What makes your company an attractive place to work? And most importantly, how does the role impact the overall business?

Candidates want to know these things. Take it from Tim Silva, Insight Global’s own Managing Director of Business Information:

“The most sought-after companies are purpose-driven companies. If you can talk about how the role will drive the business forward in your job description, that’s a home run from a job seeker standpoint.”

Use Simple Job Titles

Always opt for simplicity when it comes to job titles. For instance, use “Marketing Manager” rather than “Digital Marketing Strategist and Brand Development Manager,” or “Graphic Designer” instead of “Visual Communication Specialist.” This approach may help potential candidates discover your job listings when searching the web.

Get Job Description Expertise

Sometimes, you need an expert’s touch to truly refine your job description. Book a free consultation with us and let one of Insight Global’s recruiting experts help you create a customized job description that targets the right keywords, capitalizes on the latest job description trends, and more.

2. Use a Variety of Job Boards

Choose which job boards will work best for your role, then make sure you’re using them the right way. Make it easy for candidates to apply and let them know what the interview process will entail. Consider sharing videos, images, or testimonials from current employees about what makes the company a great place to work.

Also, don’t forget about the smaller or more niche job posting sites that can yield equal, if not better, results! LinkedIn and Indeed are great candidate search tools, but they’re not the only ones. Consider industry-specific or community-focused sites. Here are just a handful of examples:

Tech Ladies
RecruitMilitary
Lawjobs
CareerVitals

3. Explore Creative Candidate Sourcing Methods

Job boards can be helpful, but they’re not a magic wand for finding the perfect hire. They might only be attracting passive candidates, and the most successful recruitment strategies combine both passive and active methods to find qualified people.

Network at career fairs and conferences
Ask for referrals from trusted sources or create an official employee referral program
Partner with professional organizations, like your local university

4. Work on Your Employer Branding

A strong employer brand is key to finding skilled, career-minded employees to work at your business. Check out these statistics:

83 percent of employers link employer brand to hiring top talent.
95 percent of candidates prioritize reputation in job searches.
75 percent of job seekers research a company’s reputation before applying.

But if you’ve never given much thought to your brand as an employer, how do you start from scratch? Or alternatively, how do you make improvements to your current employer brand? Experts say it’s essential to engage current employees in the process and take opportunities to highlight your brand’s culture.

You might consider creating social media profiles dedicated to showcasing life at your company, for example. On these platforms, you can celebrate promotions, highlight outstanding employees, showcase your philanthropic efforts, and show off your company culture.

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A post shared by Insight Global Life (@insightglobal_life)

5. Take a Second Look at Your Careers Page

Your careers page doesn’t have to be just a functional listing of every open position at your company. It can act as a hub for all your employer-branded content and beyond. Don’t just tell them; show potential candidates why they should work for your company and how it can enrich their careers. This is something to make central in your list of recruitment strategies.

Lessons from HubSpot

If you’re looking for inspiration, consider taking a page from HubSpot’s book. Front and center on their careers page are short, testimonial-style videos from employees answering questions like, “How does HubSpot enable you to bring your authentic self to work?” and “Describe a typical day in your role.”

As part of refining their employer brand, the company created the HubSpot Culture Code, a 128-page slide deck that’s “part manifesto” and “part employee handbook,” that can also be found on their careers page. In its pages, potential candidates can learn about the company’s mission, their values, and the culture (and a few sweet perks, too). Could your team create something similar?

6. Limit Your “Must-Have” Requirements

Nikolas Majic, Sales Manager at Insight Global, points out a common hiring challenge: having a long list of “must-have” requirements that can create unnecessary barriers to finding great talent.

Instead of hiring for a long list of niche skills and certifications, for example, consider training someone with a growth mindset to develop those skills at your company.

Or, in less populated areas, hiring managers might insist on hiring a full-time, in-person software engineer at a not-so-competitive rate.

In these situations, you may need to be open to hiring someone who can work remotely or be ready to offer a competitive relocation package and other perks to attract the right talent. But only you’ll know what’s truly workable and what can be stretched for the role, your team, and your budget.

7. Run a Competitive Compensation Analysis

Low compensation is the top reason candidates say they reject job offers, with “accepted a different offer” following close behind. These two reasons often go hand in hand. Needless to say, making sure you’re offering fair pay should be at the top of your list of recruitment strategies.

Here’s how you can make your organization stand out:

Take a Good Look at the Competition’s Job Listings

Salaries and benefits can change over time due to economic factors, industry shifts, and changes in demand for specific skills. How do you keep up with the constant flux in compensation standards?

Conducting research to look at what your competitors are doing is becoming a must to make sure your offers are reasonable. Are they paying more than you are? Is their turnover rate significantly below yours?

If you want your recruiting strategies to attract the best talent, it might be time to assess the market and consider if your salary standards meet them—if you’re able.

Book a Free Competitive Hiring Consultation

How efficient is your interview process? How long does it take and how many people are involved? Where in the process are you losing top talent?

We’ll answer all these questions and more in one of our free, 30-minute competitive hiring consultations. Get in touch with one of our hiring experts today.

8. Don’t Fumble the Job Offer

There’s a lot that goes in to making a job offer, but many job seekers are interviewing for multiple positions at the same time. Taking too long to decide could cause your candidate to drop out of the process just because a quicker offer came through.

Simply telling your candidate in a timely fashion that you want to hire them may give you an advantage over the competition.

9. Polish Your Onboarding Process

It’s essential that new employees feel welcomed and set up for success. Why? Research shows that it’s in the early days and weeks of a new job that an employee decides their future with your company, and a disorganized, disjointed onboarding experience can sour the new staffer’s opinion of the role and your company.

Insight Global Program Director Kelly McWhorter has a few general tips to create an impactful onboarding experience, so you can hire the right people and keep them around.

Involve Everyone

Anyone involved in the hiring process should be brought up to speed when you have a new employee coming in. This may include direct managers, recruiters, HR, payroll, training support, security, IT, and asset management. Or, for smaller companies, it might just be you and the person who needs to set up their desk and devices.

As an added note, make sure you let your new employee know how to reach their key partners in case they have questions or issues in their first weeks on the job.

Standardize Start Dates

If it makes sense for your company, consider implementing standardized start dates across the board to streamline the onboarding process. This practice might enable HR and other departments to align training sessions and orientation programs. It could promote better connections among new employees as well as for asset management by ensuring timely allocation and tracking of devices like laptops, phones, and access cards.

Give Them a Warm Welcome

Send your new hire a welcome email with information about the onboarding process and what to expect in the first week. After their onboarding, you could fill them in on what the next month will look like.

Be there to greet them on their first day, and ensure their desk is well prepared with all the necessary tools they need. Consider creating a welcome note to add a personal touch to their workspace to help them feel at home from day one.

FREE DOWNLOAD: Onboarding Checklist for Managers and HR Teams

10. Track Your Key Recruiting Numbers

When you’re putting these recruiting strategies into action, it’s important to gauge their effectiveness. To assist you in tracking your outcomes, consider keeping up with some essential recruiting metrics like these:

Time to hire: The time it takes to hire a new employee.
Offer acceptance rate: The percentage of job offers that candidates say yes to.
Cost per hire: How much it costs to hire one employee, including your time, recruiting expenses, advertising, and onboarding costs.
Candidate experience: A survey to ask how candidates feel about the application and interview process.
Retention rate: How many employees stay with the company over a period of time.
Source of hire: Where the company finds most new employees and if that’s giving you the long-term, successful workers you need.

The Hiring Support You Need from an Expert Partner

Creating recruitment strategies that really work takes time, but you don’t have to do it alone. The ultimate solution for hiring is teaming up with a staffing agency like Insight Global. We understand the importance of having the right talent in your organization, and we’ll go the extra mile to secure it for you.

Our free consultations cover everything from fine-tuning your job listings to diving deep into your local job market. We’ll help you craft smart hiring plans that attract, hire, and keep the best candidates for your team. The best part? You don’t pay a dime until their first day. Get in touch with us today.

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