Have you noticed that recruitment is getting harder? 

Most businesses that have been through a successful recruitment process will tell you that it is not that simple and can be incredibly time-consuming. 

Finding a new team member isn’t just about posting job ads. It’s about executing a plan to make sure you get the candidates that best fit the job description AND your company culture. The hard job you have ahead of you is to correctly get across your job requirements and ‘real’ working environment AND potentially find and select a team member who matches both of those criteria. 

The recruitment process involves the end-to-end steps from how you may be picking up passive applicants (those who may just be looking even if you don’t have a vacancy, to how you handle and communicate with the applicants throughout the entire process (or risk ticking them off), how you set up interviews, how many interviews you have and with whom, what you cover in the interviews, how you handle the non-successful candidates and more…not easy right?

We learnt a lot in 2020. This was a challenging time for businesses and companies to play the recruiting game. If you don’t have a clear plan in place of how you will approach this process (like any other process in your business), you can end up making costly mistakes.

So, this week we are sharing 5 top tips you can use to accelerate your hiring for 2021: 

1. Make the Job Ad clear and speak to the candidates you are trying to attract

Why is this important? More often than not, it’s the first thing that candidates take a look at. It’s also the starting point of the applicant experience. So make sure that your job ad contains a good tone of voice, it can be accessed through different channels (mobile, laptop, and tablet) and includes your contact information in case they want to further discuss the job details with you. Make sure you nail your job ads so applicants can get a feel of both what the role requirements are and what the culture of your business is. 

To note once you have your job ad, then you need to think about what is the best place to share it:-

• job boards such as Seek, Career One, indeed 
• the paper (particularly relevant for some regional roles) 
• your social media most relevant to where your candidates will be
• if it is a regular job, you may consider generating its landing page and boosting that
• under your career page on your website that covers more about the company, team, position and what it is like to work for your company
• relevant position or industry groups’ social media 

2. Don’t forget about internal candidate potential

Communicating with your team about current and upcoming potential vacancies is critical and is often a step that is forgotten about in the rush to get a job ad up. 

A good talent pool of internal resources gives you the resources that keep giving. Always check your talent pool first and share upcoming potential roles with them first. 

You need to get the balance right here of bringing in new blood and experience and developing your team. You don’t want to set internal candidates up to fail if they don’t have all the skills however if you continually recruit externally and don’t offer internal candidates the opportunities that arise, you could disengage them and block them from developing their careers further.

3. Stay  in touch with past candidates who were a good fit

Just because a candidate may not be right for the position you are currently recruiting for, doesn’t mean they are not right for a future potential position. Similarly, if you have a top 3 for example and only one position available, make sure you stay in contact with the other potentials regularly to keep them warm. Recruitment is time-consuming and if you can leverage your time and keep the details of any candidates that were a great fit, it can save you time in the long run.

Also, we are currently seeing very ‘interesting candidate behaviour’ at the moment. Just because they sign a contract does not mean they will always end up starting with your company and may choose to accept another offer they were waiting on. Similarly, just because they start with you doesn’t mean they will stay so having backups is a great option to have if you ever have the opportunity. 

4. Standardise as much as you can

As we have highlighted, the recruitment process can be time-consuming so the more you can standardise your processes the better. Specifically, the below are useful tools to have in your toolkit:-

• Job ad templates 
• Position Descriptions 
• Interview Guides 
• Application Forms
• Reference Check Forms – yes we still recommend doing reference checks. You will be surprised at how many people don’t provide positive reference checks. 
• Contracts of Employment 
• Non-successful emails or letters 
• Fair Work Statement 

PS Don’t have any of the above, don’t worry. We can help. 

5. Put recruitment rhythms in place

Once you are aware of your eps and flows in your business, you will start to get a feel for the regular recruitment rhythms and timeframes. 

Knowing what they are for your business can you help you forward plan potential recruitment drives and focus on potentially building your capability backup pool to recruit from when needed and leverage your time and resources as much as possible.  

For example, if you pick up over Christmas you may want to start recruiting in September so that you can hire and train people for the Christmas period.  Similarly, if you are in a high-growth environment that is constantly recruiting, you may want to pool your resources and run larger campaigns 4 times a year to build up your talent pool. 

Recruitment can be hard work and super costly if you get it wrong. This is not a ‘fake it, until you make it’ situation. If you don’t have the time, skills, or resources to do it properly it can be extremely damaging for your brand. If you need help while you are building the capability in your team, yell out and we would love to assist you.