We’re all familiar with the infamous war for talent. It’s been debated, discussed and deliberated in finite detail for many years – ever since McKinsey coined the term in the 80s.
And as result of the pandemic, it’s BACK. The candidates are back in control and have been for some time now. For so long, employers held the best playing cards but that has changed - those who are still in denial are living in the past. But for those of you who have realised which way the land lies, the next step is understanding how you can always be the go-to for candidates – passive and active - when they’re looking for new positions. How to find good candidates is now made up of a number of tactics, including:
Get on board with your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)
As the market shifts and power bounces towards the candidates, it naturally affects the role of a recruiter and new challenges arise.
One of these is Employer Value Proposition and how you work with your clients to define this. It’s no longer about leaving the client to decide these things, but rather working in collaboration with them to guide them through modern talent attraction.
It’s also a good time to urge your clients to be self-aware about what they can actually provide and bring to the top talent.
Branding matters and what you can do personally
Traditionally recruiters leave matters of marketing and branding up to the company they’re working for at the time, but the focus needs to shift to their own personal brand.
How you conduct yourself, the things you say and values you believe in will determine whether the talent want to work for you or not. Build yourself up like any other company and your customers will come to you.
Personal brands also filter into this category. Consultants have built healthy LinkedIn accounts – leverage their interest in you (and vice versa) and encourage them to promote your content, messaging and events.
Consultants want to do more, are demanding more accountability and are looking to bump up their OTE. Engage them, involve them and get them board.
Use your network
As a step further on the personal brands piece, recruitment consultants network is your golden ticket. It’s the best thing you have and it’s often overlooked. Use your network to give your would-be candidates what they want.
For example, if you’re hiring within tech and you’ve placed the CIO of Google and have a great relationship with them, ask them to do a pizza and beers night where anyone within tech can come, have free beer, and chat to someone they admire within their industry.
It’s your job to create the spaces for talent pools to happen. You’re the facilitator and party planner, not the main entertainment.
Use your technology
Your recruitment software should be helping you maintain and build talent pools consistently. Volcanic’s candidate attraction SaaS platform is designed for recruiters to attract talent.
Meanwhile, Access Recruitment CRM keeps your consultants engaged with their candidates using automated mailshots, notification reminders and candidate portals.
Integrated front and back office functions also allows you to pass information throughout the business quicker and more efficiently, keeping your candidates engaged throughout the entire process.
Review processes and be brutal with efficiency
Long interview processes, pages of application forms, ten round interviews and multiple assessments are not the way to engage the top talent in business. Many recruiting processes are messy, complicated and long winded. Mainly because they haven’t been revamped in years.
In a world where recruiters are always trying to draw your candidates to them, you don’t have time for that. Create a process that is streamlined and engages them at a top-of-the-funnel approach. Once you have candidates in process and bought into the job, you can start extracting the heavy information, but at the start, keep it as simple as possible.
Candidate experience really does matter
You’ve heard this one a million times so you’ll know just how important the candidate experience is. You can’t afford to be disengaged or take days to call back and give feedback.
Remember, you’re romancing your candidates. This is old fashioned courtship. Your software should be helping you create a flawless experience.
Access Recruitment CRM has efficient screening that keeps you compliant but also moves your candidates through the process easily and seamlessly. Your candidates need to feel cared for and adored and if you don’t, they will go to someone else who will make them feel special.
Plus, a bad candidate experience can have a detrimental impact on your fees. Candidates won’t recommend their network to you and it will limit your talent pools drastically.
Use your greatest asset
I.e. the internet. Recruiters today have unlimited access to people across various platforms and yet so many agencies disregard social recruiting. Again, your LinkedIn job adverts do not, in any world, count as social recruiting. Use social media platforms to find candidates, and then build relationships with them. Post content on LinkedIn and tag colleagues – their connections will see the post and could start interacting and then reach out.
This way you can gently create online friendships that will turn into offline billings. Use your social platforms to also build your own image so that when you approach candidates, they engage with a human with personality, likes and emotions, as opposed to another stone cold recruiter blowing up their phone lines. This does take time but does work and you can find talent online.
Don’t be a recruiter
Be a mate. A friend. A confidant. A real human that doesn’t spit out reams of business jargon every time you pick up the phone. In the end, people buy from people. And this sounds remarkably simple, but it’s remarkable the number of recruiters who don’t seem to manage it.
When we chat to candidates their biggest gripe is that recruiters are impersonal, dull, solely business focused and incredibly transactional. The biggest secret in recruitment is that no one want’s a recruiter, they want a friend.
They want one person they trust, that they can always go to every time a career shift or change is happening. Someone who understands their goals, ambitions and wider story. They also want someone they can send their mates to, which in turn gives you an automatic referral network.
None of these things are easy or a quick fix, but if you’re looking for rockstars, superstars and A-players, you’re going to have to play the long game. Start employing tactics that build you a solid foundation of strong candidates, as opposed to a fickle few that may or may not be right for the job.
Know when it’s the right time
In this blog, we’ve talked about the digital methods to engaging contact with a passive candidate, who, to date, has given all the indications they are staying in their current position. With enough digital likes, interactions and emotions, consultants will know when to move to the phone and arrange a coffee to take interest to the next stage. Winning talent has never been easy, but with focus and thinking like a candidate can get you there.
Find out about how Access has helped some of the leading recruitment agencies get to where they are today.