Transforming Recruitment
Your Recovery Will Be Talent-Driven
Recent spikes in COVID-19 infection rates around the globe underscore the fact that much uncertainty still lies ahead in overcoming the unprecedented health and economic impacts of COVID-19.
The key to accelerating your organization’s bounce-back can be summed up in a single word: resilience. Resilient companies are proactive, digitally-enabled enterprises that can respond to changing business conditions through agile processes, infrastructure and strategic partnerships. An analysis by McKinsey & Company found that companies that launched strategic initiatives to intervene during the 2007 recession performed better at the outset of the downturn and for several years afterward.
According to a recent survey of HR leaders, 39% say they’re harnessing the crisis to reshape and reprioritize their company’s talent agenda.
Record unemployment rates and concerns over job security present opportunities for companies with resilient talent acquisition strategies to bolster their workforces with top talent, address skills gaps and overcome leadership succession challenges.
Is your recruitment strategy optimized for the new normal? This report provides insights and best practices for transforming recruitment to accelerate your organization’s bounce-back.
Trendicators is the research division of the E2E group of companies, leading providers of engaging career and consumer experiences. Trendicators provides original HR research, along with reports on insights and best practices from industry leaders and experts.
A proactive recruitment strategy enables faster
response to changing market conditions
With the post-pandemic recovery period expected to last several years, now is an important time for reevaluating your recruitment strategy. Begin with an assessment of your company’s current state. The maturity model below can serve as a quick assessment tool. Plot your organization’s current and future states according to the five core capabilities listed in the far-left column. The ultimate goals of your recruitment transformation initiative should be to work with internal business partners to anticipate hiring needs and to optimize sourcing and recruitment functions using analytics to progressively improve candidate experiences and hiring outcomes.
How can you build a more effective and relevant
employee value proposition (EVP)?
ALIGN YOUR EVP WITH YOUR CORPORATE STRATEGY
Your organization’s culture, values, vision and business goals are unique. Your EVP should be equally unique and should define everything your company does to attract, engage, motivate and reward employees to create value for its customers in the current business environment. Your EVP is a promise that explains in simple, easy-to-understand language why an employee would want to work for your company as opposed to anywhere else.
DEFINE ROLES FOR YOUR EVP STAKEHOLDERS
Different stakeholders within your organization have different responsibilities for bringing your EVP to life. Your leadership team is responsible for communicating the EVP to internal and external audiences. HR defines and manages the delivery of the EVP. Hiring managers enable and deliver it through their day-to-day interactions with employees and candidates. Employees are the ultimate EVP stakeholders. They’ll tell you whether or not your company is actually delivering on its value proposition.
UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR EMPLOYEES REALLY WANT
Employee engagement surveys provide objective, scientifically-valid insights to use in formulating your EVP and evaluating its relevance over time. For example, the RESPECT framework for measuring employee engagement from Engage2Excel enables you to benchmark employee engagement levels against those in your industry sector as well as against best practices organizations.
GET HELP FROM MARKETING IN CREATING YOUR EVP
Engage your internal marketing team early in the process of developing or updating your EVP and in creating the communications programs, tools and experiences that will help make it compelling and relevant. As the stewards of your corporate brand, they can provide the expertise, resources and guidance needed to ensure strategic alignment with enterprise positioning and differentiation.
Are you creating experiences that
will keep top talent in the queue?
Current record-high unemployment rates might lead some to believe that candidate experiences are less important than they were last year. Nothing could be further from the truth. Recruiting for the pandemic recovery period is all about matching fewer openings with the top talent you’ll need to succeed. While you’ll be receiving more applications for each open position, a slow or less than engaging hiring process may cause top talent to move on. Every applicant, if treated respectfully, could become a referral source, candidate, or customer in the future.
Are you using content marketing and candidate
nurturing to build your talent pipeline?
In today’s job market, the same principles your marketing department uses to build a pipeline of customer prospects can be applied to build a pipeline of employee candidates. Whether you are attempting to attract customers or employees, there are three distinct phases that define where prospects are in a pipeline: awareness, engagement and consideration. Content marketing programs foster advancement through each stage by delivering targeted communications, activities and experiences. The table below lists examples of the types of content and experiences you can use to improve the effectiveness of your recruitment marketing program.
“Content marketing is an essential component for
creating an effective recruitment marketing campaign.”
DARREN FINDLEY, PRESIDENT
ENGAGE2EXCEL RECRUITMENT SOLUTIONS
Do you have the recruitment marketing
tools you need to attract top talent?
What tools will you need to compete more efficiently and effectively for top talent in today’s job market? Listed below are a few examples that are often either overlooked or underutilized. Use these suggestions as a starting point for brainstorming and discussion. Work with your sourcers, recruiters, internal business partners and marketing experts to build a more comprehensive list of recruitment marketing tools, assets and programs.
Job Description Creation: Do your job descriptions go beyond basic requirements and duties to uniquely convey your position and company as the opportunity of choice for candidates? Poorly crafted job descriptions result in wasted time with today’s candidates, contribute to higher turnover and don’t present a compelling and realistic representation of your job opportunities. A survey by management consultancy Hay Group revealed that 90% of HR managers believe that good job descriptions lead to better qualified candidate pools.
EVP Messaging Playbook: Your EVP is an important asset to use in differentiating your company. An EVP messaging playbook helps ensure consistent and compelling messaging across corporate divisions, recruiting partners and channels. Often overlooked, however, is the vital role that recruiters and hiring managers need to play by delivering the EVP to candidates in an authentic and personalized manner. Make sure your EVP playbook includes sample scripts and scenario-based sketches to help stakeholders bring your EVP to life.
Training for Recruiters and Hiring Managers: Does your organization have a formal program in place for training recruiters and hiring managers in effective video interviewing? Training should also include how to best do an internal discovery call to gain consensus on all the key attributes of a candidate, top sourcing techniques that can be used in identifying your target market, behavioral-based interviewing techniques and analysis of assessment results.
Social Media Advertising: Paid social media campaigns provide an excellent way to supplement your organic, inbound recruitment advertising. The average click-through rate for ads on Facebook is 0.56% with an average cost per click of $3.77, which makes such campaigns affordable for both large and small businesses. Whether you opt for authentic employee profiles or use humor and creativity to engage your audience, utilizing Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn can help you increase brand awareness and reach potential hires via highly targeted campaigns.
What can you do to improve candidate
experiences and outcomes?
Transforming recruitment operations won’t happen overnight. It’s a time-consuming process that requires clearly defined objectives, a prioritized roadmap and ongoing project management. Usually, the biggest challenge is deciding where to begin. The table below lists ideas for improving experiences and outcomes at each stage of the recruitment lifecycle. As with the other suggestions provided in this eBook, these ideas are offered as starting points when developing plans for building your organization’s recruitment transformation initiative.
How can you better align recruitment processes
to compete more effectively for talent?
Transforming recruitment to better respond to opportunities and challenges during the post-pandemic recovery period is a top priority for CEOs and HR leaders. One challenge for many organizations, however, is that recruitment functions are often performed in a disparate and disconnected manner. In building your plan for transforming recruitment to improve your competitive advantage, it is imperative to win support from your senior leadership for an integrated business model that aligns recruitment processes, functions and resources to achieve measurable outcomes.
“Now more than ever, recruitment leaders need to proactively respond to the
changing needs of internal business stakeholders to improve competitive advantage.”
DARREN FINDLEY, PRESIDENT
ENGAGE2EXCEL RECRUITMENT SOLUTIONS
