4 New Trends in Effective Recruiting

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The Great Resignation has created a paradigm shift in how companies recruit. Employees have captured a significant degree of momentum and have created a booming job market for themselves. Job-seekers — particularly those with a high degree of talent and experience — can have their pick of the litter when considering their next career move.

This new reality  means traditional recruitment techniques, like throwing together a detailed and demanding job advert or working your company’s network, won’t cut it anymore. Recruiters must find new, cutting-edge ways to attract top talent to their companies.

With that in mind, here are a handful of new trending tips to effectively recruit (and retain) the best employees for your present and future success.

1. Inspire Your CSR With Employee Involvement

Corporate social responsibility has been a buzzword for a few years now. As with most trends, many CSR initiatives have fizzled or at least lost momentum since they were started.

One way to breathe new life into your recruitment efforts is by being smarter with your CSR. Philanthropy-as-a-service platform Groundswell suggests that smarter CSR  can address many recruitment issues since the pandemic.

Younger generations — Millennials and Generation Z, basically those under 35 — have shifted the perspective of what employees expect their employers to focus on. Rather than the traditional goal of generating profit, the younger generation of talented professionals wants to see companies striving to improve society.

Re-energizing your CSR initiatives is an ideal way to do this. For instance, you can:

  • Make sure your company’s benefits align with its values
  • Enable employees to volunteer
  • Find ways to include your employees in your company’s overall CSR strategy

If you want to attract and retain employees over the long term, make sure your CSR is helping rather than hindering those efforts.

2. Stay Flexible and Enable Remote Work

While flexibility and remote work aren’t new, they remain at the forefront of recruitment trends — and with good reason. 

Flexibility has been one of the great refrains of the 21st-century workforce. As technology has steadily improved, working from home has become easier and easier. 

In addition, the issue of working close to others presented by the pandemic did remote work more than a perk reserved for the elite. The crisis turned the ability to work from home into a new right for a freshly empowered post-pandemic workforce.

That said, it isn’t easy to stand out against competitors vying for the same candidates if you offer remote work as a benefit. That’s why you need to package and present the flexible nature of your work environment the right way by:

  • Offering remote work without unnecessary conditions
  • Emphasizing a reduction in the need for meetings
  • Embracing an asynchronous work model whenever possible

That last item is essential. An asynchronous workflow  sends the message that you won’t micromanage your employees. You trust them as peers who will get the job done without their corporate “Big Brother” watching over their shoulders.

3. Use Social Media — All Social Media

Social media is another one of those “this isn’t new, but it’s new” recruitment trends. In this case, we aren’t talking about the recruitment channel itself so much about how it’s used. 

In the past, social media recruitment has overwhelmingly been focused on LinkedIn. As the primary professional digital networking site, LinkedIn has served as a place to network with others, post job ads, and even promote thought leadership content. And in many ways, it continues to serve that function.

But over time, other social media platforms have also started to play an important role. Places like Facebook and Twitter can provide critical insights into how a candidate interacts with others.

Even Instagram can be useful as a multi-purpose recruitment tool . For example, The Undercover Recruiter suggests using the visuals-based social platform for:

  • Building your brand
  • Seeking passive talent
  • Finding local talent through location tagging
  • Using hashtags to narrow recruitment-related content
  • Engaging actively with potential talent

Your industry and needs will dictate the social platforms you use. Just make sure you aren’t limiting yourself to LinkedIn.

4. Hire From Within

The remote work world has made external hiring easier than ever. From digital interviews to automated onboarding processes, hiring someone living a thousand miles away has never been easier.

The ease of external recruiting is a powerful tool in the modern recruiter’s arsenal. But it shouldn’t mean they’re overlooking one of their best talent pools: your internal staff.

The Society for Human Resource Management emphasizes internal hiring  as one of the key recruitment trends coming out of the pandemic. With so much turnover, sometimes one of the best ways to retain talented employees is by moving them into a better position within your company.

Internal promotions are an excellent way to improve company loyalty and foster engagement. They can also reduce hiring costs and avoid the need to retrain a new hire “from the ground up.”

Recruitment is an ever-evolving world. What matters is that HR reps keep moving along with the changes. Use the trending recruitment suggestions above as a starting point to refresh your hiring strategy in 2022 and beyond. That way, you can attract and retain the best talent, even in an era where quality employees are at a premium.

 

Sofia Hernandez has been a senior HR executive at multiple Fortune 500 companies.

 

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By Sofia Hernandez