5 Ways to Significantly Increase Recruiting Effectiveness

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5Whether you are a young and aspiring recruiter, a mid career professional or a senior ranking strategist, you have an interest in increasing the hiring effectiveness of both yourself as an individual or in your organization as a whole. Many of you will face those head scratching moments when you are in brainstorming session, at an away day, or in a team meeting when the facilitator or your boss asks simply, “How can we make our recruitment processes better, e.g. cheaper, faster, higher quality?”

And these are the times that you can set yourself apart from your colleagues by coming up with great ideas, insights and suggestions to help improve your recruiting effectiveness. The problem is that it’s not always easy to stay up to date with the latest ideas so you can present them on demand in meetings – and so I have researched and compiled a list of5 key areas that you may be able to change within your recruiting structure that could improve your recruiting effectiveness from today – or in the near future.

1. Add video To your job advertisements and posts

Data from Careerbuilder indicates that job postings with video icons are viewed 12% more than postings without video and, on average, receive a 34 percent greater application rate. So, why not develop some professional corporate videos saying how great it is to work at your company – or even have an internal competition and have your staff create a corporate video – and ensure they are linked to from all your job postings.

2. Make more use of job search engines

Research from SilkRoad indicates that job search engines are singularly far more effective than job boards at returning hires and interviews. Just to be clear, the main jobs boards are still effective; this is just about not overlooking the job search engines, such as the recently acquired Indeed.com and SimplyHired.

3. Increase your reliance on employee referrals

There is compelling evidence to show from Jobvite that employee referrals are by far the most popular source of hire with 40% of roles currently being filled by referrals, while only 7% of applicants come from referrals.

But, that’s not it, their research also showed that referred employees are hired 55% faster than employees hired through other channels, and they also have much higher retention rates than employees who are not referred, that is 46% of referred employees stay for 3 years, compared to just 14% from job-boards.

4. Company career sites are not dead: enhance and upgrade

The 11th CareerXRoads Source of Hire Survey has shown that contrary to popular belief careers sites are not dead, but actually still account for 10% of hires. And more importantly, the SilkRoad survey tells us that company career websites were the leading on-line source of interviews and hires by some way, although Indeed was shown to provide a similar amount of interviews. As well as this employees who came from career sites have high retention levels, that is 37% of them stay longer than three years, compared to just 14% from jobs boards.

So, company careers are more critical to your recruiting effort than you may think. We suggest you introduce a company careers site or at least optimize your existing one. This may include things like minimizing numbers of clicks to apply, installing an easy job search tool, adding video, enabling social sharing, mobile optimization, live chat, blog, etc…

5. Audit your employer brand: refresh and redefine

CareerBuilder research tells us that firms with a strong employment brand attract at least 3.5 times more applications than companies in the same industry. Its is important that you are always maximizing the attractiveness of your brand. Are you an employer of choice? Is your business a great place to work and do people want to work for your business? What was a great brand three years ago might not be so appropriate now. For example, has your target audience change? Has your value proposition change? Have your organizational values altered? Have your priorities changed?

So, whether you are looking at employer brand creation or employer brand refreshment, why not shake up your next team meeting by making a strong suggestion that the business audit its employee brand with a view to creating or refreshing the branding proposition to supercharge your talent stream.

I realize this is not an exhaustive list of  of potential enhancements to your hiring and recruitment process, but thought it would be a good starting point to get your thoughts flowing.

By Kazim Ladimeji