Today, companies worldwide face new hiring challenges: competition for talent, profile shortages and employer branding problems. Consequently, they must constantly innovate to attract and engage the most talented people. Here are five best practices for building a solid talent acquisition strategy that attracts and retains talent.

Define your Recruitment Needs

The first step in developing your talent acquisition strategy is clearly defining your recruitment needs. You must specify the roles and types of candidates you want to hire. Doing so will help you develop your ideal candidate personas.

The next step is determining the content that may interest your target audience. Consider the following questions to design your marketing initiatives targeting the candidate personas you created.

• Which topics are of interest to my candidate persona?
• Which social networks do they use?
• Where do they obtain their information?

Build a Robust Brand as an Employer

You want to build a reputation that people would want to work for your company. You need to demonstrate expertise and be a perceived industry leader in making your company visible and attractive. You need to create engaging content and engage in thought leadership.

• Creating a blog post with pertinent information, such as industry-specific content, will catch your audience’s attention.
• Creating a career site with content that reinforces your employer brand. Make your career site interactive with video content highlighting your company’s values and culture.

Showcase Your Work Culture

Now that you have your persona’s attention, the next step is to convert them into candidates. You must convince them to join your company by stimulating them. A captivating job description and handsome salary are no longer enough to motivate people to apply. Employees want to know what they are getting into if they come to work for you.

Your company must be desirable. You want to showcase the various aspects of working for your company. Talk about company events, training opportunities, career development perspectives, employee well-being, etc. Your publications, articles, blog posts, and job offers must be appealing and showcase your brand as an employer.

Recruit Faster and Better

Speed and time are of the essence when recruiting new talent. You want to avoid the tedious process and hiring the wrong people. You can apply some marketing techniques to make your recruiting process efficient. Inbound recruiting is one technique that aims to accelerate the recruitment of high-performing employees through innovative and diversified channels.

Because timing is critical when recruiting new talents, there are different tools you can implement to recruit faster and better. Below are some ideas: 

• Pre-select candidates by using personality traits-based questionnaires 
• Create a candidate scoring matrix to help you identify the high achievers to gain a competitive advantage 
• Automate the hiring process using an HR email workflow.

Create True Brand Ambassadors

You have hired your candidate at this point, but the recruiting process isn’t over. You want to keep the talented candidate engaged so you can retain them. Talent management is vital to drive job satisfaction among employees and keep the workforce happy. Satisfied employees are more inclined to speak positively about your company on social media and become true brand ambassadors for your organization.

Employee advocacy is a strategy in which a company invites its employees to speak about their employer’s brand on social media. It is pretty common on social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Also, job platforms such as Glassdoor allow job seekers to see the feedback employees have left for their companies.

You need to create an engaged community where your current employees participate in the recruitment process and can share their overall experience with potential new hires. A satisfied employee is more likely to say positive things about the company’s work culture, making your company more desirable which loops back into the initial steps.

Concluding Thoughts

If you notice, the recruitment process is similar to a sales funnel in marketing. In marketing, you have the AIDA model, or as I like to call it AIDAR model. AIDAR stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, and Retention.

You attract the attention of job seekers, create interest in your company using content, and make your company look desirable as a workplace which results in a job seeker becoming a job candidate. You take your pick of the bunch, work to retain them and increase loyalty until they become an advocate for your company.

To recap, create a continuous talent pool of candidates that matches your candidate personas. Then, implement a multi-channel employer branding strategy to attract the best talents through appropriate content marketing. You can speed up your recruitment process and decrease hiring costs successfully. 

At ExpertTal, we help companies recruit the best-in-class software development talent to build high-performing remote teams. Contact us to find out how we can help your business grow.

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