10 Ways to Reinvent Your Talent Acquisition Strategy

Whether you're a start up, small business or a "Fortune" organization, having a winning talent acquisition strategy and wonderful brand ambassadors can help you attract the right talent to your organization.

Latest social tools and technologies and new ways of finding talent through social recruiting, talent communities or through various recruiting platforms are always emerging. And talent attraction has become more competitive than ever. It's time for you to rethink your talent acquisition strategy in a way to attract top talent to your organization.

Here are a few points that can help reinvent your talent acquisition strategy!

Build your employer brand

If you haven’t taken it seriously, it's time for you to ensure that you are building your employer brand to attract talent. Develop your employee value proposition and create a message that aligns with your corporate brand and tells why someone should join your company. Communicating your employer brand can help answer most of the questions that arise among candidates like "Why do your employees want to work with you?" “What is unique about your organizations culture?” and “What it is like to work at your organization?” A well articulated employer branding message can attract candidates and make the recruiter’s job much easier.

Make employees your brand ambassadors

Creating an employer brand is not enough; let everyone in the organization live your brand values in a way that represents the brand. Make your employees feel connected to the corporate brand, let them know what your organization stands for and how your employees turn your brand aspirations to reality.  Be it the recruiter talking to a candidate or a front line sales employee talking to a customer, the culture of the organization should be felt in every interaction. Your employees should be your brand ambassadors.

Provide a better candidate experience

It's all about treating candidates like humans, respecting their time and interest in applying at your organization and following through on the promises that you made. Remember, it is also about transparency. Let them know the reason for not being selected or why they are not a right match for the organization. Everybody wants closure and so do candidates. Well-treated candidates can refer the open position to their network even if they are not selected. Read here on how to build a better candidate experience.

Provide a better employment experience

Candidate experience is not enough to attract talent.  Let them know that the same experience continues even when they become an employee at your organization.  As I mentioned earlier, your employee value proposition is the promise you make to your employees. If you deliver on that, they are going to be engaged, connected and committed. Engaged employees can attract future engaged employees.

Use social to build relationships

Explore social media to connect and engage with your talent pool and create your own talent networks. Use social channels to connect with candidates, have conversations with them, talk about your company culture, provide recruitment or interview tips and ignite the interest in working with you by helping them know more about your organization. Use social tools like Pinterest, Instagram, Vine and Youtube for branding, Twitter for having a conversation, and Facebook and LinkedIn for sourcing!

Revamp your career sites

Get candidates to land and stay on your career page by making it easy to spot and navigate on your website. Promote your career page by providing content with helpful tips and advice for job seekers or inviting them for a Facebook chat/Twitter chat. Incorporating eye-catching photos of your workplace and videos that show your culture would be great in this case. Mainly, make it easy for the job seekers to easily find and apply for jobs on your career sites -- and with fewer clicks.

Go Mobile

Traditional marketing and talent acquisition processes have to keep up with the needs of consumers and candidates who want to access any information on the go. Time and accessibility are competitive factors when it comes to helping your job seekers explore the possibilities at your organization. 77% of job seekers use mobile search apps, so making your career site mobile-friendly and your job postings easily accessible on the go is wise.  Make the ‘Apply’ link/button easy to find and make applying for the job an easier experience for the candidates.

Hire for the culture fit

Hiring for culture vs. competency has been a popular conservation lately. I would say never compromise on the culture because we can train one for learning new skills, but changing one’s attitude can be so hard. Hiring decisions that fit your culture will lead to employee satisfaction, engaged employees, customer satisfaction, productivity and growth. Employees who fit in your culture will refer someone that they are comfortable working with. And that adds to your culture.

Work on big data anlaysis

Of course, you don’t need to be a guru to learn your data. It is about measuring the right data that helps you make informed decisions. Lisa Johnson, Director of Recruiting (North America), Gate Gourmet, mentioned that using big data analysis helped them know that their applicants are heavily clustered across various geographies, but also that they were easily able to track the location where most hires resulted from. They became much more productive and efficient, and stopped wasting time and money sourcing candidates from areas that did not bring good results.

Hire a recruitment marketing expert

It is time to explore some tactics and revolutionize your recruitment marketing efforts by incorporating social, mobile and automation. Recruitment marketing experts can advise you on how to get your word out effectively by using social channels, how to make your career sites search engine optimized so your jobs show up on the search results, how to make your career sites mobile friendly, and even how to use your time wisely by using automated communication campaigns.