Recruiting Strategies: A Guide for Businesses

As the job market becomes more and more competitive, recruiting top talent is the key to effective business operations. Whether you are looking to fill a new position or looking to fill a vacated role, recruiting is a critical part of any company. But there are many challenges to recruiting top talent. In this guide, we’ll discuss best practices, methods and creative ideas to recruit top talent.

Why Companies Should Always be in Recruiting Mode

According to a CareerBuilder survey, there are three main trends impacting the need for companies to be on top of their game when it comes to recruiting: 

1. Job creation: new technology, startups and even existing companies, are creating new job roles.

2. Voluntary employee turnover: whether employees are looking for exciting opportunities, trying something new or moving across the country, many employees are open to voluntarily leaving their jobs for something new.

3. Intensified competition: With companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple luring the workforce with cool offices and endless benefits, the competition for talent is fierce, especially in hot markets like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York.  

Regardless of the industry, the above reasons are key reasons why companies must maintain continuous and creative recruiting efforts.

2019 Recruiting Challenges 

In addition to the above challenges, the hiring industry has seen other unique pain points that may not have been present in past decades. These include:

• Increased need for flexibility: With statistics from the 2018 Global Talent Trends study, it’s clear that employees value flexibility. In fact, the study found that 51% of employees wish they had more flexible work options like work from home options, flexible schedules or unlimited PTO.

• Digital natives make up almost half the workforce: Digital natives, or people who have grown up in the digital era, are flooding the workforce. In fact, millennials are the largest generation in the US labor force. And as companies recruit for emerging talent, Gen Z will also start to fill up the workforce as well. Companies must keep this in mind when putting their recruiting strategies in place.

External vs. Internal Recruiting

Oftentimes companies focus on corporate recruiting, seeking external talent to complement or fill key roles. But what’s the difference between external versus internal recruiting and when should they be used?

• Corporate Recruiting or External Recruiting: This is the most general and traditional form of recruiting where companies seek outside talent to fill a new role or replace a recently vacated role.
  

• Internal Recruiting: This is when a company looks to their current employees to fill open positions. Also called “hiring from within.” At times, new roles are created within a company that may be best suited to be filled by someone already familiar with the company. The advantage of internal recruiting is the prior knowledge of the company culture, objectives, and goals. Internal recruiting often requires moving existing employees into a new role or department or a relocating them to new office location.  

Recruiting Strategy Methods

HR departments usually rely on two recruiting methods:

• Passive: Passive recruiting means companies rely on potential talent and candidates to find them rather than the other way around. These methods usually rely on posting positions on their website or having openings throughout the year available for applicants to apply.

• Aggressive: Aggressive recruiting means companies apply more aggressive recruiting strategies that seek to identify top talent and contact potential candidates directly with phone calls and emails or while at certain events.

Depending on your company’s specific hiring needs, whether long-term or immediate, an aggressive strategy may be necessary, especially when there is a need to fill a vacated position quickly.

Examples of Recruiting Strategies

With so many challenges in recruiting, companies should consider implementing or testing out different strategies for recruiting. Common recruiting strategies include:

• Social Media Recruiting: Many companies rely on social channels to actively recruit new talent. Professional platforms like LinkedIn often serve as a vehicle to identify and reach talent. Other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram lend themselves to active recruiting, although these tend to be for more promotional or seasonal roles.

• Campus Recruiting: To ensure a full pipeline of talent, many companies seek to identify potential or emerging talent. Large and mid-size companies often have ongoing campus recruiting to try to spot budding talent to fill entry-level roles or internship programs.

• Referral Recruiting: To decrease the cost of recruiting and also vet candidates, companies can reward existing employees for referring people in their personal and professional network to apply for an open position.

• Online Recruiting: Online recruiting incorporates practices of digital marketing (also referred to as recruitment marketing). Examples include job ads, email drips/candidate newsletters, company culture videos etc.

• Employee Relocation: One of the best ways to widen a candidate pool is to recruit outside of a geographical area. Companies will offer job relocation assistance in their offer letter to blur state or country lines and enable the recruiter to solely focus on bringing top talent into the office.