We have been through some daunting times during this COVID pandemic but, with a vaccine solution on the way in 2021, could now be the right time to invest in your recruitment processes and ensure that you have the right talent in place for your business when there is a bounce-back? After all, UK unemployment is currently at 4.5% and, with so many skilled individuals looking for work, it’s never been more important to take a close look at your recruitment strategy.
Finding the right candidate for any vacancy is a long journey that can take up to four months, depending on the role.
We understand that short-cut strategies may sound appealing and money-saving at first but will probably cost you twice as much down the line.
Not hiring at all could also be a risky decision to take and leads to several unwanted outcomes:
- Staff burnout
- Low productivity
- More money and time replacing and supporting impacted staff
If the current situation finds you in a position where you need to review your recruitment strategy to find where you could maximise your efforts, you’re in the right place!
GET YOUR TARGETING RIGHT
If there’s one thing that the current pandemic showed to us, it’s the importance of being digital.
With new digital marketing strategies and techniques becoming available almost on a daily basis, you could be exploring, literally, hundreds of new targeting possibilities.
When you target the right people, at the right time, at the right channel, this means that your advertising budget will be spent only on candidates who match your job criteria and not on anyone who can see and apply for your vacancy.
Another advantage is that you will be reaching passive candidates, who may not be looking for a job right now, but are open to consider working with you after seeing your advert where they spend most of their time: on social media, apps or news websites.
Speaking of social media … are you incorporating your channels in your current recruitment strategies? What’s your online presence saying about you as an employer? If you already advertise your vacancies on social media, are you ensuring that your application process is mobile-friendly? These may seem minor details that most often than not can be overlooked, but they actually play a very important role on maximising your recruitment processes.
BUILD YOUR OWN TALENT POOL
If you don’t work with a recruitment advertising agency partner, your advertising costs can reach on average £500 per day – considering time and resources spent to create engaging copy, artwork, negotiating with the media, managing invoices from all different media, closing the deal, monitoring results … phew.
Not only that, according to LinkedIn, it usually takes more than one month for companies to find a suitable candidate for their vacancy – some roles can take up to 4 months! When you add everything up, your recruiting budget gets tighter and tighter.
That’s why having an up-to-date and evergreen talent pool comes to the rescue.
Although building a ready-to-hire talent pool might sound challenging at first, it’s an effort worth making. A talent pool reduces your costs massively because:
- You won’t have to advertise every single vacancy
- You will hire faster
- You have the possibility of building a more diverse mix of qualified candidates
- Candidates are already open and interested to working for you, which may make the hiring process easier, smoother, and faster
- You will spend your time and internal resources on more demanding tasks
The secret to achieve this is to employ a robust recruitment marketing strategy (social media is great for this!) and a proper database management. By the way, we can help you out with that too: many job boards offer talent pool services, however they target only active jobseekers and attract low-quality applicants. Instead, we can help you to find and attract passive jobseekers that may be the ideal hire for your current or future roles.
How many CVs did you receive and how many of them were of the quality that you would expect? Not too many we imagine, but there are ways to reduce your spend and ensure quality candidates.
WRITE YOUR JOB ADVERTS WITH YOUR CANDIDATES IN MIND
We’ve put a comprehensive blogpost about it but we would like to highlight again the importance of your advert copy writing.
Job ads copy writing is a work of art here at Point 13 Media: whenever we need to advertise a job on behalf of our clients using job boards, for instance, we make sure to do our homework researching what that job is all about and, more importantly, how candidates would be searching for it:
- What terms would they use to search for this specific vacancy?
- What benefits are they looking for?
- What other job titles are used in the field that candidates may be searching for?
- Is the job description concise and informative enough to filter out unsuitable candidates?
- Is there anything we could do to make this ad stand out?
A badly written copy will probably make you spend more time tweaking it and more money advertising it again.
REVIEW YOUR NUMBER OF INTERVIEWS
We dare to say that interviews are the most money and time-consuming part of your recruitment process. Normally, more than one staff member has to dedicate some hours of their working day to speak to and evaluate candidates. If you have a long process, this means several staff, several days and hours.
A good approach to resolve this is to have a strong screening process in place – this includes:
- Technical tests (depending on the role)
- Pre-tasks
- Video interviews
Even if you are not in a position to have a screening process you’ve always dreamed of, sometimes just asking for a cover letter and only inviting for an interview those who took the time to write something personalised to your company and vacancy will help you filter out candidates.
OUTSOURCE YOUR RECRUITMENT ADVERTISING PROCESS
We understand this may sound counterintuitive but outsourcing your recruitment advertising to a specialised agency actually will save you lots of money and time down the line.
When you use companies, which are experts in what they do, they already know all the secrets and tricks to help you to find better-quality hires. Just imagine the time and effort you would need just to put together a high-quality job copy advert – without considering the artwork creation and approval, negotiating with the media, and so on…
After this step, you may want to consider outsourcing your recruitment marketing strategies (including your employer branding), online recruitment advertising (can you imagine adding Google and Facebook ads to the top of your already gigantic to-do list?) and your talent pool management – from harvesting high-quality CVs to database management.
Outsourcing these processes is not only cheaper than paying internal employees to do so but also alleviates your ever-growing list of things to do.
As you have probably noticed, you don’t have to spend tons of money to find and hire the best talents – it’s just a matter of putting together streamlined processes and making cost-efficient choices and changes on your recruitment efforts.
Changing and adapting your approach rather than pausing hires when something completely unexpected pops up (like a worldwide pandemic…) can make you stay ahead of the market and the competition.
If all of this sounds a bit daunting and you feel you need some support on getting your recruitment advertising, digital marketing and talent pools sorted, we are happy to help! Please get in touch with us today.
