Oct 14th 2019

Stay competitive: tips on how to hire the right candidates

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find top candidates. In fact, 77% of CEOs say it’s hard to find candidates with the right creativity and innovation skills they need. In a candidate-driven job market, not only are top candidates harder to find, but with the right talent being up to 8 x more productive, losing out on such candidates is highly detrimental for business. Particularly if these top candidates are being snapped up by competitors.

So how can companies, particularly those in the earlier stages of growth, ensure they hire top candidates and remain competitive?

Read closely, we have some tips for you…

1: Identify the talent

Identifying the right talent goes hand in hand with identifying the job you need doing. What are the business challenges you’re facing and what skills are needed to tackle them?

Once you’ve refined what you need done, you’ll be able to identify who you need to do it.  With diverse teams being 1.7x more innovative, consider talent with a broad range of backgrounds, whether that be in terms of education, sector experience or skill set.

Once you’ve pinpointed the right candidates for the role, you can then devise the most effective strategy to attract and hire them.

2: Define your recruitment methods

To ensure access to a broad range of candidates, you need to make sure your recruitment methods aren’t restricting your pools of talent. Try not to focus on attributes that may not be indicative of candidates’ skills set I.E. CVs or University background may not be the best indicator of what a candidate can bring to the role.

Using alternative recruitment methods like assessment centres or psychometric tests can open up your candidate pool and enable access to a wider breadth of talent to build more effective teams.

When developing your hiring process it’s important to consider the candidate’s experience throughout. If the process is long-winded or old fashioned you could lose top candidates across the hiring journey, or even lose them to competitors. Especially in a world where customer first experience is a given, and candidate first experience is a must-have.

3: Convince candidates of your opportunity over others

In this candidate-driven market you must consider why candidates would choose your opportunity over a competitor’s. Does your company offer learning and development opportunities as well as clear progression? Does it include additional benefits such as flexible working, or onsite mental health coaching. For Millennials and Gen Zers these benefits are crucial when considering job opportunities.

In this hyperconnected world, consider all the ways you can communicate your brand to your ideal candidates. Social media, vlogs or events are innovative ways to grab candidates’ attention and communicate your company’s opportunity.

Building up your employer brand and value proposition will not only strengthen your offering to potential candidates but reduce hiring costs through organic applications.

Takeaways

Inefficient hiring processes will result in sky high costs per acquisition and more concerningly, it will increase the likelihood of hiring the wrong talent, which is a critical problem for businesses, particularly at the earlier stages of growth.

You must consider your recruitment strategy from who you want to target right through to the point of hire.

But attaining top candidates doesn’t stop at the point of hire. You must now keep them! All the commitments you make at the point of hire must be kept throughout the experience the candidate has within your company, this includes the experience of your internal culture.

All your recruitment efforts will be for nothing if you don’t retain these candidates. Looking at hiring and retention methods should go hand in hand when considering your talent attraction strategy.

Read more on how you can improve your candidate experience here.