For every vacant position that you post you receive hundreds of resumes, but how many of them are submitted by qualified candidates? Any recruiter knows these words to be true: ”I don’t need more candidates, I need more competent candidates.”

Finding valuable candidates is a challenge for a lot of companies and part of the problem is how your recruiting process is carried out. There are definitely qualified candidates out there, so you can’t put all the blame on the labour market. Therefore, it’s time to find which of the elements below is lacking from your company’s efforts of attracting the best candidates for the available positions.

Every recruiter is also a salesman

We can safely say that staff recruitment is a type of sales – you try to reach out to the right people and convince them that they will find the best employment opportunity with your company. That’s why any recruiter needs to put their salesman hat on and:

Understand the importance of empathy in the process – a successful recruiter listens to candidates before speaking, in order to determine what they are lacking in their current job and whether the vacant position within the company would be a good fit. It’s not always about the money – the benefits, the balance between work and personal life, or a new start could be the main motivator.

Use the right language – a knowledge of psychology is very helpful in establishing a strong connection with the candidates from the get-go. Use an authentic language instead of email templates or copy-paste job descriptions so candidates understand that they are communicating with a friendly person that wants to help them find an excellent job.

Visualize the hiring process like a funnel – more and more companies are monitoring and adapting the recruiting and hiring process as they go, in order to adjust the actions in the funnel that are not efficient. Their focus is to determine the actions that attract qualified candidates and turn them into the right employees with the right job.

The employer brand needs to be consolidated

When the number of recruiting processes becomes overwhelming for the recruiters, you run the risk of their job only entailing finding candidates to fill vacant positions, which would be very harmful to the company. That kind of pressure to achieve objectives at any cost should be replaced with a common effort of communicating the fact that you are an excellent employer.

Think about a few of the successful companies around the world or from your country and you will notice that it’s not a coincidence that they have the strongest organizational cultures and appealing work environments.

Try to see the employer brand through the candidates’ eyes. All employees want their contribution to the company’s success to be recognized. Be sure to create the image of a work environment where exemplary work is recognized and rewarded through bonuses, possibilities of advancement or of working within the organization on an international level, gifts, trips, flexible working hours and other health-related benefits.

Create a strong online presence on the media where you know you can find the valuable candidates that you are looking for and emphasize the benefits of being part of your company through blog articles, video content, original team pages, etc. It’s essential to emphasize that a job is not all about the work, but also about building harmonious friendship relationships in the workplace, about recognizing the value of each member of the team.

Create descriptions that attract quality candidates

The job description can be the first form of communication that many of the candidates receive from your company, so they form their first impressions before setting up a telephone conversation or a meeting.

In order to hold the attention of valuable candidates that you want to attract as part of the process, start with an attractive job title and continue transforming each detail of the description into a small career story that eliminates any trace of passivity.

For example, an important section of the job description is the one where you specify the few performance objectives that you expect from the future employee. This is where you have the occasion to draw attention to the performance that a candidate can reach by becoming a part of your company, instead of providing a banal list of the qualities that the candidate should possess.

Improve communication between managers and recruiters

Candidate quality is related to previous experience or the potential to learn how to meet the job requirements so when such requirements are not clearly formulated, this generates problems.  People are often hired without anyone explicitly telling them what is expected from them. The reason why companies often have to deal with this scenario is a faulty communication between recruiters and managers approving the hiring.

That’s why it’s important for your company’s managers and recruiters to collaborate in order to establish the features of ideal candidates. This way, you can also eliminate unclarities between the parties involved in the recruiting process and the costs generated by the low quality of the candidates going through the process.

Simplify the recruiting process

Candidates’ experience is essential. But what do you do when the job application process works against you? If a person needs to go through a complicated, time-wasting process in order to apply for your job, many of the talents that you hope to attract will be extremely reticent when it comes to working with you. As we were saying, each element of the pre-hiring experience creates an image of how things are going to go as an employee.

Nowadays, top candidates don’t have time to fill in complicated questionnaires. On the other hand, they are open to a video conference that saves them the trip to your company’s office or the need to take a few hours off from their current job to have that discussion with the recruiter.

When you’ve identified candidates that stand out, make sure that their interest in working for your company is growing and apply more rigorous assessment methods, such as assessing their competencies through a small test or face to face interviews with the managers.

Once you’ve developed an efficient process of attracting valuable candidates, you should not forget about post-hiring performance assessments that can help you see whether you’ve really found the perfect recipe. An HR software application is very helpful in this effort, due to the complexity of the data that it stores and the reports that you can create using it.

Finally, by using such a tool, you can automate your recruiting process, making it much easier to manage candidate pools or access their history, manage approval flows and recruiting sources or communicate using various online channels. Discover details here.

• employer brand
• recruiting
• recruiting process
• recruitment