Gaining and keeping a team of qualified individuals at your company just makes life as an employer so much easier. If you can casually look for good candidates as your company experiences much-welcomed growth, recruitment is not too much of a headache.
But maybe new hires aren’t working out, or you can’t seem to find enough capable bodies to complete necessary tasks. In those instances, recruitment might feel like an exercise in futility. If your recruiting processes aren’t turning up suitable people or your company comes up short against competitors, ask yourself why. You might find both your recruitment methods and the way your company operates need some adjustments.
Here are three ways you might be able to improve recruitment results during the next hiring round.
1. Adapt the Job to Widen Your Candidate Pool
If you post a well-crafted job listing and offer competitive compensation, qualified local applicants should flood in, right? For certain industries and in certain geographic areas, that might be the case. Sometimes, though, the local candidate pool is either underpopulated or underqualified for your needs.
In situations such as these, you might look into the operations aspect of the job itself. Could the position be adequately performed by a remote worker or at least an employee who is onsite only occasionally? If so, putting the necessary technology in place to enable that could massively expand your candidate pool.
For semi-remote work, it might be possible to accept applicants from all over the country. Of course, this typically depends on the pay scale and in-person frequency requirements. Someone who lives in New York and makes $250,000 each year might be willing to fly to California once a month. It’s less likely they would be willing to do so two days every week without relocating.
If the job can be adapted to fully remote capabilities, you can even look into hiring global employees by utilizing a service like an employer of record. There are numerous things to consider before you open your candidate pool worldwide, however. You’ll need to make sure the regulations of the countries you’re hiring from are advantageous to you. You’ll also have to consider whether different time zones would affect the performance of the job itself. This is especially important when team members must communicate regularly and quickly.
2. Leverage Referrals and Connections
Building out your network isn’t just good for lead generation. It can also help connect you to potential employees who might not come across your radar from an open job posting.
So if you have an opening, get in touch with other business owners. Very rarely are they going to offer up their own top-tier workers, but they might still know individuals you can contact. They may have a former colleague who is unhappy at their current employer or simply looking for a change. In those cases, you could see whether you can put together a tempting offer.
Occasionally employers go through a change in business and need to downsize their team. If you hear about something like this occurring, you can reach out to see whether good employees are going to be available.
Ethical employers who are forced to downsize generally want to help their employees find new work. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it helps maintain the employer’s reputation. Word typically gets out if a business owner casts employees out with no warning or assistance. Former employees tend to be forgiving if the cuts are unavoidable, and the employer makes a strong effort to help find new placements. Reaching out to inquire about employees looking for a home could help all parties concerned and strengthen your relationship.
3. Offer Standout Benefits
Recruiting is a matter of both finding good candidates and offering them compensation attractive enough to land and retain them. If the pay you’re offering is in line with your competitors but nothing special, benefits can often make or break the deal.
When you’re putting together company perks and benefits, however, make sure what you’re offering has value to your workforce. A gym membership reimbursement might be a nice bullet item on an offer sheet, but it’s unlikely to be a deciding factor. If you only included it because you know other employers in the area do, it might not entice anyone.
To make someone choose your company over another similar one, look at where you can stand out instead. One good example is maternity leave. In the U.S., only 35% of employers offer paid maternity leave. In some industries, that number is significantly less. If it seems feasible, paid leave for new moms could be a high-value item that sets you apart from other employers.
Another possible way to set your company apart is by offering four-day work weeks. It’s not going to be an option for every business, but it could be a game changer for recruiting and retention.
Standing out from your competitors may require fairly impactful process adjustments. Yet one major operations change could do more good than maintaining a dozen inconsequential perks. Naturally, you’ll need to make sure those changes don’t negatively impact your company’s bottom line or overall ability to function. But if they look like viable options, gauge the perceived value from an employee’s point of view and put them up for discussion.
Finding and Keeping the Best People
If your current recruitment and retention strategies aren’t working, it’s unlikely that the workforce is going to adjust to your methods. Most of the time, you’re going to need to assess why your efforts are failing. Once you’ve identified the causes, you’ll have to adapt to find the candidates you want and get them to sign on. If you embrace flexibility in both processes and the overall workplace, you might just start seeing the results you want.
