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8 min read

15 Recruitment Strategies to Attract And Retain A+ Talent

15 Recruitment Strategies to Attract And Retain A+ Talent
8 min read

15 Recruitment Strategies to Attract And Retain A+ Talent

Article roundup

  • With a tight international employment market, in 2023 it is more important than ever to think carefully about your recruitment strategies in order to attract the best staff.
  • Here we offer our 15 top recruitment strategies for 2023 organized into four ‘master strategies’: Promote your workplace, diversify your recruitment tools, nurture a healthy workspace and optimize your sourcing processes.

How do you attract qualified candidates to your company? This is one of the biggest challenges that hiring managers and HR teams face today, and since the pandemic, it has become increasingly more difficult. A 2022 report published by Monster, found that recruiter confidence in finding the right candidate has fell from 95% in 2020 to 91% in 2022. And once these top candidates have been successfully hired, it’s a question of finding the best strategies to retain these stellar employees.

In this article, we will look at the top 15 recruitment strategies to attract and retain talent in 2023. 

Promote your workplace

First things first, to attract top candidates to your company, you need to invest in the marketing side of your recruitment strategy. This means displaying your company as a highly desired workplace, appealing to both active and passive job seekers. With so many marketing tools available, it’s even easier than ever to promote your workplace to potential candidates. Let’s see how your company can get started… 

1. Use social media to promote company culture 

Social recruiting is a vital part of any recruitment strategy. By creating and promoting content, you can display your employer brand and company culture in a very appealing and positive light to both active and passive job seekers, and considering, as many as 29% of all job seekers use social media as their primary job search tool, it’s important for your content to attract top talent. 

For instance, you can use a TikTok video editor to create visually enticing reels showcasing your company values or an audio editor to record a podcast discussing the benefits of applying to your company. If you’re not tech-savvy, you can also utilize an AI Avatar generator to create social media content from a selection of employee testimonials, company awards, team photographs, and past team-building events.

2. Create company culture videos to promote your workplace 

In such a competitive labor market, your company can attract top talent and stand out from the competition by adding company culture videos to your job adverts, social media pages, and company website. As a matter of fact, a CareerBuilder study found that adding a video to your job advert increases the candidate application rate by 34%. Adding a professional video gives candidates a visual insight into what it’s like to work with you, which advantageously helps to build an honest and clear relationship from this initial stage of their job search. 

Diversify your recruitment methods and tools

As we mentioned, hiring top candidates can be a long and tiresome process, especially when it comes to finding a top candidate who fits the role both culturally and technically. This is where internal recruitment can be extremely advantageous, you may already have the perfect candidate within your company, and that employee is right under your nose. 

Internal recruitment strategies can save your company a considerable amount of time and money spent on external job boards, reference checks, and the recruitment process in general. On top of that, internal recruitment can have a particularly beneficial effect on your existing workforce and employee retention rate. Here are some of the most sought-after internal recruitment methods:

3. Promotions and transfers

By choosing to promote candidates internally you can simultaneously promote loyalty in your workplace by recognizing your employee’s potential for more senior roles. This internal recruitment method acts as a new form of reward for your employees. By acknowledging your employees hard work and potential, you can increase both employee morale and your employee retention rate. The same goes for internal transfers, by sourcing candidates directly: Whether this is in a different department or location, you are actively creating professional development opportunities for your employees and therefore reducing the likelihood of them looking for new opportunities elsewhere, retaining your top talent.  

4. Use employee referral programs

Encouraging your existing employees to recommend candidates through employee referral programs can save a substantial amount of time and money for your company. Generally speaking, referred candidates are often more prepared and informed by the employee who recommended them, therefore you can usually dedicate a lot less time to the candidate screening and interview process. Employee referrals also diminish the need to invest in any costly job boards or recruitment tools. 

5. Rehire former employees

There’s always a risk involved when it comes to hiring a new employee, and one of the biggest fears can be whether they will be a good fit for your team. This is why hiring a former employee can be significantly beneficial for your company. Not only is it likely that former employees will fit back into your company culture much more easily, this can reduce training time and costs through their existing knowledge of the products and company. Additionally, rehired employees can have a positive effect on your business quicker. 

6. Hire contractors or freelancers

You may not always need to hire an employee to fulfil the role in question. Hiring contractors or freelancers can be more cost-effective for short-term and clearly defined tasks. While their hourly rate may be higher than an equivalent employee, savings on employee benefits, social contributions and administration costs mean the total cost of hire is often cheaper. Major freelancer hiring platforms include Upwork, Fiverr, and Toptal

Nurture a healthy workspace 

A key way to attract and retain top talent within your company is to create and maintain a healthy working environment. Not only is this crucial for the mental and physical well-being of your existing employees, but it also helps to make your work appeal to potential candidates. Jobseekers often consult platforms such as Glassdoor to research your company, and therefore, failure to focus on the well-being of your employees will only lead to bad employee reviews. A 2021 report by Glassdoor found that a whopping 86% of job seekers look at a company’s reviews and ratings before deciding whether to apply for a job. Therefore your company shouldn’t only seem appealing to active and passive candidates on social media, but it should be genuinely appealing to your existing workforce.  

Now let’s consider what high-quality job candidates are looking for in 2023.

7. Encourage flexible working

If your company fails to allow flexible working conditions there’s no doubt that candidate attraction will be an issue for your company, causing you extreme difficulty when filling your job vacancies. In an interview with CNBC, Rey Ramirez, cofounder of Thrive HR, expressed how companies that aren’t offering flexible or remote working programs are missing out on 50% to 70% of candidates. It’s no surprise that the flexibility that was introduced to employees during the pandemic has created a high demand for flexible working arrangements such as home office, the hybrid working model, compressed hours, and more. Therefore in order to appeal to a wider candidate pool companies need to adapt their traditional ways of working to suit the modern-day worker. 

8. Celebrate diversity and inclusion 

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion can have a significantly big impact on the overall culture of your workplace and as a result play a key part in attracting and retaining talent of all backgrounds. As an employer, it’s important to make sure that your recruitment policies are fair and inclusive, ensuring that any requirements for a job can be justified and don’t discriminate against any potential candidate. 

It’s important to stress that these equal employment opportunities should not only be a priority during the initial selection stage but throughout the entire hiring process and within your workplace culture as a whole. When Equality, Diversity and Inclusion are celebrated, employees are less likely to move on from your company, through the hope that they have equal opportunities to progress within your company. 

9. Support employee wellbeing

Employees want to work for companies whose values match their own. They also want to ensure that the company they choose to work for will support and nurture their well-being. Companies all over the world have been implementing workplace mental health programs to support and promote the mental, physical and emotional health of their employees. 

By highlighting your efforts to support these important matters, you can easily attract a varied pool of candidates to your job positions and more importantly, retain your top talent. Companies that continuously focus on the well-being of their employees have lower rates of absenteeism and presenteeism, and higher rates of employee engagement and satisfaction. In addition to supporting the mental, physical and emotional well-being of your employees, it’s important to support their financial well-being too, ensuring that they feel a sense of financial security

Optimize your recruitment process to attract top talent 

10. Be flexible with job descriptions

Having too many ‘must have’ requirements in a job description will be off-putting for many excellent candidates. Make sure that your job description is flexible enough to attract a large and diverse pool of candidates. 

11. Use HR software or platforms

HR software can save you considerable amounts of time through centralizing your active job adverts from job boards and career sites, and can help you to source top talent faster. You can also post your job adverts simultaneously, helping you to streamline your recruitment process. By saving time during this initial stage, you can dedicate more time to writing better job advertisements, which will result in higher-quality applicants, making your hiring efforts less stressful and more rewarding. It’s important to consider that desirable candidates will receive interest from other companies too, therefore by accelerating your hiring process you are less likely to lose a top candidate to another company. 

By implementing HR software (also known as ‘Human Resources Information Systems‘ or ‘HRIS’) your company can also gain access to useful hiring tools such as interview scheduling, remote interviewing, document signing, automated email and text communication, employee background checks and more. These HR software tools will allow you to save a considerable amount of time for your hiring team and help to improve your HR processes and talent management through digitization

12. Encourage candidate engagement 

Candidate engagement is essentially the communication between the candidate and your company. Therefore, the way you communicate with a candidate throughout this process can have a big impact on whether a candidate wants to work with you, whether that’s now or in the future. A survey conducted by CareerBuilder found that 42% of jobseekers said they would never apply to that company again if they had a bad candidate experience and a further 22% said they would tell other candidates not to work at that company. Therefore, the way that you communicate and engage with job applicants should be a crucial part of your hiring process. 

Not only does high candidate engagement increase the level of interest of your candidates, it decreases the likelihood of candidates dropping out during your hiring process and promotes your company in a positive light to future candidates. By engaging with your employees throughout the hiring process, you will help to build a strong relationship with your new employees as they already feel respected by your hiring team. 

13. Use video interviews

Video interviews are extremely convenient for both the jobseeker and the hiring manager, they can save the candidate time traveling to the interview and they also give your company the ability to source candidates from anywhere in the world, increasing your chances of finding A+ talent. By incorporating video interviews into your hiring process you can make your recruitment process more flexible, reducing both the time it takes to fill a position and your hiring costs. 

14. Implement continuous recruitment

Continuous recruitment is a great way to attract top talent to your company.  Instead of waiting for your top talent to leave, you can implement continuous recruitment by accepting resumes through your career page on an ongoing basis, this enables you to develop a pool of interested applicants, helping you to source better candidates quicker. By focusing on continuous recruitment as a key recruitment strategy, you can make looking for new and better talent part of your everyday HR operations. By maintaining a good relationship with these applicants you can boost your employer brand and reduce time to hire when a position becomes available, rather than waiting for the moment your top talent resigns. 

15. Consider international hiring

Hiring globally opens up your pool of potential talent significantly. Furthermore, with the normalization of remote work, it is often not necessary to set up a separate entity or subsidiary of your company overseas. 

If you are looking to expand your company globally without a subsidiary, international PEO service providers can provide a strong support system, assisting with your company’s global hiring processes, payroll, taxes, and HR in general. Working with an international PEO (it stands for ‘international Professional Employer Organization’) will open up the doors to more expansion opportunities, saving your company time, effort, and resources. Through engaging a global PEO, you can hand over many of your responsibilities regarding your international employees, avoid any compliance issues and ultimately save hiring time and costs. 

FAQ

There is no one-size-all recruitment strategy for businesses seeking to grow talent. Many companies decide to outsource the entire process to professionals (known as Recruitment Process Outsourcing) in order to ensure the best strategy is applied to their business.

When recruitment and hiring is being carried out in-house, it is hard to beat internal or direct sourcing strategies including employee referral programs and promotion from within. This often saves time and money and ensures that the general standard of hires is high. 

Yes. For example, when hiring software developers it may be best to go straight to software developer job boards like Wellfound (formerly AngelList) or the Github job board, or platforms like Toptal. 

Article By
HRIS and Remote Tech Specialist
Charlotte speaks with authority as RemotePad’s recruitment and HR tech maestro. With a background in marketing, Charlotte has worked for major brands in the industry, including leading HR software provider, FactorialHR. Originally from Manchester, UK, with a bachelor’s degree from the Manchester Metropolitan University, Charlotte currently resides in sunny Barcelona, Spain.

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