The evolution of the workplace and hiring world in the last couple of years has meant many old-fashioned recruitment plans are quickly growing outdated. Posting a job ad on a single forum and hoping for the best is a thing of the past.
Today's organisations need to invest in a focused, intelligent, digitally-charged recruitment strategy to generate the best results.
A key driver today is to look for a diverse team.
Standing out in a competitive hiring landscape means ensuring you have a strong plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion. This strategy should begin with the hiring process. Working with a specialist recruiter will allow you to attract candidates from a wider range of environments.
A specialist recruitment company can help you utilise niche job boards, posting your jobs on social media, and even connect with new graduates from the educational landscape. It's also important to ensure you don't let bias get in the way of who you pick to move to the next stage in the interview process. Your recruiter can help by sorting through your applicants on your behalf.
Reactive recruitment strategies are rarely the best choice in today's fast-paced market. Companies need to constantly access a stream of people with leadership skills to fill the gaps in their team quickly.
Think about the major leaders in your business your company would be lost without, and start building a talent pipeline with your recruiter to keep more people with the same talents waiting in the wings. It's also worth expanding your pipeline to include people with skills you don't need now but might want to embrace in the future.
The easiest way to do this is to work with a recruitment specialist.
Though we are in a skill-short market, recruitment partners like ourselves already have a broad network of candidates connections we are cultivating daily. As a result of this, we can help you fill talent gaps faster and guide every step.
Once you've successfully upgraded your recruitment and hiring strategy, the next stage is getting the interview right. Interviews are one of the most important stages in the recruitment journey, as they can make or break whether your candidate decides to join your team. Skilled professionals are 39% less likely to take a role if the interview experience is poor.
Start by speaking to your recruitment team about the questions you should ask and the processes you should use during the interview.
Competency-based interviews are often an excellent way to ensure your leaders have the skills you've identified as crucial to your role. These involve asking questions like:
Aside from asking the right questions, you can also improve your chances of success by creating a strategy for how you will make effective hiring decisions. Whether you're using ATS equipment or not, you need to make interviewing a more data-driven process.
Create a list of potential "scores" for the answers your employees can give, so you can assign numbers to their responses and make it easier to define which candidates meet your needs later on. It's also worth using the same strategic questions in your interview with every candidate to effectively compare leaders.
As well as standardising and scoring interview questions, it's also worth thinking about how you can make your interviews more efficient and future-proof. For instance:
Use virtual interviews: Video interviews, online tests, and phone conversations make it easier to assess a candidate at a distance for a remote or hybrid role.
Train your interviewing teams: Provide training for hiring managers and other experts to help them make better decisions.
Collect feedback: Curate feedback from your candidates to find out what they liked and disliked about the interview process.
Here at Lucy Walker Recruitment we have been helping firms with their talent acquisition, and job seekers find their ideal roles for over 30 years. We have placed thousands of candidates and filled thousands of roles for our clients; if you want to find out how we can help you call us on 0113 367 2880 or email us here.