Employers, Want to Improve Your Recruiting Efforts? Just Fix These Four Things.

If your recruiting process is anything like my garage, it may be time to do a little housecleaning. Everyone knows you are receiving a lot of applications (many unqualified) for your open positions. It is also well known that these same applicants are going into the famous “black hole”. Hopefully, if you make a few of these changes, you will get better candidates (just not as many) and build future talent pipelines.

1. The Candidate Experience. I write about this a lot because employers' applicant tracking systems (ATS) are getting loaded up with applications but candidates are getting no love. The black hole is now the “cloud”. Companies should develop a system to reach out to all rejected applicants ASAP. Let those under consideration know and reach out to them by phone. Run 7-day job postings only so you don’t get so many resumes. If you don’t find someone, then you can reload. Applicants use your products, buy your stock and can be a great referral source for your employment brand if they are treated like kings and queens.

2. Average Job Titles. If you are allowed to change them, make your job titles sexier. Most companies can’t because of red tape. A good job title has to be like a good tweet; leaving the reader wanting more. Job curious or passive job seekers need a reason to continue reading and a good job title on a job board works great. Be sure to include title, location and some job selling point in the title. (Yes, you have plenty of space to do this)

3. Bad Social Media. I know it is cool to say that your company recruits in social media. With social media recruiting, if you are not all in, stay out until you can really figure it out. Tweeting jobs and searching LinkedIn will get some results, but according to surveys in this industry, job boards still far outpace any social media platform when it comes to hires (it's right behind referrals). Good social media recruiting is hard work and will be a train you can catch anytime; don’t worry about catching it today unless you are 100% committed to making it relevant.

4. Average Recruiting Strategy for Hard to Find Candidates. Do you use the same resource to recruit an administrative assistant as you do a property underwriter? Many companies do because it is easy to keep all your open jobs in one place. Change this! Identify your companies hardest to fill positions and put together a recruiting strategy for those jobs that includes posting to niche job boards, blogs, twitter feeds, LinkedIn groups and niche resources. 

Some of the best candidates come from unqualified applicants’ references. Others come in because they see a job title like “Awesome Job for an Inland Marine Underwriter in Downtown Chicago”. Hopefully making these few, small changes you will get better candidates and more hires!

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