HELP! How Will You Recruit in the Tightest Talent Market Ever?

 

Wow. 2020 is gearing up to be a real talent acquisition rut. Employers already know how hard and expensive it is to attract talent to their organizations, and next year shows no relief. Complicating matters more is your current employees are in demand and may leave should one of your competitors court them. A lot of things to think about in this crazy world!

It is always easy to tell an employer this is what you should be doing to hire great talent. The obvious strategies many talk about are things like making sure you have the best company culture and pay scale in your niche, so your current employees are more likely to stay. You can also spend a ton more money on recruiting products that promise to find talent no one else can. I am sure you heard of machine learning and artificial intelligence recruiting. In super-low unemployment, many employers will try almost anything.

Which leads me to share what works in low unemployment. If you have a ton of open jobs and come into work every day praying the right person will walk through the door, this strategy will not work. Here are my top three ideas on how to ramp up your recruiting efforts for 2020.

 

Live Conversations - Not Robots!

Most likely, you have an applicant tracking system or access to a job board resume database. In both of these databases, find resumes of potential matches no older than five years. Print out (yes, waste some paper) these resumes and do the following:

• Set aside 10 am - 11:30 am to reach out to these resumes (described below) with no interruptions.
• Call them on their cell phone. Introduce yourself and let them know you have some exciting opportunities. If they don’t pick up, they most likely will never hear your message.
• As soon as you leave a VM, text them the same message asking for a return call. Text is powerful.
• Email them the same message as well. Do not send a link to the job. You want to build their interest by learning what they are looking for in a career before you present your open positions.

If you have fifty resumes, you should get at least ten people to call you back. Your goal on this call is to see what they are up to, what they want to do, and if they may be suitable for one of your jobs. If nothing matches up, you HAVE to ask them for referrals since they most likely hang with people who have the skills you need.

It sounds pretty simple, but so many recruiters rely on emails, InMail’s, and job postings instead of picking up the phone. Also, many cell phones have visual voice mail. The VM you leave them turns into a secondary text message.

 

Use Your Social Media!

Are you running targeted employment posts on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn? Does your company have a large following on Facebook or a LinkedIn company page? Social media recruiting is enormous, and most companies in 2019 don’t understand what that even means, except that it creates more work for their department!

Depending on the type of job you are recruiting for, figure out which SM platform to use. Have someone in marketing create a post with some excellent visuals and link to the job posting. You can then use “targeting” in each platform to promote your post directly to that group, even if they don’t follow you. It costs money, but it is relatively inexpensive. If you need help, please let us know and we can help.

 

Easy Apply-Hire Fast.

Let’s face it. Job seekers applying to jobs via your applicant tracking system have many issues. These include not being able to do it on a cell phone, taking too long to complete all ten pages, asking for information not memorized, and timing out. You will double your applications if job seekers could just attach a resume and send it with one click. If you have not applied to a job using your own systems, you should. You will find why so many of your applications are incomplete. Companies that have made applying easier and making hiring decisions quickly are winning the war for talent.