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We do love a good hack here at Occupop. We just love finding new, better and more effective ways to do what we do and use our time more efficiently. And a little birdy tells us that you guys do to! That’s why we’ve decided to share our favourite recruiting hacks with a new content series entitled Hiring Hacks Series and show you how you can use each and every one of them to make help you become a more effective, productive recruiter.
As pandemic life starts to slowly recede employers face a plethora of challenges in attracting and retaining talent. Of late the term the great resignation has been thrown about in the media, as we see a dramatic increase in resignations, that, coupled with many large cities seeing a mass exodus as people move to rural or suburban locations, are just some of the myriad reasons that recruiting strategies for 2021 will look different from any other year.
Of late, we have got a lot of requests from customers on how to increase the quantity and quality of applicants in the challenging post COVID-19 era. With this in mind we have collated 10 practical, actionable ideas that have worked for us (or one of our customers) in the competitive post pandemic employment market. The emphasis here is especially focused on the fast, high impact hacks you can implement quickly and trial in your own company to get results immediately. We hope you find these useful!
Some companies are now looking at hiring countrywide and overseas due to a shortage of candidates locally. This is especially the case in industries such as hospitality and healthcare post pandemic. From our data, Indeed and LinkedIn are the most utilised job boards in these industries, and so a quick hiring hack for any company is a paid campaign on both platforms. There are multiple formats you can use such as promoted roles which appear first in the job listings, sponsored ads using graphics and many more.
LinkedIn and Facebook are brilliant tools for targeting specific locations within a certain radius, locales or indeed specific locations further afield. We recommend working with a marketing professional or an agency to create appealing and enticing campaigns with smart copy and creative imagery. Create a suite of adverts that can be dipped in to and utilised as needed across different job roles as they come up.
If you don’t have one it’s time to implement one, and if you do, think about making the incentive more attractive for successful referrals! Its worth noting that 85% of jobs are filled through networking or referrals. Ensure all your hiring managers are communicating your referral scheme with current employees and provide them with all the tools they need to promote and share relevant job openings to their own networks. You can even take this one step further and investigate employee referral platforms that will track and reward the employee for every action they take in sharing open roles and doing their bit to encourage referrals to your company.
Be proactive on LinkedIn and establish a candidate connection procedure. This social network for professionals has almost 500,000 members of which 90% are open to hearing from a recruiter. While LinkedIn has a great job posting section, a top hack is actually through LinkedIn’s Recruiter subscription which may be a worthy investment for any hiring company. With this subscription you can search for candidates who match your specific job specifications. This includes people who are already employed but are open to changing jobs. With the subscription, you also get 30 InMail’s (LinkedIn’s version of email) per month. Connect with a personalised message, Once the connection request is accepted send a follow-up message. The content of your messages is very important, don’t just ask if they are looking for a job, let the person know why you think they might be suitable for your role, information on your company, and why you think it would be worth a brief conversation.
A simple hack that is largely under utilised is connecting directly with the best talent who are already working. Why wait for people to apply to your listing when you can go out and approach them? Known in the recruitment space as “head-hunting”, this practice of poaching talent from other employers has been around forever, and for good reason.
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Handing off the hiring process to someone else can be a huge time saver if you have the budget for it. While recruitment agencies typically come with a cost, there are ways of targeting cost effective recruitment companies. We recommend targeting fixed fee recruiters in this instance, so you know from the outset the cost and how it fits into your recruitment budget. There are some huge benefits to using a recruiter for your employee search. It saves you time. This means that the only candidates you must interview are those who made it past the first screening tests. Instead of having to deal with multiple applicants, you get to skip a few steps ahead to screen just the qualified candidates.
We also recommend you go to an industry specialist recruiter, mainly as they typically have a talent pool to start with and can hit the ground running achieving results for you from the offset. You can do a simple Google search for “your industry + recruiter + your location” to get some options.
Ensure all your job specifications are focused on why the candidate would like to work in your company, and highlight all the perks and benefits you have to entice an expression of interest. As you write up your job description, try specifying within the listing itself what the likely career progression would be for that particular role. For example, if you’re hiring for a Nursing Manager role, you could mention that this person could potentially grow into a Director of Nursing role.
If your seeking local talent don’t forget about the power and reach of local notice boards and Facebook groups. You can also take this one step further if your recruitment drive is significant enough and do a PR push around your hiring by issuing a press release. We have found local and regional papers and radio shows quick to promote good news stories and local business success in the wake of COVID-19.
A simple thing but often overlooked, depending on the type of business you have a simple ‘We are Hiring’ sign at front of premises can work wonders. Let’s not also forget the digital version of this, which can be a post on your career page, your company LinkedIn, or any other of your social channels advertising your growth plans.
If the cost of hiring a recruitment agency doesn’t work for you, or you wish to keep hiring internal, recruiting software could be last, and possibly the only hack you need!
Think about all the research you have to do with a candidate. Reviewing a CV might take 5-10 minutes. Next up is the phone interview and prep time, this can easily take an hour or more. Add in one or two video interviews at an hour each. When you do the math's, this can be about 4 hours per candidate!
Occupop is a small and medium business recruitment software that will give you extreme time-saving benefits and is so intuitive you can be up and recruiting within a few hours.
Add your open jobs to your website and over 15+ other job boards in one simple click. No more wasted time copying and pasting. With Occupop, you can also see your pipeline in real time. You’ll know how many applicants you have and where they are in the hiring process and what needs to be done to speed up the process.
Furthermore, you can schedule interviews easily with built-in integrations with calendars and email service providers. No more emailing back and forth with potential dates and times. Occupop even features an interview-review tool where you give a candidate a thumbs up or down and add comments easily and share them with the rest of your staff in one central place.
It can be difficult to find talented employees in normal times, but this is amplified in the post pandemic era. Our final recommendation is to keep your hiring process moving as quick as possible, make it a company goal to keep your process well under the 23-day average!
In our next instalment of this series, we focus on some of the longer term, high impact recruiting hacks that are more robust to implement, but you will reap the rewards over time. Watch this space!
What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to hiring? And, what recruitment hacks have worked the best for you? We’d love to hear from you!
Occupop is a beautifully simple recruitment software built for small and medium businesses. We empower our customers to become great at hiring through our smart hiring technology and suite of solutions that almost anyone can use. So whether you're a team of five or fifty, it only takes a few minutes to onboard your team members, set permissions, and start recruiting. If you think Occupop could be a good small business recruitment software solution for you, try it out today with a free 14-day trial.
The emphasis here is especially focused on the fast, high impact hacks you can implement quickly to get results.
#1 Run a paid campaign on job sites like Indeed & LinkedIn
#2 Run a paid campaign on social media sites for local and international talent
#3 Increase referral bonus incentives
#4 Use LinkedIn proactively to connect with suitable candidates
#5 Headhunt from other companies
#6 Find a recruitment agency locally or internationally that suits budget requirements
#7 Work with an industry specialist recruiter
#8 Check & optimise your job descriptions
#9 Local notice boards, papers, radio and Facebook groups
#10 We are hiring sign
