How to Take Your Recruiting Up a Notch

By Josh Tolan

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As the times change and technology advances, so must our efforts to find and place top talent. Unfortunately, too many of us are stuck in our old humdrum ways of recruiting candidates.

You know, trying to catch candidates at a good time for a phone interview, engaging with talent on the sites they use to connect with friends and family, and relying on outdated company career sites to attract talent.

The world of recruiting is growing and changing, and we need to keep up. In an effort to find and place great talent, it’s time to kick your recruiting efforts up a notch with these three tips:

 

1. Hang up the Phone  

Consider this: the average number of resumes received for a job opening is 250. Obviously you can’t meet with each and every one of the 250 job applicants. That’s where screening comes in to play. In addition to screening applicant resumes, many recruiters also opt to call qualified candidates for a phone interview.  

Not only is the phone interview an outdated screening tool, it’s faulty. For starters, it’s time-consuming and difficult to schedule. It also doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the candidate, nor is it standardized across candidates. It’s time to hang up the phone.

Kick it up a notch: One-way video interviews, in which candidates record their answers to a series of pre-set questions, allow recruiters to screen more candidates in less time. In fact, recent research has found that you can watch 10 one-way video interviews in the time it takes to perform just one phone screen.

Not only are one-way video interviews more time-efficient, they also give you an opportunity to see the candidate and assess them on more than just their tone of voice. And the standardization issue with phone interviews? Solved. With one-way video interviews, all candidates are asked the same pre-determined questions.     

 

2. Use the Right Social Platforms

Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are widely used to engage and connect with candidates. But these social sites, while they provide a great way to gain insight on candidates’ personal lives, are not ideal for recruiting. After all, these social platforms were designed primarily for keeping friends and family in constant communication -- not for recruiting quality talent.  

Kick it up a notch: When it comes to targeting and engaging potential candidates, social professional networks (like LinkedIn) are the way to go. These networks, created primarily to connect job seekers with recruiters and employers, are currently the fastest growing source of quality hires globally, increasing 73 percent over the past 4 years.

As more companies begin to allow job seekers to apply for jobs via social professional networks and switch out the traditional, one-page paper resume for an update online version, it will become critical for recruiters to fully utilize sites like LinkedIn.

 

3. Cater to Candidate Lifestyles

With more than 50 percent of job seekers assessing company career sites at least every other week, according to CareerBuilder’s 2013 Candidate Behavior Study, just having a corporate career page isn’t enough.

The corporate career page is typically the first place job seekers go to assess employer brand, so it’s important to have a career site that is designed to inform, engage and ultimately attract job seekers.

Kick it up a notch: Having a strong company career site is helpful in attracting talent, but what really matters is whether or not the career site is optimized for mobile. Especially when you consider the fact that people between the ages of 18 and 36 check their smartphones an average of 43 times per day.

Today’s talent pool largely consists of mobile job seekers. In fact, 27 percent of job seekers expect to be able to apply for a job from their mobile device. To cater to society’s on-the-go mentality, make sure your career site is not just mobile friendly, but mobile optimized.

 

What other recruiting methods can be taken up a notch? Share your suggestions in the comments below!

Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, a video interview solution used by more than 2,000 companies across the globe. Learn more about staffing trends and connect with Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.

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