Strategic Talent Acquisition

It requires a tremendous amount of effort to find and hire new employees, which in turn involve expensive job adverts, dedicated time for interviewing candidates, hiring them, and finally training the fresh recruits. Needless to say, this process requires ample resources and budget to ensure success.

So, how can we look at talent acquisition differently?

Looking at recruitment from a marketing perspective

If we think about it, acquiring employees is pretty similar to acquiring leads, advertising brings in traffic, content marketing helps reach a wider audience and word of mouth referrals bring new leads. These techniques can be applied to talent acquisition strategy to both make people aware of your job vacancies and to offer more information about working for your company.

Utilizing things such as:

• Advertising

Many companies use job networks such as Monster, Indeed to advertise their vacancies. While these are great sources of candidates, they are limited in terms of talent acquisition. Instead of opting for this, you can choose to advertise your vacancies on a relevant, high-profile website (if you have vacancies in the IT department, you may choose to advertise on Stack overflow or something similar).

Depending on the budget, we could go all out by creating a landing page on our website and linking it with a Google Ad words campaign. Set the advert up for long-tail search terms such as ‘IT jobs in Bangalore’ to direct potential candidates to your landing page. This way there will be more relevant talent is looking for a job change.

• Involving industry’s influencers in the recruitment process

Industry influencers are hugely influential in their industries. Targeting them to assist with the recruitment drive is likely to bring some good results. Just as a brand will reach out to a blogger to engage their audience, a recruiter must engage with the blog audience to find talent.

This can be as simple as reaching out to a blogger and asking to collaborate on any piece of content (to generate your leads) or composing a press release to distribute to relevant news networks – there are endless possibilities.

Either way, the talent you’re searching to recruit is out there somewhere and they are more likely to be available on a relevant blog or forum than a job network like Indeed.

• Take to social media

Social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook have become extremely popular for hiring managers and recruitment agencies in recent years, because of the simple fact that people are more likely to engage on social media than they do on any other platform making it much easier to find ideal candidates.

Social media sites such as LinkedIn are a perfect example as they are dedicated to profiling your career and skills, making it an ideal platform for talent acquisition. Users join groups relevant to their field of expertise, offering us the opportunity to advertise the vacancy directly to a small (but extremely relevant) pool of professionals who all know their stuff.

• Adopting new technology

If sourcing talent is the goal, then new technologies are the catalyst for the process. Recruiters and hiring managers are often searching for the latest software and related training to streamline their existing recruitment process.

Using technology can have its drawbacks though, for example, if the software you use is designed for larger HR departments and yours is relatively small, you could be wasting money and not getting the most out of your software. Therefore it is important to do proper research before committing to a new program.

• Train, train & retrain your recruitment team

Training is essential, not just for your recruits, but for the recruiters too. It can be easy for them (especially if they’ve worked in the same role for a long time) to fall into repetitive patterns and processes of recruitment.

Training the team on what to look for in new applicants, which skills to consider, which recruits show the best potential, and improving and refining the hiring process will not only lead to acquiring better talent, it can also keep out the time-wasters and the dead weight of employing irrelevantly skilled workers.

As the saying goes – “It’s usually much easier to prevent a problem from happening than to fix it once it’s done”. And in this case, it’s hiring and training employees with irrelevant skills.

• Using Google’s Search

Sometimes we should look out to explore unconventional options that exist for recruitment. Google search is one of them, where if you know how to use a proper Boolean string you will be able to find the unexplored talent.

We don’t always have to follow a cookie-cutter recruitment process.

Recruiting the Google way is not ideal or feasible in most situations, but the point is if you’re open-minded when it comes to talent acquisition, then the talent will likely be open-minded too.