Posting a job offer is one of the more simple and straightforward ways of recruiting. By simply describing the position and displaying it online, you’ll quickly end up receiving quite a few postulations. The real question is: how many of these potential candidates do you really end up hiring? While simply posting the job offer online can bring across a nice quantity of potential candidates, it’s in no way a guarantee that among these you’ll end up with the ones you’re really looking for. However, by putting forth a variety of recruitment strategies, you can easily attract a much higher quality pool of candidates.
Here are 4 easy ways to innovate when it comes to recruiting :
1. Organize events
When organizing an event, you must start by setting a clear objective. Something along these lines is great :
- Hire 3 senior software developers (the best ones are few and far between!)
One thing to be mindful of is to create an event that will please your target audience. While you may not know the exact preferences of every type of candidate you’re looking to recruit, you can always ask the people already working in this position within your organization what they’d like to see.
If your offices look great, feel free to host the event there. If they aren’t as fabulous as you’d like them to be, don’t be afraid to rent an appropriate location to receive your event attendees. Salle Privée is a great place to start when looking for the ideal place in Quebec and the Greater Montreal area to host your event.
Don’t forget to think ahead and plan a way to collect your candidates’ contact information as it is in no way safe to assume that they’ll be carrying theirs resumés with them.
- A portable device such as a tablet will allow you to fill out your potential candidates’ contact information quickly and easily as well as add them to your ATS (Applicant Tracking System). You can also ask any current employees who have attended the event to name their 3 favorite potential candidates and you can even consider carrying around a way to access your work calendar so that you can book interesting applicants for interviews on the fly.
Another quick and easy way to get the contact information of your event attendees is to simply email them a link to the Careers page of your website following the event. This method makes everything easier for everyone and also garners great results: they’ll be able to apply for the position the appeals to them in just a few clicks. If you’re looking to send out a mass mailing to everyone that attended your event, you can use a platform such as Emailicious, Quebec’s MailChimp equivalent.
2. Set up an internal referencing contest
Often, many organizations offer financial compensation to employees who refer candidates that end up being hired. Be it 500$, 1000$ or 2000$, you’ll easily end up making your money back in terms of finding the candidates you’re looking for simply in terms of the amount of time you’ll be saving.
Eventually, however, your employees will start mentioning that they no longer have anyone to refer while, in reality, this isn’t the case at all! All you need to do is provide them with a more enticing offer and you’ll notice that their pool of possible candidates will substantially grow!
- You can have a drawing for a trip, a weekend at a nice lodge or concert tickets among everyone who referred a potential candidate. There are millions of ways to help incite your employees to participate in your recruitment initiative.
You may see a trip as a large expense to simply find the best candidates but if you actually take a step back and think, it’s most likely much cheaper than hiring a recruitment firm for this same purpose. An actual tangible reward like a 5000$ trip is bound to leave a positive mark on your employees and help you stand out from other organizations even more than 20 000$ worth of referencing commissions over the course of a year will.
Obviously, recruitment agencies can be quite useful in certain cases such as trying to find the best candidates for highly specialized positions. I’m simply letting you know that there are much easier to afford alternatives to cash bonuses when you’re on a budget.
3. Attend the right events
Depending what you’re recruiting for, there are generally many appropriate communities for each position.
- Tout le monde UX (design), MSDEVMTL (.NET developers) and even universities (if you’re looking for interns) are all great examples of this.
It really is a great idea to attend any and all events relevant to the candidates you’re looking for. However, do note that subtlety is key.
The absolute worst way to do this is to show up with a pile of business cards and hand them out to everyone you come across and end up leaving within the first 15 minutes. Believe me, I’ve seen this with my own eyes and these recruitment strategies rarely yields interesting results.
Ideally, you’ll want to show interest in the members of the community and let them know that you’re there to learn more about their world to aid you in your job as a recruiter (which is also true). You can then mention the way your organization works and what you do without being too pushy. This will generally yield great results as well as prevent your organization from looking desperate.
4. Pursue candidates differently
LinkedIn is exactly like adding a job posting to your site: quick and easy. This is why most organizations recruit this way!
Certain types of candidates will be solicited by recruiters on a constant basis. As this isn’t the case for us HR workers (if it is, hats off to you!), it can sometimes be difficult to imagine ourselves in their shoes.
How can we reach out to them and stand out from other organizations in this case? Easy: by approaching your recruitment strategies in a more creative way.
- Send a Christmas card to your passive referenced candidates (given that your employees can provide you with their postal address), send them gift cards or invite them to sign up for a contest. While this may seem old-school, you can easily stand out by making good use of snail mail in the Information Era!
It’s also important to remain simple, clear and to-the-point in your communications with potential candidates.
Finally, there are a multitude of other recruitment strategies and initiatives to find the one candidate you’re really looking for. If you ask me, the most important way to obtain this goal is to turn your current employees into brand ambassadors. If they love their jobs and their offices, they’ll be all the more likely to speak positively of what they do and where they do it to their friends and spread the good word about your organization. This will then lead them to be more likely to refer their friends (if they don’t end up applying themselves beforehand!).
In short, always remember that successful recruiting starts internally.
