How To Reinvent and Reinvigorate Your Hiring Strategy

How To Reinvent and Reinvigorate Your Hiring Strategy

To find and retain the right people for your company, you’ll need a hiring strategy — a plan that helps you consistently fill job openings with qualified hires. Your hiring strategy should inform every stage of a potential employee’s onboarding process, from their first interview to a formal offer.

With the right hiring strategy, you can minimize turnover and place employees into company roles where they thrive. A poor or incomplete hiring process can frustrate candidates, compromise productivity, and even result in the wrong person filling a position.

If you’re invested in your company’s hiring process, it’s important to optimize your strategy in ways that attract top industry talent.

Revamp Job Descriptions

Some companies will draft generic job descriptions that omit specific details. This can result in an excessive number of applications from unqualified job seekers, ultimately slowing down the hiring process.

To minimize the number of irrelevant applications, make sure you explain job requirements, schedule, benefits, and other key details that help you clearly define the role.

Many employees today seek new opportunities to learn and grow. Instead of focusing on strict requirements for an open position, consider restructuring your job description to highlight training and growth opportunities. You can outline mandatory qualifications for the position, but make sure you also emphasize any introductory or ongoing training included with the position. Take the time to clarify why certain individuals might succeed in the role and why.

Be Clear About Who You Are

The hiring process works both ways: candidates are mentally interviewing you while you interview them. Ultimately, both a candidate and an employer should feel as though they’ve found an ideal fit. To help candidates make clear decisions, make sure you’re clear about who you are and what you want to accomplish as a company.

Candidates generally care about more than a job’s salary and benefits; they also want to know that their values are aligned with their employer’s. Your job description should include information about your company’s culture, values, and identity. As part of your strategy, make sure you identify how this role fits into your company’s overall goals.

If your new hire will be involved in any sort of trademark applications or other legal tasks, make sure they’re aware of this responsibility before their first interview. Be ready to answer any questions they might have about this process, including how a legal firm might expedite the trademark application process.

Be Transparent About Pay and Benefits

For both job applicants and employers, transparency is always the best policy. Make sure potential candidates are aware of the pay and benefits you’re offering for any posted position.

Some companies hide pay and benefits from applicants until it’s time to extend a formal offer. However, if an applicant’s expectations don’t align with the pay and benefits your company is offering, you risk losing a candidate at the final stage of the hiring process. To ensure all candidates are aware of — and satisfied by — the compensation you’re offering, include these details in the initial job description.

Let Employees Work Remotely

Across the United States, more than 5.7 million employees worked remotely pre-pandemic. Of the total American population, 56% of workers (75 million people) have a job that could allow them to work remotely. Remote work offers several advantages to American employees, including increased flexibility.

Remote employment allows a company’s employees to work from home, without visiting any corporate office. One survey found that remote employees experience several benefits as a result of at-home employment, saving an average of $4,523 in fuel each year. Those same remote employees exercised more, while maintaining higher levels of productivity throughout the day.

If you’re planning on offering remote work as an option for employees, know that there are some drawbacks. Supervisors can prove more distracting from home than they otherwise were in the office, according to the same study. Since remote employees often work and sleep in the same house, many can experience difficulties striking a favorable work-life balance.

Try a Collaborative Approach

You might also want to try a collaborative approach as part of your reinvented hiring strategy. Consider inviting coworkers, or employees from other departments, to join interviews or assess applicants during the hiring process.

Collaboration between employees or departments during the hiring process helps companies avoid bias, and can help balance opinions between hiring managers. Introducing a candidate to multiple company employees also gives that candidate a better understanding of the company’s culture and current workers.

In some cases, a collaborative approach to hiring can prove beneficial. In other cases, you might not want to invite others to partake in the hiring process. If you know what you’re looking for in a particular candidate, other collaborators might not feel represented during the selection process.

You’ll also need to make sure that you don’t offend coworkers if you ask for their opinions and ultimately hire someone they didn’t recommend.

Know How To Market Your Jobs

Even if your company is offering a lucrative position and salary, you might have trouble filling a job vacancy without appropriate marketing. To find applicants online, consider a variety of different digital options.

Make sure you list your job across online job boards, particularly job boards that list other positions in your industry. List your position across as many job boards as possible to broaden your reach and source more applications.

Take the time to thoroughly market your position across social media. Social media can compete with traditional job boards, offering a viable alternative for applicants seeking employment. In minutes, you can list your open position, populate job details and compensation, and broadcast your job to thousands of qualified candidates on social media.

You might also consider an employee referral program, one that rewards current company employees for recommending candidates. Through a hiring referral program, your current employee should receive a reward if their recommended candidate is ultimately hired for the position.

Get Creative

There’s always room for creativity during the hiring process. A little creativity during the hiring process can help set your company apart from others in a candidate’s eyes.

You can include creativity in your hiring strategy in a variety of different ways. When you’re fielding online applications, ask customized questions that gauge an applicant’s creativity and reading skills. During the interview process, don’t be afraid to ask non-traditional questions that help put your candidate at ease and encourage them to think on their feet.

For more inspiration on creativity during the hiring process, reference job podcasts or webinars that outline the best modern hiring processes to implement. You might even try gamification during the hiring process, even if you simply use a quiz or challenge to test candidates’ intellect and their willingness to try new things.