Share This Article:
Back to Blog

Five Ways HR Can Improve Hiring Practices to Recruit Great Employees

Five Ways HR Can Improve Hiring Practices to Recruit Great Employees

Organizations can communicate their values, mission, and company culture to new hire candidates through slick web design and well-crafted “About Us” pages. With this in mind, HR leaders at small and mid-sized businesses can actually hire better candidates by rethinking their approach to the nuts and bolts of the recruiting process, from an applicant’s first interaction to their application. Here’s how.

 

What is New Hire Recruiting?

Recruitment is the process that employers use to find and hire employees, from the initial search to interviews and eventually onboarding. This includes attracting, shortlisting, selecting, and appointing suitable candidates for jobs (either permanent or temporary) within an organization.

 

Why Small and Mid-Sized Organizations Struggle to Hire Top Talent

Inefficient hiring processes put small- and mid-sized organizations at a recruitment disadvantage. While these businesses can struggle to find quality talent, most are not prioritizing a swift recruitment process.

As a result, quality hires are off the market too quickly for searching employers. However, being smaller than the competition doesn’t necessarily mean that these companies will never land top talent. Streamlining the hiring process presents a critical opportunity for HR leaders to improve recruitment and retention rates.

 

What is a Careers Page, and Should Organizations Have One?

A careers page is an organization’s sales pitch to job applicants. It’s the one-stop-shop where candidates can learn about the company, discover its products and services, and get to know its mission and values. It’s also the place where job seekers can find out what it’s like to work for your company and search through open positions.

Unfortunately, most careers pages don’t cut it for the majority of businesses looking to hire the best available job candidates.

 

Five Ways HR Can Improve its Hiring Practices

According to CareerBuilder, 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out applications because of their length and complexity. Yet with a few important tweaks, HR can adjust an employer’s hiring practices to land (and retain) better hires.

 

1. Don’t Just Rely on Your Careers Page

HR can make certain quality of life adjustments to the company’s careers page, but organizations need more to land the best candidates. If an employer’s site doesn’t naturally generate a lot of web traffic, hiring managers might be missing out on top talent if they stick to posting job openings on the careers page and nowhere else.

To widen the funnel of applicants, integrate your careers page with job sites like Indeed. Likewise, HR should avoid making the mistake of linking from Indeed to the company careers page, which creates friction between the two. Candidates should be able to apply directly on Indeed or the careers page, saving them time and headaches switching between sites and tabs.

 

2. Align with the Marketing and Hiring Team

If an organization posts on job sites, HR and hiring managers should be aligned with the marketing and recruiting team to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

For example, lots of companies share job openings on social media platforms like LinkedIn. If they aren’t aligned with the marketing team, hiring managers may post the wrong information about a job opening, or send applicants to the wrong place on the site. That’s friction yet again.

Similarly, HR and hiring managers need to closely collaborate with the marketing team to build out the careers page to ensure that it’s as attractive (and effective) as can be. Likewise, the marketing team can help the hiring team optimize social media and job review sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, which can go a long way towards improving an organization’s reputation among potential candidates.

3. Refocus Your Candidate Pitch

Employers often focus too much on what they want out of a candidate for specific roles. They barrage potential applicants with a collection of different responsibilities and requirements without even pitching them on why they should want to work for the organization in the first place.

Instead, organizations need to think about recruiting in the same way marketers think about earning leads. They should be using job descriptions to sell positions to candidates, not tell them what’s required of the position that they haven’t even applied for yet. This can include target compensation as well. 

This means that hiring managers should want to get as many applications in as possible and weed them out later. Their candidate pool will be deeper, more diverse, and likely include several great choices for any open position. The result? Hiring managers can make better decisions and hire the right people for the right roles.

 

4. Respond Quickly to Candidates 

Inefficient hiring processes put small- and mid-sized organizations at a recruitment disadvantage. It’s common industry knowledge that the best candidates are off the market in 10 days. So, to land the best candidates, hiring managers need to respond quickly—ideally within 24 hours

It’s important for hiring managers and HR to understand that job seekers are likely applying elsewhere as well. The quicker employers get back to applicants, the sooner they can begin the hiring process. Some companies may have hundreds of applicants for a single position, so to keep up, employers should adopt HR technology that improves applicant tracking, hiring, and onboarding processes.

 

5. Rely on a High-Quality Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to Serve as Your Backend

The backend of a company’s careers page should be built on an applicant tracking system (ATS) to help teams recruit, track, and manage job candidates throughout the hiring process. 

More than anything, a quality ATS (like the one included in BerniePortal) helps streamline every component of recruitment. Less time sorting through applications and emails and more time fine-tuning job listings and more. To put it simply, HR can’t really optimize anything else about its hiring process without an ATS that makes life easier.

Additionally, relying on an ATS eliminates the need for applicant account creation. Not only does this additional step create added friction, but it could quite literally be the reason why a job candidate decides not to apply. Why go through all that trouble if a thousand other jobs don’t require you to create an account? 

When hiring managers use an ATS, they’re already collecting all of the important information needed to follow up with an applicant if needed. This saves teams and candidates the trouble in advance.

HR's Innovative Strategies for Employee Retention

Share This Article:
    

Related Posts

As an HR Party of One at a small business, you may be responsible for managing your...

Imagine this: Your boss asks you to start recruiting for a software developer. You have...

You probably already know that your role as a Human Resources professional is vital to...

Form W-4 is crucial to employee tax reporting and employer withholding. This form got a...

Submit a Comment