With all the hang-ups, changes and challenges due to the COVID pandemic, it’s easy to feel stuck. But when it comes to your company’s recruiting, you have to get moving. The perfect talent isn’t going to wait around for you to get organized. In order to help you do this, I’m sharing my “Top 10 Tips to Level-Up Your Talent Acquisition Game”, so you have all your ducks in a row when it’s “go” time.
1. Pressure Test your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
Because of COVID, perceptions have changed dramatically. You might benefit from asking your employees a few questions via a survey and adjusting your brand communications and strategy accordingly. And, if your EVP is aging, or if you have undergone significant change like an acquisition or a divestiture, now is a great time to pressure test your employer brand messaging. Remember that authenticity is key. If you oversell a candidate today, you are just setting yourself up for turnover later.
2. Brand IN for Retention
One of the key pools of talent we tend to overlook is our own people, who we need to be reselling our value proposition to over and over again in order to reinforce why we are the best company for them and why they should stay. Especially our top talent because it’s expensive to lose employees. You should be doing all you can right now to turn your employer brand messaging inward. Find those employee stories that are aligned with your brand pillars and share them internally.
3. Tell it like Walt Did
According to Psychologist Jerome Bruner, we are 22 times more likely to remember a fact if it is woven into a story. Walt Disney is widely considered one of the greatest storytellers ever, and he always included a “three-pronged approach” when writing his stories:
- The principle of “shared desires”
- The notion that people desire to be part of something more than themselves
- The importance of creating new worlds, especially the unknown
In the world of TA, we should be looking for ways to make our brands appear as unique as possible, while sharing the greater purpose and mission that is generated from our work. People can work anywhere, but research proves that they will thrive in an environment where there is purpose and mission.
4. Own your Part in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
If championing your company’s DEI initiatives sounds overwhelming, here are a few simple places to start: neutralize your job postings, examine your media mix/sourcing with diversity in mind, train your hiring managers on unconscious bias, create a DEI/veteran mentorship program, invest in technology to drive equity, implement blind auditions for interview exercises, and follow the Rooney Rule (one woman and one underrepresented minority per slate of candidates for every open position).
5. Find your Virtual Reality
With the future of work rapidly trending towards an emphasis on remote, it’s prudent to take the time to build a continuity plan that includes ways to replicate your hiring process virtually. Whether you will need to rely on virtual hiring events or interviews, there are many vendors and free services that can help you determine which will be the right fit for your volume of needs, number of users, and of course your budget!
6. Treat your Media Like Fashion
- Use data to drive decisions, not your comfort level with a particular media or the media rep. Using comfortability as your success gauge is like wearing sandals with socks.
- Match your media to the occasion. You wouldn’t wear this feather ball into the office, just as you would never use the Thrifty Nickel to find your next executive.
- Programmatic job advertising is versatile and can easily and quickly be scaled up and down…just like a little black dress which can be dressed up or down with accessories and literally worn anytime.
- Make sure that you have a way to accurately measure your own data. Otherwise, it would be like letting a tailor make you a suit without having an opportunity to see you in person.
7. Audit Paid Ad Investment
If you aren’t optimizing your paid ads, especially on Google, then you are probably losing money. But before you begin, it’s important to identify what your KPIs are going to be. My advice is to focus on these three: ROI or hires, conversion or clicks/lead generation, and finally, brand awareness or traffic uptick on your career site, landing page or wherever you are driving traffic.
8. Repair the Holes in the Path
Data shows us that candidates visit up to 16 different sites before making the decision to apply to a role. It’s your job to ensure they receive the best experience possible. A small piece of me dies every time a TA professional admits to me that they have never evaluated their candidate experience. So, take the time to audit your entire candidate experience, from start to finish.
9. Provide Accessibility to All
Have you ever been on a site and clicked on a button that took you nowhere? Or tapped on a job posting link and got a 404 error? Frustrating, right?! Now imagine you have a visual, hearing, motor or cognitive disability and try to envision how infuriating life online would be EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Take a look at your career site/job application process and address any issues that might make things more challenging for someone with disabilities.
10. Automate for AI Experience
With the reductions in headcount, uncertainty of the future and the need for expediency in hiring, especially in high volume or hourly roles, it can be beneficial to automate parts of your recruiting process. By imbedding conversational AI into your career site, the AI can gather the applicant’s basic information and slot them for an interview at the closest location, reducing the bottleneck that occurs in between application and interview scheduling.
There are many more ways to improve your company’s talent acquisition strategy, but if you start with these 10, you will be in a great spot! For more information about how we can help you with any of these, check out our services here.