How to level-up your hiring process | 5 recruitment strategies to find the best people for your organisation

Are you looking to improve your approach to recruitment to attract and secure the best possible candidates? Bombarded by unqualified applications? Failing to generate interest in open vacancies? We’ve got 5 strategies you can start using to guarantee the best possible crops of prospects to pick from, and to help make sure you’re making the right hiring decisions.

The job market may be competitive for job hunters, but you better believe the labour market is competitive for businesses trying to attract and secure the most qualified people for their vacancies. Receiving 150 CVs simply isn’t practical any more. Not only does a CV only give you a fraction of a prospect’s story, sifting through them can be incredibly inefficient – both from a time management point of view, and the results it can deliver.

To recruit effectively in today’s world, where it’s easier than ever for candidates to rapid-fire apply to a mind-boggling amount of positions with minimal tailoring in their approach, you need to use more targeted and innovative methods to ensure you’re finding the best people to help you run your business.

Here are our best actionable strategies you can follow to optimise your approach to recruitment.

1. Invest time and effort into your employer branding

Attracting top talent to work for your business starts with exactly that: being attractive. Odds are the best people for the job will be in high demand, so you need to make sure that when the top percentiles decide they’re ready for a change of scenery, your grass looks the greenest.

You do this by developing your employer brand. In short, your employer brand is how you’re perceived by your own workforce, and by the prospective workforce. Are you a company people would be excited about working for? Do your employees strike jealousy into the hearts of their peers when they say they work for your business?

In short, crafting an irresistible employer brand means covering a few specific bases. You’re going to want to invest in ensuring there are training opportunities and progression pathways for your employees, making sure your team are able to enjoy a healthy work-life balance, and look to reflect the values and aspirations of your people through a corporate social responsibility strategy (CSR), because as much as people want opportunities and a nice environment, they also want to align themselves with a socially responsible employer.

Pro tip: Putting the time into all of the above is of paramount importance, but remember, it’s employer branding, you need to communicate all the good you’re doing internally and externally to make your company a more attractive prospect for jobseekers.

This should include videos and article content, but can also benefit from gamified courses. Gamification uses game mechanics and design elements to create interactive, immersive experiences that enhance user focus.

You could use the Dynamic Path™ format to create games that communicate some of the more complex elements of your employer branding, like your CSR approach. or even create a digital treasure hunt that gives job prospects opportunities to win prizes while learning more about your business.

2. Think beyond the raw materials of what you’re looking for in an employee

When crafting job ads, you should focus on more than just the qualifications and experience required, but also on the candidate’s potential, their adaptability, and their willingness to learn.

While for some jobs certain qualifications and experience will be cast in stone, in a lot of cases, it makes sense to be flexible in what’s essential and what’s desired in a candidate. Particularly when it comes to qualifications, remember that some people finish at the bottom of all their classes but still collect a diploma on the way out.

The most qualified and experienced candidate won’t always be the best fit, particularly in the information age when people have so much access to information and technology to experiment with, and can take an autodidactical approach to their training and be more agile in their learning as a result.

3. Use gamification to qualify candidates and reduce how many applications you need to pour through

Gamification is a magic bullet for recruitment. By tailoring gamified experiences to the recruitment process for different roles, you can assess a candidate’s aptitude, their job specific knowledge, their soft skills, and get an idea of how they would respond to job-specific situations.

For example, you could use the Dynamic Path™ format to create a series of psychometric tests and job specific scenarios that can give you a full quantitative rundown on how suitable an applicant is for a role. This is giving you information in an easy to export and analyse format, and because it’s accessible through a direct link, it can form part of the application process, allowing you to assess everyone who applies, and bring a far smaller field through to the interview process.

If your experience is well designed, the data you gather can then be used alongside candidates’ interview performances to give you every possible chance of selecting the right candidate, faster.

Pro tip: Make your recruitment flow seamlessly into your onboarding process, with gamified orientation courses to train new recruits on the company history and mission, how they fit in, and to teach them best practices.

4. Remember and respect that the hiring process is a 2-way street

This one too often falls by the wayside, as once you have your first choice, it’s easy to forget everyone else. Treat candidates with respect throughout the process, offering timely feedback, and clear communication. A positive candidate experience, even for those that are unsuccessful, can have positive repercussions for your reputation and for your organisation, and potentially lead to referrals and future interest.

Remember that people network, and candidates you don’t hire will probably have trained with, or be friendly with candidates you’d like to hire. If enough people feel messed around, it will negatively affect your reputation as an employer.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that just because you don’t hire someone the first time they apply, doesn’t mean you won’t want to hire them in the future. They may also be a strong candidate in their own right, narrowly beaten to the finish line by someone else, and if your first choice then falls through, you might want to reach out to them rather than go through the whole process again.

5. Strive to be a great employer and run a great place to work

The fifth strategy might just be an offshoot of the first strategy, but in many ways, it’s the most important one. Be a good employer. Retaining an employee is easier than procuring a new one, and upskilling is a lot easier to facilitate than onboarding, so make your people want to stay.

If recruitment is an iceberg, retention is the unseen 90%.

Key takeaway

Taking your hiring process to the next level doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. But these actionable strategies can be put in motion today, and by any business of any size, and will all contribute to improved end results.