Select Top Talent in The Competitive Job Market

Strategies to Attract And Select Top Talent in The Competitive Job Market

While the Great Resignation still lasts, since the wake of the COVID pandemic, when employees started to resign massively, there have been undeniable feelings of pressure on hiring professionals. 

Some of the most frequently mentioned reasons for resigning are: wage stagnation amid the rising cost of living; limited opportunities for career growth; hostile work environments; insufficient benefits; inflexible remote work policies; and long-lasting job dissatisfaction. According to a survey by LinkedIn in December among more than 2,000 US employees, about 61% of American workers plan to resign in 2023

Consequently, there is a big challenge in front of hiring professionals who are looking for a quality workforce. Organizations must increase their efforts to gain the attention of job candidates, particularly top-tier hires, and persuade employees to stay for the long term.

Top talents are rare, hard to find, and hard to win over, they aren’t going to come to you. Your previous recruiting methods may not be suitable for attracting top talent. The power has switched from employers to employees. Talent can now request higher salaries, compensation, and titles.

In this article, we will explore ways to attract top-tier professionals in the era of high layoffs and a competitive labor market.

8 Tips For Attracting And Hiring Top Talent

Hiring, training, and the onboarding process are time-consuming. When you increase the number and quality of your candidates with these strategies, you’ll save your team significant time in recruiting and hiring.

#1 Promote Your Employer Brand

Collectively, the mission, vision, and values of your company form your employer brand. Start by analyzing your company’s mission and vision, which refer to what your company does, why it exists, and what it stands for. 

That is followed by your company’s core values, which are what your company believes in. Your company’s values are the behaviors you and your team show as you work toward common goals, especially when facing challenges, as well as the character traits that others perceive about you and your company. Your values are the foundation of your company and the most important thing to establish and enroot first.

The most effective way to evaluate the strength of your company’s culture is to speak directly with your employees. Find out how they feel about the subject. Whether through anonymous surveys or face-to-face interviews, ask them what they love most about working at your company and what they’d like to be different about it. Listening to your workers will not only help you identify weaknesses that your company can improve but will also help you identify strengths you should emphasize as part of your company’s brand. To be competitive, you must recognize and address workers’ desires. 

If you want to establish a great reputation as an employer, you need to strongly promote your brand. Be consistent in your messaging on your company’s website, social media, and job descriptions. 

#2 Use Sourcing Strategies

Sourcing is a proactive search for high-quality candidates; sourcing is different from recruiting. Proactive in terms of employees going to search for candidates, contrary to recruiting, where employees are posting jobs and waiting for candidates to come to them. It also means that employees are seeking qualified candidates even if there isn’t an immediate hiring need.

Use Sourcing Strategies

Nowadays, most sourcing happens on LinkedIn. Recruiters, sourcers, and hiring managers use LinkedIn and tools such as Pipeline Builder and LinkedIn Recruiter to find and interact with top talent. But sourcing difficult-to-find candidates happens outside of LinkedIn too, through social media groups and forums, recommendations, meetings, conferences, and recruiting events.

Sourcing Strategies For Attracting Top Talents Are:

  1. Searching on social media sites. LinkedIn is the most popular site for finding qualified candidates, but don’t let that limit you from using other social media platforms. You can also use Facebook groups to source talent. Twitter is also a great source of potential candidates; if you find one that meets your requirements, you should check who they’re following to expand your discovery of other potential talents.
  2. Check out Meetup.com. Meetup is a website for finding local events. It can be an excellent source of passive candidates in a specific location with specific skills.
  3. Search forums and online communities. They are also full of candidates, for example, on Reddit. Join the groups, read the rules, and observe how people communicate before starting to participate.
  4. Use analytics. Big data is a new resource for recruiters. Big data can predict just how difficult it will be to hire for a specific position in a specific city, how many workers a company will need in the future, important talent areas recruiting should focus on, and more.
  5. Learn from past hires. Review what kinds of candidates you’ve placed in jobs in the past two years. examine the job titles for every position, their salary ranges, the skills and experience needed, the length of the hiring process, the rate of retention, the company size, the industry, location, and more. Use what you learn to implement a proactive strategy for talent sourcing.
  6. Get recommendations. Ask hiring managers, company leadership, and current employees to share your job ads with their professional networks and refer prospective employees to you. Work with recruiters and hiring managers to set up employee referral programs to help with that.

#3 Be Transparent

From your workplace culture to your salary, you need to be transparent. We’re talking here about job ads that say it all like it is. Job ads that have all the relevant information, including stats about salary, benefits, number of openings, testing steps, or specific eligibility prerequisites like grade criteria and visa requirements.

Transparent job ads will explain the role and organization in clear, simple, and accessible language. It helps a professional determine whether or not they are qualified, or, in other words, whether or not they want to work for you. Actual transparency means writing a job description with the specific goal of helping many potential candidates evaluate themselves before they submit an application. 

Embracing true transparency has many benefits for employers, like attracting the best-fit talents, cutting down on unused resources, minimizing the damage to the employer’s brand image, and decreasing staff turnover.

Being honest with your potential candidates and transparent in your job advertising is undoubtedly the rational and right thing to do.

#4 Evaluate Your Benefits on a Regular Basis

Review the specifics of your basic benefits package on a regular basis and make them as solid as possible. Many organizations have basic benefit packages that may include health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, paid time-off policies, and a retirement plan.

Compare your benefits packages to your competitors, see what they offer, and make changes to increase the attractiveness of your company. Furthermore, consider what other special benefits you can offer that are unique to your company. 

Highlight your benefit offerings in both job descriptions and on your website’s employment or career page. To be an effective recruiting tool, people must first be aware of your company’s outstanding benefits. 

#5 Increase Workplace Diversity 

It’s important to commit to diversity, equity, and inclusion because they are, in the end, associated with growth in revenue. Many benefits come from a diverse and inclusive workplace, such as:

  • Increased motivation, engagement, and productivity,
  • Widen opinions that generate new ideas,
  • A greater understanding of different customers and markets,
  • Lower risk of discrimination and harassment issues.

Showcase your ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and successes on your company’s website and social media platforms, as well as in your job descriptions.

#6 Show What to Expect From Your Interview Process

Show What to Expect From Your Interview Process

When applying for a job, candidates could feel uneasy because they don’t know what to expect from the interview process. Try sharing a summary of your interview process through an initial email, a phone call, your careers page, or a job advertisement. Being open about what candidates can expect regarding the recruitment process and timeline shows that you’re a transparent and trustworthy company. It also allows candidates to determine if they’re interested in continuing.

#7 Share Quality Content 

Among the many benefits of sharing valuable content on your company’s website and social media profiles, which include increased brand awareness, easy connections with the public, attracting more visitors, targeted advertising, and so on, we give a special focus to social recruiting.

Through pictures and written content, you can show potential job candidates what it would be like to work at your company, and even if you’re not advertising open roles or career opportunities, you can attract passive talent by expressing your organization’s voice and character.

You can use video to demonstrate what your workers’ day-to-day activities are like, share a photo to catch the eye of a scroller, use hashtags, and provide helpful and informative content, giving your audience a reason to follow. For example, an informative blog post about bartender salary in United States will demonstrate your transparency.

#8 Include a Practical Task in The Interviewing Process

During the interview, your candidate may seem like a perfect fit for the role, they did their best to present themselves in the best light, but once they are actually on the team, they may fail to deliver. To prevent this from happening, we suggest including a practical exercise in the hiring process. 

For example, if you’re hiring a customer service representative or account manager, simulate a challenging conversation with a customer. If you’re hiring a video maker, ask them to record and edit a brief video. If you are going to hire someone for your content team, have them write an article.

In general, you want to include some kind of testing that will give you an idea of how the candidate will actually do the job, aside from a resume, portfolios, and your gut feeling. From the perspective of the interviewee, this will give them an opportunity to see what kind of work they will be doing and the standards you’re looking for.

With these tips, you are fully prepared to start attracting and making the best selection of top talent in the job marketplace.

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