Ways to Attract Employees Using your Website

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

Are you using your company website to help recruit new talent? Perhaps you have a great Careers Page and update it regularly with current vacancies, but what about the rest of the site? Ways to attract employees on your website go beyond these basic tactics. 

 

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How HR Professionals Can Protect Employee and Candidate Data

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

With data becoming one of the most sought-after currencies today, security breaches are not an uncommon occurrence. Candidate and employee data protection has never been more important, as the repercussions of data breaches can lead to a loss of money, confidential information, and brand reputation.

 

A secure, centralised electronic document management system (EDM) is a great solution to this modern problem. EDMs minimise the risk of security breaches and ensure your candidate and employee data is protected, along with many other additional benefits.

 

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4 Ways Employer Branding Videos Get You the Best Applicants

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

In today’s candidate-driven market, a positive, definite employer brand is important for attracting and retaining top talent.

 

With an employer profile, you have numerous opportunities to showcase your companies’ unique brand and culture. Including online employer branding videos in your profile is a brilliant way to communicate your brand to candidates due to the rise in the video.

 

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The Ultimate Recruitment Campaign Checklist

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

If your application numbers are dwindling and you can’t work out why, use this checklist before you run your next recruitment campaign. 

 

It’s no longer an employer’s market, and the application process needs to be clear, positive and simple.  If you want to attract the passive candidate that may not be actively looking, but just “seeing what’s out there”, you need to design your advertising and application process accordingly.

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How to Advertise a Job Effectively in 8 Steps

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

Here is our simple 8 step guide how to advertise a job effectively. 

 

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5 Ways Automation Improves the Onboarding Experience

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

Over the years, automation has become one of those business buzzwords you hear tossed around at almost every meeting. And yes, it can be just a buzzword if you don’t implement it into your organisation, but it can also be a solution that transforms every department and every process in your company. Automation encompasses a myriad of software and hardware solutions that aim to cut extraneous business costs, elevate efficiency and productivity, improve compliance and security, and bring numerous other benefits to the table. This includes improving the onboarding experience. 

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Understanding The Science Behind Successful Recruiting

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

The ubiquitous adoption of online recruitment services has led to record levels of online job-related activity taking place. Major engines register over 17m unique job-related searches each month within the UK alone. To operate effectively in this environment we need to understand the science behind successful recruiting.

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The 8 Biggest Recruitment Challenges for 2021

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

When you’re looking to hire the best talent for your business, it’s inevitable that you’ll run into a few recruitment challenges along the way. Here we discuss what some of these biggest challenges are, and some useful tips that help solve them. 

 

1. Market Fragmentation

One of the biggest recruitment challenges is understanding the different tools are services out there, and which are most effective for improving the recruitment process. This can be a daunting task, with hundreds of potential solutions out there that claim they can get your job filled, making it hard to distinguish which are best for your recruitment needs.

 

From job boards and aggregators, to social media, sponsored advertising, agencies and RPOs, it can be hard to know where to start, as amongst the very good solutions, there are some very poor ones too. Each job will need a different set of solutions, so finding the ideal combination of advertising media, technology and processes is the best way to get your job filled efficiently and cost-effectively.

 

Tips:

Luckily, there are now recruitment services available that let you centralise all your recruitment activities. Many of these services have integrated 3^rd party tools so you can get several recruitment solutions in one, giving you better value for money.

 

A key tip to establish which is the best service for you is to first list your company objectives, then you can think about the tools you need to achieve them. For example, if you want to reduce recruitment costs, selecting tools that reduce your dependency on agencies could be the best option.

 

2. Efficiency During The Recruitment Process

Inefficient administration processes and duplication of effort are what soak up the vast majority of a recruiter’s time. For example, sourcing potential applicants and reviewing CVs and profiles can take hours, if not days.

 

When lots of time is spent inefficiently on recruitment admin, it can actually create a substantial cost to your business. Yet, when calculating the cost-per-hire metric, many businesses don’t factor in the time and resources spent on these kinds of tasks.

 

Creating an efficient recruitment process is essential for getting high-quality applicants into your shortlist, as quickly as possible. It’s also important for managing efficient ways to reject unsuitable applicants quickly, while protecting the corporate brand.

 

Tips:

A good recruitment management system is essential for improving your recruitment efficiency. Recruitment management systems let you coordinate all your processes from one single platform, where you can easily identify what tasks are the most time consuming, along with many other tools that automate and simplify the recruitment process.

 

This will dramatically reduce time spent on manual admin tasks, and save on long-term costs to your business. For example, you may notice screening applicants is taking far longer than necessary, so you could benefit from implementing tools like behavioural assessments, video profiling and technical assessments.

 

 

3. The Candidate Experience and Protecting the Company Brand

Company brand is all about reputation, and this can be significantly affected by the candidate experience throughout the recruitment process. This can be seen in research that found 80% of candidates who have a bad recruitment experience will openly tell others about it, with many proactively doing so.

 

A poor candidate experience can damage your brand image, impacting how both candidates and customers may see you in the future. Yet understanding how to execute a positive candidate experience seems to be one of the biggest recruitment challenges.

 

Tips:

Improving the way you communicate with candidates is one of the best things you can do to improve their experience and protect your brand. This can easily be done with personalised automated email and SMS responses at each stage of the application process, acknowledging applications and providing additional information about your job opportunity to keep them engaged.

 

This is important even for candidates who aren’t suitable for your roles. According to a PwC survey, 61% of candidates have experienced recruiters withdrawing from all communication suddenly and without explanation, even after they have had an interview. This can leave candidates feeling negatively towards your brand, increasing the chance of negative word-of-mouth.

 

Download our eBook on Creating a Better Candidate Experience

 

4. Avoiding Bad Hires

The person doing the recruitment may be under pressure to get the job filled quickly above anything else. This can lead to unsuitable candidates being selected, and bad hires being made. Bad hires can cost your business almost a third of the employee’s first-year earnings, and affect your team’s overall performance and productivity, so naturally this is something you want to avoid.

 

Tips:

Applying due diligence even in the earliest stages of recruitment is key for avoiding bad hires. This can be done in the form of sophisticated candidate screening tools, such as CV parsing, behavioural assessments, and video profiling. Tools like this will help closely match candidate experience, behaviour, and cultural fit to your role and business.

 

5. Direct Applicant Quality

Every recruiter is looking for the secret sauce to this recruitment challenge. Attracting quality candidates is important, but something many businesses struggle with. This isn’t helped by the fact that the typical drop-off rate during the application process is 80%, and this tends to be the strongest applicants passively searching for a new role.

 

Poorly optimised job adverts that don’t include appropriate keywords are often the centre of this problem, as the right candidates aren’t discovering the role. Many job adverts are also poorly written to convert, creating the challenge of turning a view into an actual application.

 

Tips:

There are short and long-term solutions to this challenge. A short-term strategy would be to ensure your advert will be displayed by search engines like Google by using the most effective job title and relevant keywords that your ideal candidate will be searching for. Make sure to include these keywords in your ad copy, page title and meta description. Once candidates find your job ad, making it engaging and well-written will help improve conversions more than a simple job spec.

 

More long-term strategies that will help improve direct applicant quality are to improve your company brand and reputation using the tactics mentioned for improving the candidate experience. We also recommend building your talent pool and establishing relationships with quality candidates ahead of trying to recruit them, for example those that have previously applied at your company, follow you on social media or have joined groups you manage on LinkedIn.

 

6. Improving Time to Hire

With 81% of candidates expecting the hiring process to take 2 weeks at most, improving time-to-hire is a recruitment challenge increasing in importance. This is because candidates are far more likely to drop-off the application process if it is taking too long, or get snapped up by another company.

 

Tips:

Instead of measuring your time-to-hire, use the time-to-offer metric instead. This is much more sensible to assess your performance on, as things like candidate notice period are beyond the recruiter’s control.

 

If you find that your time-to-offer is still too long, then you need to start looking for ways to speed up your recruitment process so you don’t miss out on talented candidates. Some ways to do this include posting your jobs to a wide enough network, writing optimised ad copy, communicating with the best applicants continuously, and automating manual processes through technology like CV parsing, to name a few.

 

7. Measuring Performance and Results

What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t improve. Tracking data like application completion rates, drop-off rates, and declined offers is important for identifying areas where you might need to improve your recruitment process. It’s also useful for spotting what campaigns perform well, so you can replicate these in future and save on the cost of weak recruitment.

 

Recruiters need to generate simple, accurate reports that give this kind of information, and the recruitment challenges lies with what tools are most effective for doing this.

 

Tips:

A good recruitment management system is once again an easy solution to this challenge. These systems provide you with detailed reports across all your recruitment activities that you can then analyse for performance and pinpoint areas for improvement.

 

8. Reducing Recruitment Costs

Perhaps the most prominent recruitment challenge concerns reducing your recruitment spend. Many companies look to cut back on agency costs, which is unsurprising given standard fees range between 15 – 20% of the candidate’s first annual salary. Hiring directly in-house is one of the most effective ways to reduce these costs, but hiring the right candidate is what will repay that cost several times over.

 

Tips:

Having the right tools, systems, and processes in place is critical to improving your in-house recruitment process, and reducing overall recruitment costs. Our Guide to Reducing Recruitment Costs covers this in more depth, and will give you all the tips you need to do this.

 

Many fixed price solutions are able to offer extremely good value for money when it comes to your media advertising, and some come with outstanding management systems that can help you to address many of the other challenges that recruiters face.

 

Look out for free trials of recruitment services

You may have noted that many of the biggest recruitment challenges can be solved using recruitment technology and services. Luckily, many businesses that provide these kind of services offer a free trial, so you can decide if they are suited to your needs.

 

Smart Recruit Online offer free online demonstrations of our talent acquisition platform. Our platform comes fully equipped to solve the challenges we’ve spoken about here, with recruitment management software, candidate communication tools, screening tools, job advert optimisation tools and so much more available on one, easy-to-use platform. If you like what you see, you can sign up for a 12 week trial completely free of charge.

 

What are you waiting for? Start solving some of your biggest recruitment challenges today. 

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Onboarding New Staff During a Pandemic: What You Need to Know

Danielle Meakin - 6 Comments - 29 Sep 2019

It’s safe to say that we can all agree that Covid-19 has thrown the traditional office work life into complete disarray. Workplaces have closed with employees encouraged to work from home as much as they possibly can. Entire work practices have been moved online, from recruiting and inducting new recruits, to hosting weekly updates and team meetings. While the prospect of employee onboarding during a pandemic might seem daunting and sometimes impossible, we have some helpful tips listed to help make the process as easy as possible. (more…)

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