Your company has a bunch of job openings and is looking to hire. There’s only one problem: you don’t know how to attract new talent on this scale, and nothing you’ve tried so far has been particularly successful. In this list, we’ve rounded up eight different ways to attract new talent to your company, from great benefits and corporate gifts to creating relationships with local colleges.
Identify Why You Need New Talent
If you’re hiring because your company is growing fast, and you need more workers to sustain that, then that is a good problem to have! However, if you’re hiring because you have a lot of turnover on your team, and people keep leaving, that’s a sign that something is wrong. If you suspect that employees are leaving because of underlying cultural problems, then you need to identify and address that before hiring another crop of new employees again. Otherwise, they will just leave again, driven away by the same problems that made the last batch quit, and the whole cycle will repeat itself.
Know What Sets You Apart
Speaking of company culture, identifying what sets you apart is a major part of attracting top talent. The labor market is very competitive right now, and it’s not enough to simply post a job — you need to demonstrate why people should come work for you, and company culture is a really compelling reason. If you don’t already have a mission statement and a set of company values, then take some time to sit down and figure those out before throwing up another job posting. If you can’t articulate what sets your company apart, then potential employees who have never worked there certainly won’t be able to figure it out.
Engage Your Current Employees
Your current employees can be a great resource for figuring out what potential candidates might love about your company. Consider sending out a survey or even sitting down with employees one-on-one to pick their brains about how your company can appeal to new candidates. You should also institute an employee referral program if you haven’t already. Getting referrals from existing employees can increase the quality of the candidate pool and speed up the hiring process. Featuring genuine employee testimonials on your website will also make your company more appealing to candidates and increase the likelihood they will submit an application.
Promote Job Openings Online
The internet has made it easier than ever to promote your job openings, so you need to take advantage of it. Your job openings should be posted not only to your own website but also to recruiting websites such as LinkedIn and Indeed.com. You should promote the job openings on your company social media channels; ask employees to reshare the posts on their personal social media accounts to spread the word. If you have a large company with an accompanying budget, you may get better results from sponsoring job posts or promoting them via paid ads for better visibility.
Offer Competitive Benefits and Perks
It’s not enough to just figure out your company culture and promote your job openings: you also need to offer competitive benefits and other perks that will make your business stand out in a competitive labor market. You should offer a salary range that is at least on par with your industry and geographic average, if not higher, as well as insurance and other benefits. Extra perks such as dog-friendly offices and promotional gifts like custom shoes and jackets can also help make your company stand out (though they aren’t a replacement for more substantive compensation like salary and insurance).
Reach out to Local Schools and Community Groups
If you don’t already have hiring pipelines established with local schools, now is the time to do it. Colleges and universities are obvious targets, but you should also seek out other options such as coding boot camps run by community groups. Talk to these organizations about opportunities for promoting your job openings to their current students as well as past graduates. Many departments will have a job board, email chain, or some other way to promote jobs to students and recent graduates, so, if you post there, you might get a lot more attention than you otherwise would.
Host an Open House or Job Fair
Open houses and job fairs are two more great opportunities to promote your job openings to candidates in specific regions. For open houses, candidates come to you, but you don’t have to compete with other companies for attention. At job fairs, there will be many different companies besides yours, but also higher foot traffic and a greater number of potential candidates. If you are actively hiring right now, see if there is a local or regional job fair where you can set up a booth to start reaching candidates immediately.
Create a Transparent Hiring Process
With so many job opportunities out there, potential employees won’t persist if you have an overly long job application, strange screening questions, or an opaque hiring process. You need to make the whole thing as transparent and easy on candidates as possible. If you’re not sure how to do that, take a look at your competitors’ job postings, as well as those of other companies that are renowned for their hiring processes. You might be able to draw some inspiration from them about what changes you need to make to your own hiring processes.
Needing to hire new talent is a great situation to be in, as long as it’s for the right reasons. Follow these tips to help attract potential job candidates to your company.
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