The Recruitment Racetrack: 5 Recruitment Strategies to Accelerate Your Hiring

What Are the Elements of a Successful Recruiting Strategy?

Before any race, you need to take a look under the hood and evaluate. You’ll want to look at what’s wrong and what elements make a winning recruiting strategy.

Here’s our checklist:

An Engaged Talent Pool

Accessing a diverse pool of qualified candidates already showing interest in your organization can save valuable time and resources, since you won’t be starting your outreach from scratch.

Fair & Unbiased Evaluation

Whether conscious or unconscious, bias creates an unnecessary obstacle that can cause you to miss out on qualified candidates and tarnish your employer’s reputation. Actively taking steps to mitigate bias ensures fair and compliant hiring practices that will lead to more diverse talent.

To help you get started, check out our bias-free Candidate Interview Rubric Template!

Effective Onboarding

A smooth transition from candidate to employee is critical for long-term success. Onboarding sets the tone for your new hire’s journey, affecting engagement and retention. A seamless process leaves employees feeling confident and ready to contribute from day one.

Positive Candidate Experience

With sites like Glassdoor and Indeed that allow candidates to voice their thoughts on hiring experiences, creating a positive candidate experience is more important than ever. Clear communication, timely feedback, showing respect for candidates’ time, and using tools that make it easy to navigate the hiring process all contribute to building a good experience.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Tracking key metrics such as time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and quality-of-hire will help you identify areas for improvement and optimize your recruiting efforts.

What Are the Five Recruitment Strategies to Accelerate Your Hiring?

Now, it’s time to put the pedal to the metal and explore the recruitment strategies that will help you speed up your hiring and reach your goals.

Be Proactive

Don’t wait for candidates to come to you while everybody else is racing ahead! Be proactive and engage passive candidates—those who are not actively job searching but have the skills and experience you’re looking for. You can build a database of potential candidates by collecting information from previous job postings, employee referrals, and social media, or by using a solution that already has a database for you to access.

You can also be proactive by investing in employer branding to attract candidates organically. Showcasing your company culture and opportunities on your social media and website is a great way to generate positive word of mouth and drive candidates directly to you.

Tip: Do industry research to find out what skills are becoming valuable. This will help you better understand your talent pool and determine what candidates you might want in the future.

Utilize Diversity Recruiting Strategies

Diverse recruiting strategies are a secret weapon that can help you pull ahead by casting a wider net than traditional methods, allowing you to find more qualified candidates who may otherwise go unnoticed. Here are a few tactics to consider:

• Post jobs to diverse and niche job boards that attract candidates from different backgrounds.
• Use inclusive language in job descriptions to avoid accidentally deterring qualified talent.
• Use an ATS that will anonymize resumes to avoid unconscious bias.
• Partner with community-based organizations that are seeking employment opportunities for their members.

By using these strategies, you can access a hidden workforce full of untapped talent waiting to be engaged.

Build Efficient Onboarding

Onboarding is where companies can really stand out to candidates. The key to efficient onboarding is streamlining processes for both candidates and HR teams. You can achieve this by:

• Standardizing procedures across HR functions
• Using candidate-friendly onboarding tools
• Pairing new hires with dedicated mentors or people to support them and answer any questions they might have
• Providing new hires with easy-to-understand process documents and instructions

This efficiency is essential to get new hires on the right track so they can transition smoothly into their training and focus on their success in those crucial first 30 days.

Develop Tailored Training

To help fuel new employees to go the distance, you’ll want to ditch a one-size-fits-all approach and instead focus on developing tailored training. Tailored training aligns with each individual’s unique strengths and learning preferences, leading to better engagement, retention, and overall performance.

Here are some different ways you can tailor your training:

• Role-specific training: Break down key responsibilities and highlight the essential skills and knowledge needed to succeed.
• Incorporate Different Learning Styles: Use a mix of auditory, visual, and interactive elements to cater to different learning preferences.
• Set Milestones: Establish clear objectives for the first 30, 60, and 90 days, with regular check-ins to adjust the training as needed.
• Gather and Act on Feedback: Continuously seek feedback to refine and improve the training experience.

With tailored training, you’ll keep new hires engaged, motivated, and ready to go far within your company.

Use Hiring Technology that Fits Your Needs

No matter how great the driver is, a poorly built car won’t win any races. The same goes for your recruitment process—without the right technology, you’ll struggle to keep up.

To find out if the technology you’re using fits your organization’s needs, it may be time to conduct a process audit. Go through each of your processes and determine:

• What manual tasks are eating up time?
• Where are bottlenecks being created?
• Are there any steps that candidates have complained about?
• Is there any possibility of compliance risks?

Once you’ve done this, it’s time to consider what technologies can alleviate these pain points. You’ll want to invest in tools like Mitratech that can:

• Automate repetitive tasks
• Scale to your organization’s needs
• Take care of compliance requirements
• Detect risk and send you alerts
• Provide you with data to improve your hiring

Once you have the right solutions, you should feel ready to win!

Unclear Job Descriptions

Vague or overly complicated job descriptions can deter candidates from applying or lead to low-quality applications that waste time and resources.

For the best results, you’ll want to ensure that job descriptions are clear, concise, and accurate.

Lack of Alignment Between Hiring Manager & HR

The process can become disjointed and inefficient when hiring managers and HR teams are out of sync regarding job requirements, candidate qualifications, and hiring timelines.

Regular check-ins and clear documentation of expectations can help ensure everyone is aligned throughout the hiring process.

Slow Background Screening

A sluggish background screening process can create delays that result in having to push back the start date, which can annoy a candidate and even cause them to accept another offer.

To avoid this, use a background screening vendor that better suits your needs and regularly communicate with candidates to update them on the status of their background checks.

Poor Communication

Miscommunication or a lack of communication is one of the most common reasons candidates disengage and withdraw their applications. Especially in this hot and cold hiring market, candidates are looking for transparency and responsiveness above all else.

By providing regular updates and communication, you can ensure candidates won’t lose interest and protect your company’s reputation.

Manual Tasks

A lack of automation can leave your team bogged down and increase the risk of compliance errors. When manual tasks are eating up your team’s time, they cannot focus on outreach and providing a personal touch to the hiring process that will set you apart from the competition.

Adding automation to your hiring processes and reducing manual tasks improves the experience for both candidates and HR teams.

Crossing the Finish Line with Better Recruitment Strategies

With these strategies in place, you’ll be well-equipped to accelerate your recruitment and avoid spinning out.