If you haven’t updated your recruitment process for a while, it’s high time that you considered it. Recruitment is changing all the time due to new technologies, strategies, and techniques. Stay up to date on the latest recruitment trends and pick and choose the ones you think would work for your company to implement. Here are our 10 tips for to improve your hiring success rate:

Create an Employer Brand

Many companies recruit time and time again without ever creating a strategy for employer branding. Employer branding is the general public perception of what you are like to work for as an employer. If you’re not sure where to start, a good first step is to develop an employee value proposition; what you can offer your staff. What sets you apart from all the other places your employees could work at? Maybe you provide excellent health insurance, plenty of holiday leave, or other benefits.

Use an Applicant Tracking System

If you want to make your recruitment process more efficient, you might consider looking into an applicant tracking system (ATS). These systems can improve your hiring process by simplifying it, saving you time, and helping you make better hires. With all of your applicant data in one place, you can effortlessly search and keep track of where applicants are in the process.

See Yourself as A Marketer

Many recruiters and hiring managers don’t think a lot about marketing, day-to-day. However, recruitment is essentially a marketing process – of the job, of you as an employer. When writing your job ads, keep this in mind. Writing copy in the job ad that will engage and appeal to your audience can help attract more people to apply. And don’t forget to end with a call to action.

Create a Talent Pipeline

If you want a faster hiring process, source candidates before you need them. This may seem counterintuitive but having a talent pipeline that you can refer to whenever you have a role open up will change the way you recruit. Imagine already having talented and qualified candidates in mind each time you start a recruitment process.

You can connect with potential candidates through social media platforms such as LinkedIn or online job forums. Seek out the people who fit the candidate persona for a number of roles or have the general skills your organization looks for.

Consider Your Requirements

In the job description, many hiring managers and HR teams use it as a place to write their ‘wish list’ of desired candidate traits. However, if you stick to only describing the essential characteristics or experience, you’re likely to get more quality applicants. The more specific you can be, the more high quality applicants you could have. That’s because women especially can be put off applying for a role unless they meet every single criteria. So, by sticking to only the required items, you won’t put people off with a long list.

Keep in Touch

Most of us have been through a recruitment process where we had no idea what was happening or where we stood. It’s frustrating and can put people off working for you; it comes across as unprofessional. Why not provide each candidate a timeline of what to expect during the process? You could even put this at the bottom of the job ad – just the basics such as the week you wish to interview, and when you hope to make a decision.

Build an Employee Referral Program

If you have a team of talented and dedicated staff, those people likely know others who are just as great in the workplace. So, why not ask them to tell you who they think would be an excellent fit in your company? No one knows more about what it takes to work for you than your employees do. One study found that employee referrals are preferred by 82% of employers over other sources of talent.

Build a Streamlined Offboarding Process

Offboarding is indeed part of the recruitment process. The way that someone leaves your company matters, and these people can be an excellent source of data. Just as you might build an employee referral program for your current staff to recommend your organization, past staff may be inclined to endorse you as an employer as well.

Hire Collaboratively

The recruitment process is often not collaborative. It may be run solely by the HR team or a hiring manager might do it with as little input from HR as possible. It doesn’t have to be done that that way! The hiring manager is not the only person this decision affects; their whole team will have to work with this new person. So, why not involve them? A hiring manager can even get future colleagues of the potential candidates to run the first round of interviews. Then, only those who have been vetted by the team move forward to interview with the hiring manager. This not only saves you plenty of time in interviewing subpar candidates but brings your team into the decision-making process. The more involved they are, the more likely they are to be happy with your choice.

Develop Better Interview Questions

If you’ve been using the same interview questions for years, it’s time to take a look at them through fresh eyes. To find incredible candidates, you need some relevant questions that dig deeper into what you want to know. Don’t use stock-standard questions for every single interview process – they should change according to the role in question. Use a mix of behavioral and situational interview questions to gain a full understanding of how the applicant has behaved in the past and how they would behave in the future. It’s always a good idea after a behavioral question to ask if they would act the same way should the situation arise again, and why or why not.

Incorporate these 10 tips into your recruitment process to give it a refresh. You just might discover some effective new ways of sourcing candidates, improving your employer brand, and hiring more productive staff members.