4 Ways to Recruit Employees in a Competitive Job Market

4 Ways to Recruit Employees in a Competitive Job Market

Why is it so hard to find good employees? With unemployment levels at 4.8%, there are fewer active job seekers. This creates competition in the market but a much different one from recent years. Rather than multiple candidates vying for positions because of limited availability, there is now a surplus of positions opening up and not enough candidates to fill them. That means employers must compete to find and recruit top talent. With the talent pool being smaller, intelligently identifying your hiring needs and prioritizing them becomes paramount.

With so many jobs and unique opportunities for candidates to consider, it's your job as an employer to ensure that your hiring process is up to the challenge and that your company stands out. If you're wondering how to recruit in a highly competitive job market, here are some tips to consider.

  • Great Benefits

One of the best ways to attract top talent is to offer a competitive salary. However, for many job seekers, salary isn't everything. In today's competitive job market, a generous benefits package is essential for attracting and retaining top talent.

A recent survey found that work-life balance, flex time, vacation time, or work to time-off proportion was one of the main factors for accepting a job for 24% of the respondents.  Offer benefits and incentives like health insurance, paid time off, retirement savings plans, flexible hours, remote work options, paid parental leave, advancement and mobility, and generous vacation policies to attract candidates.

  • Ease of Application

Make the application process straightforward, or you'll likely frustrate candidates. In many cases, parts of the job application are redundant, which creates a more frustrating experience for job seekers. Many of today's job seekers no longer have the patience for lengthy, complicated job applications, meaning to attract top talent in today's competitive job market, you need to make the process simpler. 

To get a sense of where your application process needs improvement, ask several members of your team to apply for an open role. Their feedback will give you a good sense of where in the process applicants become frustrated or confused, causing them to leave the application uncompleted. 

Some ways to improve your application process include:

  • Make the application process mobile-friendly.
  • Use resume parsing so that information from uploaded resumes is automatically pulled out and won't have to be re-entered.
  • Leverage prescreen surveys to eliminate applicants who aren't a good fit.
  • Communicate timelines clearly to candidates. Let them know what next steps they should expect and when so that they don't drop off or look elsewhere.

 

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  • Be Mission Forward

There's nothing more vital to the success of an organization than bringing the right people on board, and that means hiring with the company vision and values in mind. Having a clear focus on the values that define your organization will undoubtedly help your company more easily target, vet, qualify, and hire people whose values align with your own.

Incorporate company values into your interview process by defining the company's principles, values, and goals early on in the hiring process. Job descriptions can serve as a candidate's first impression of an organization, so they should positively reflect on the company and job to attract the best candidates. 

Your job description should include the role within the organization, working conditions, background information on the company, and information on the unique cultural aspects of the company. Asking the right questions during the hiring process gives you the chance to determine if a candidate will be a good cultural fit, in addition to being qualified for the job. 

  • Optimize the Workflow for Speed and Experience

To successfully attract talent, you need to ensure your candidate's experience is nothing short of spectacular. The best way to do that is by optimizing workflow for speed and experience. An unstructured hiring process means having a longer time to hire. Candidates have other opportunities, and you don't want to get to selection time only to find the person you want has a better offer. 

One of the easiest ways to optimize your recruitment workflow is by simplifying your entire recruiting process. The best approach is to evaluate each step in the hiring process, starting from initial job approval to extending offers to candidates, making decisions along the way as to what isn't working or could be improved, and eliminating any unnecessary hiring process steps. 

You can reduce time to hire by collecting the right data. With important stats and data captured at almost every stage of the hiring process, Crosschq can help your organization understand the effectiveness of the various parts of the hiring workflow. Equipped with this information, you can easily make the necessary adjustments to improve your hiring effectiveness further. 

Crosschq can help you stand out from competing employers and build a team of top employees who will drive results for your business. Our Talent Intelligence Cloud™ provides solutions across the new hire lifecycle to help enhance sourcing, screening, and onboarding new hires while providing a single source of truth for customers to accurately measure Quality of Hire

To discover how Crosschq can help reduce time to hire, improve your hiring processes, make data-driven decisions, and hire the best diverse talent, schedule a free demo with our experts today. 

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Lucas Sonini

Contributing Writer

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Topics from this blog: Talent Acquisition

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