Hunting down the right person to do the job is not a simple job at all. In a corporate environment, the people capital department is responsible to source, shortlist, coordinate interviews and assessments, and onboard talents. An array of sources, recruiters, hiring managers, and HR professionals make up the Talent acquisition team. The team is responsible to identify and acknowledge key people that can play a pivotal role in the company’s future successes and meet overall company goals.
Employer brand conveys to your future prospects, what it’s like to work for your organization. It encompasses your day-to-day activities, the community, and everything that your business represents. Promoting your strong company brand and culture backed by a competitive compensation package creates a positive candidate experience.
In the current volatile market, your employer brand plays a crucial role in shaping your talent acquisition strategy. The goal is to impress your future prospects with what you’re promoting, selling, and how you advertise the same. It’s extremely crucial to draw the right image of your brand in your candidate’s mind.
Making your employer brand visible to everyone is equally important as building it effectively in the first place. Showcasing your brand on social media, smart media, or optimized career websites will make it seen all across the board and create new opportunities for candidates.
The radical openness of your business online creates maximum impact on all kinds of audiences. Your online presence is a positive amalgamation of company videos, contributed content by thought leaders, employee testimonials, casual interviews with company leaders, and much more. You have to create a positive brand reputation by showcasing each and every place where your brand exists.
Recruiting is marketing. An efficient partnership between the people capital and marketing departments is absolutely essential for any talent acquisition strategy to work. A solid relationship between the two ensures a strong employee value proposition (EVP).
Industry leaders and influencers must communicate often with hiring managers and understand their personal style. A grounded relationship will develop at a genuine pace that will definitely help attract the right kind of people you are looking for. Organizations often reach out to reputed external recruitment services and consultants as well, who use their high level of expertise to find the best person for any vacancy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) forms an integral part of the hiring strategy. A list of keywords that define your brand and requirements should be identified and included in the job description of your company website’s career section. The probability of hitting the right candidate increases manifold by using specific keywords and connects you to the best talent out there.
One of the most important SEO tools is inbound and outbound linking. The company’s career website, open positions, job descriptions, related posts, and articles should be extensively mapped and linked internally to take advantage of this process. Providing adequate backlinks on every popular social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn increases exposure in Google search rankings. Being aware of your website’s Google page ranking before posting your job requirements will help position the openings to well-trafficked locations and boards.
SEO narrows down the best available candidates to your job description.
One of the best HRM practices is to treat applicants like consumers. The interviewer and the interviewee share an important relationship. The candidate should be treated and communicated with utmost transparency, and compassion. The employer talent brand is directly correlated to the candidate experience. No matter how much effort you put into building your talent marketing campaigns, what truly matters is the quality of your candidate’s experience. Employer brand is directly impacted by negative reviews on common public forums. It’s shared by both the hired and rejected applicants. So every single candidate should be treated with care and respect.
Candidate experience is crucial to attracting the right talent while maintaining your company’s image. Engagements and interactions with your candidate happen mostly on two levels. In the beginning, it’s primarily technology-driven, through social media, job postings, and the like. Further down the road, it becomes more personal, such as emails and interviews.
Applicant experience, be it positive or negative causes a huge ripple effect on your brand and talent pool. Negative experiences spread like wildfire via social media and candidates may also feel encouraged to take their loyalty elsewhere. On the other side, positive experience increases networking, referrals, and re-application with the same company in the future.
To up your communication game with candidates, send well-written emails. Proactively address any negative reviews online. Don’t make fake promises and always express genuine gratitude for the candidate’s time. Create a robust support plan as new prospects will have a ton of questions. Communicate often and effectively.
Organizations these days are also investing in tailor-made comprehensive Applicant Tracking System (ATS) SaaS products to accelerate the hiring process using automation and smart analytical tools.
Rock-solid recruiters are well equipped to hunt top-notch talent from a massive pool. To be one, you need to be a people person at first. You should be comfortable maintaining professional relationships across all personality types. It helps to be well versed in your business and be a salesperson at heart. Because, as a recruiter, you’ll be selling jobs to promising applicants. To make the process enthusiastic, wear a genuine smile in all situations.
Organizational culture represents a company’s values, processes, and future goals. It constantly evolves as the organization matures. It helps for every company to maintain a general awareness of their culture. Company culture encompasses organizational structure and employee productivity. Employee satisfaction goes a long way in building a healthy culture.
Potential employees are exposed to company culture through various means. A company website and an office visit are good ways to start. Engaging with the hiring manager, recruiters, and other employees also offers a good insight into the organization.
Social media content is getting generated and consumed at an unprecedented scale today. So organizations are encouraging employees to share workplace culture and lifestyle using unique hashtags. Employee-created content provides an authentic view of the company culture and also binds them together.
The employee onboarding process kick starts as soon as a candidate accepts an offer by the employer. It’s a welcome process that gives the employee the first glimpse into the company culture. The new hire has to go through a lot of initial paperwork and training programs to learn specific company software and systems. After that, the employee is introduced to the team and veteran employees are assigned to them as mentors. New hire performance goals are set, which are tracked with the help of the existing HR technology system.
The New Hire Orientation program ensures that employees gain insight into payroll, benefits, and company compliance checks. The entire onboarding process is aimed at graduating the new hire into a productive and valued employee. It is designed to ensure that new employees gain relevant skills, work habits, and cultural insights that will transform them into successful members of the workforce.
A plethora of organizations is moving into an automated and paperless onboarding system that saves a considerable amount of new-hire hours.
Engagement is a shared responsibility between the employee and the employer. Providing a quality environment for multi-channel interaction with the candidate from the very beginning goes a long way in building healthy relationships. Engagement-focused talent teams have a strategic impact on the business by hiring faster and at lower costs. Irrespective of whether your organization has the relevant vacancy or not, the Talent Acquisition team works relentlessly to engage across multiple platforms with the type of talent your company is looking for.
Employees work with the highest involvement only if their job is inspiring and intriguing at every step. Equally important is healthy team culture and work environment. To ensure that a new hire is excited from day one and on, The TA team must take time to carefully match the position with their current competence.
Value-based hiring differs from traditional interviewing techniques. Employees look for employees whose personal values and beliefs are in line with the values of their company. A newly hired employee will inherently give the best performance if they resonate with the company’s culture. As easy as this may sound, but to accomplish this daunting task of selecting a value-oriented candidate, the TA team has to put together a comprehensive plan of action.
Companies have to establish some core strategies that will put forth specific values and beliefs to attract skilled talent. Organizations have embraced this strategy due to its multitude of benefits. Because, as humans, we know that a candidate’s values and beliefs drive their behavior. When companies are able to focus on core values in their daily operations, each member within the team works with the same aspiration and commitment.
Let’s look a bit deeper into some of the many upsides of this strategy. Candidates are easily able to navigate adversity by overcoming fear and taking ownership. They adapt faster and are able to set and achieve clearer goals. Employers with culturally oriented hiring processes are awarded better retention. Hiring candidates with poor alignment proves to be very costly with lots of downstream effects and burnouts.
The secret of HR activities relies on effective collaboration on performance management. Learning and performance management is directly linked. Performance management is all about monitoring and improvising the way the job gets done. It ensures that organizational goals are being met in a timely and efficient way. And gauges the performance of individuals, teams, departments, or even processes that have financial implications. Constantly working towards improving individual and collective capabilities ensure enhanced behavior and results.
Many organizations are adopting ongoing performance management to keep employees actively engaged with the work that is beneficial to the business. Ongoing monitoring ensures that the talent on the floor is constantly mastering existing skills and moving on to pick up new ones. The new paradigm of agile performance management is picking up fast.
Performance management processes enhance employee engagement and boost workforce morale by rewarding them befittingly for their work efforts. Learning and development is a never-ending process, be it for an individual, a team, or a department. Therefore, recruitment and development are not independent of each other. They are two sides of the same coin.
TA team is responsible to identify gaps and come up with strategies to improve individual and collective performance. If a candidate is facing a performance gap issue (i.e. a gap between desired and actual results), it often works to offer them new responsibilities to leverage their current strengths and skills.
True talent leaders see a candidate’s entire career path inside the company on the hiring day itself.
Periodic review and assessment to gauge an employee’s work performance and contribution to the organization is referred to as Performance appraisal. In traditional HR practices, the annual performance review is conducted for individuals and teams. Performance feedback is provided based on whether employee objectives and goals were met during the entire year. Incentives and compensation plans are then optimized based on target achievement. Various feedback models are developed to ensure transparent communication between both parties. The personal development plan is drafted for each candidate to work upon the next year.
But annual reviews have their pitfalls owing to less feedback and support. So, organizations are moving into more frequent performance assessments. Because, if evaluations fail to meet the standards and lack of direction for self-development, employees tend to leave.
On-floor gossips gain momentum that the other company is paying well because the grass is always greener on the other side. It becomes extremely important to deliver a just and transparent appraisal model because it takes an unnecessary toll on the company when it hires to replace instead of expanding.
A huge talent pool is waiting out there to be explored. An effective Talent Acquisition team strategically creates and communicates their employee brand to attract the best performers out of the rest.
A well-organized employer brand is in a much better position to implement a robust talent acquisition strategy. This improves the candidate experience by engaging them while bettering the application process. It also keeps the management happy by decreasing the cost-per-hires.
Keep these points handy while you signup at QPage to make your first right hire. Start your hunt for free and we will pave the road to building a strong talent acquisition team and take your business to new heights.
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