Beyond The Job Posting: Recruitment Strategies for the Savvy Modern Employer

When you need to hire talent for your team, is your company’s go-to for attracting talent start and end with posting the job on your website? Perhaps you splurge and pay for an ad on LinkedIn or Indeed?

Posting job openings on your website, aka the “post and pray” method, is a good starting point, but it’s often not enough to attract top talent in today’s competitive job market. A strong employer brand, an attractive career page, and a user-friendly website are essential foundations for successful recruitment. But to truly stand out, you’ll need to go beyond these basics and implement additional strategies to attract and engage top talent.

Target Audience

Before even drafting and posting a job description, it’s important to adopt a fundamental principle in marketing strategy: who is your target audience?

As a company, you have established your values, mission, and ultimately–culture. For example, if your company is a marketing firm supporting political campaigns, your audience may be passionate about policy and public opinion–potentially leaning towards one party. People who are interested in sustainability may be intentionally targeting renewable energy or GreenTech firms. Parents or people who want to start a family could be seeking a company that values work/life balance or even offers benefits that support working parents. What is unique about your company and its offerings that shape its brand and representation in the market?

Employer Branding

Once you have identified your target audience, the employer branding is a result of how you shape your “value prop” or image moving forward.

ProTip: It’s important to gauge the perception of your employer brand so it accurately reflects your messaging.

Years ago, when the term “employer branding” was keyed, I was under the impression that it was a fabricated, phony marketing effort to lure talent into a company. Lipstick on a pig, perse. While this could still be true for some organizations, it shouldn’t be intentionally deceiving. A strong employer brand reflects how a company is perceived by its employees and broader workforce, ideally in a positive way to attract and retain talent. Just like “personal branding” is compared to what people say about you when you aren’t in the room, an employer brand should operate the same way.

If you’re uncertain about the current state of your employer brand, data and feedback can offer insights. A few ideas include:

Start by examining your website traffic through Google Analytics. How many visitors are coming directly to your career page, and what are their referral sources?
Analyze engagement on your social media platforms, tracking followers and post interactions.
Employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor, Comparably, and Blind to gauge sentiment and perception from both current and former employees. Regardless of the reviews’ accuracy, it’s important to remember that potential applicants use these sites as sources of information during their job.
Anonymous employee surveys

One company that stands out in terms of employer branding is Netflix. Reed Hastings created a culture of open feedback and freedom–he even created the famous “culture deck,” a guiding set of principles of how the company operates. As the company scaled (and some who pushed back on the autonomous, transparent culture), their brand shifted to emphasizing a “Dream Team” (sans the “we are family”) of high performers who excel independently and as a team.

While not every company can match Netflix’s scale, every company possesses unique strengths and qualities that can be leveraged to build a compelling employer brand. James Ellis is an employer brand specialist and has an endless amount of resources on his website to help talent acquisition and business leaders identify and communicate their employer branding.

One channel to communicate employer branding is through social media. Can you highlight current employee’s experiences at your company? A video testimonial can feature stories about projects, benefits, internal mobility, or day-in-the-life. Aldi has a “Hear from our People” section on their careers page that showcases three videos of employees answering FAQs about the company. Other content to demonstrate company culture can include volunteer or team events, or any messaging around values important to the company.

Proactive Sourcing

Are you going to wait around for talent to come to you or are you going to go out and get it? Or in recruitment ops terms, “sourcing”. There is a demographic of professionals who may not be considering a job change. A challenging workday can often trigger impulsive job searching, often referred to as “rage applying.” While this initial motivation may wane, it doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of openness to new opportunities. Many professionals are engrossed in their current roles but remain receptive to the right offer.

How can companies proactively attract top talent who aren’t actively seeking new jobs??

Employee Referral Programs: Can you offer incentives (monetary, tangible, or experiential) for different levels of referral, ranging from an initial referral to an offer? Or even retention of that referral for 90 days?

Make it easy for employees to share job openings as well as the process itself to refer the applicant to the hiring team. I’ve seen complicated systems that ask for information that the referrer may not have, from street address to entire job history.

Communities: Professionals have been flocking to niche online communities, using platforms like Discord, Slack, Reddit, Circle, or Skool. In these communities, members can exchange their shared interests and industry expertise, typically with sub-categories. Not only are these great places to find talent in a specialized niche, like tech or HR, but they often have sub-channels dedicated to “open jobs.” Portfolio and work sites like Github (for developers) or Behance & Dribble (designers) are other platforms to identify talent.

Talent Communities: If you have a candidate database or applicant tracking system with files of prior applicants, consider searching through these candidate profiles who may not have been a match for a job opening at the time but could be now.

Social Media: First, before you sign-up on all social channels–understand what platforms are relevant for your audience. TikTok may not be the most appropriate platform for a B2B roofing business. Research each social media platform’s demographics first before investing time and money into targeting the wrong audience.

Promote job openings through paid social media advertisements or organic posts on social platforms. For organic, hiring managers of jobs can post the opening on their personal social pages as well. Incorporating paid ads can expand reach beyond organic, like Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin–which allows for advanced audience targeting based on demographics and proximity. For example, 25-34 year old females living within 50 miles of Frederick, Maryland, are interested in music fests.

Instead of waiting for others to engage with your brand online, your internal marketing team can actively participate in online communities, responding to posts and joining relevant groups. Many platforms offer search options to identify other profiles who could possess the skills and experience that align with your team. For example, the free version of LinkedIn has fields like job title, company, industry, and general keyword search to create a list of prospects. X allows you to search for people using Hashtags, like #cybersecurity or #contentmarketing.

Some users of social media will have a channel for direct messaging, like LinkedIn or Facebook, where you can reach out to individuals who may be interested in learning more about your company or open position.

Recruiters

Internal talent acquisition teams have a lot on their plate, from identifying talent needs, interviewing, and onboarding, but a portion of their job includes sourcing candidates if they aren’t attracting the right people to their brand through job applications.

If you are a start-up or small business that doesn’t have a dedicated recruiter or the internal recruitment team is overtasked and needs help–identifying a staffing agency or search firm can be a strategic move. Both of those models should operate on proactively finding talent, using some of the tactics mentioned here. For scarce or highly specialized talent, a niche search firm offers a strategic advantage. These experts conduct in-depth market research and execute a comprehensive search to identify top-tier candidates tailored to your specific needs. Their value prop should be saving you time with a quick turnaround. Want to get the most out of a recruitment firm? Read this guide on how to work together successfully.

Improve Your Job Ad

If you are relying on your job ads to attract talent, can you refine the copy to be more effective?

First, there is a difference between a job ad and a job description. A job description is a formalized document that outlines the responsibilities and requirements of the job. An ad? This is a marketing tool, so the copy should be written with trying to persuade the audience, the job seeker, on why they should apply. Some organizations, like the government, do not have the flexibility to edit a job description. But if your company does, how can you integrate the employer branding and value prop into the ad?

Consider what information you are including in the ad, thinking about what job seekers want to know before applying. Information could include project details, benefits, onsite or remote, must-have vs nice-to-have requirements, values, and inclusive language. Compensation is one of the first details a job seeker can look so, so consider including a range. Effective October 1, 2024, Maryland employers must disclose salary ranges in their job descriptions. If you are looking for examples, the Toggl article shows 15 samples at the end.

Can you improve the application experience? SHRM discovered that 92% of job applicants click “apply” but eventually abandon the process. Whether they were discouraged by the long process or disqualified themselves, it’s unknown. However, with the surge in AI and automation tools, recruitment teams are experiencing a higher volume of applicants. The goal is to create a streamlined application process that effectively filters out unqualified applicants with a bit of friction without deterring genuinely interested individuals. Knock-out questions can create that friction but also require a short amount of time on behalf of the applicant to complete.

Positive Candidate Experience

I can’t stress the importance of creating a positive candidate experience for every person who touches your hiring process, from job ads to onboarding. A lack of communication or a negative interview experience can significantly damage a candidate’s perception of a company. This can lead to negative word-of-mouth and damage the employer’s reputation–not the brand ambassador you want for the company. A survey by BCG reported that 52% of job seekers would refuse an otherwise attractive offer if they had a strong negative experience during the recruitment process.

While the blueprint for providing a positive candidate experience is another topic in itself, the key is to focus on clear communication and respect throughout the process (the golden rule). Be transparent in your job descriptions, set expectations of timelines, and communicate often–with any updates on the status of their application.

Analyze the Data: Source of Hire

While there is a range of recruitment metrics, tracking the source of hire will help companies understand where their talent is coming from so resources can be distributed effectively. What channels are consistently delivering candidates–referrals, job postings, paid ads? Does the company need to shift budget and efforts toward employee referrals, and if so, how can you make the employee referral program more attractive? Many ATS (applicant tracking systems) have features where you can identify the source of each applicant. If not, a simple spreadsheet will suffice to correlate the channel with the job requisition.

Finding and hiring top talent isn’t just about posting a job and hoping for the best. Regain some control and develop a comprehensive recruitment strategy to widen your talent pool. Know your value prop and employer brand, leverage those diverse sourcing channels, and always be on the lookout for fresh talent.