Summer months are behind us and, although it’s sad to say goodbye to holidays and sunshine, it’s time to get back into the recruiting game. And trust me, from my experience, it will be a true race to place the best candidates. People are coming back from holiday and getting into the work mindset again, which means that your clients will be recharged and ready to get the job done. After summer, candidates also often realign their goals and plans and are keener on making career changes.
So how do you make sure to get ahead of your competition? Well, we put together an easy guide to help you lift your sourcing game and help you to find the best candidates before anybody else!
Create candidate personas
If you want to source the best candidates, you first need to have a clear understanding of whom you’re looking for.
Creating candidate personas based on your client’s role profile will help you understand what gold dust candidates look like to your client, who those candidates are, and where they spend their time online. The research you do for your personas will influence every part of the recruitment process, from how you write your job ads, to where you market the role to ensure you’re looking in all the right places.
To help you get started with creating your candidate personas, download this free Recruitment Marketing Persona Toolkit.
Write killer job ads
Candidates that boast highly sought-after skills and experience essentially have their pick of the market, so you need to create adverts that make you stand out from all the other recruiters trying to snatch them. There are various ways to make sure your ad is top quality, including spending enough time on the headline, being concrete and direct (especially about the salary!), and thinking of your perfect candidate’s needs.
To pull in the right crowd, include industry-specific language and keywords relevant to the candidate's niche. Use the title to be clear and transparent: include the role, location and salary, and any information on WFH options (or any other non-monetary perks – after all, benefits are extremely important to 60% of employees!).
And while it’s good to target the right skill set, try not to focus too much on the must-haves. Your perfect candidate might not fit 100% of the criteria but still be gold dust! Don’t risk ruling out highly qualified candidates if some aspects of the role can be taught on the job.
Go beyond job boards
Let’s face it, job boards are handy and sometimes they can be a necessity but you need to make sure you are choosing the right job boards within your niche. Any client can post an ad on a job board and wait for the candidates to trickle in. So how can you get ahead and recruit those hard-to-find candidates? Try the alternatives to job boards - this is what will make you stand out from your competitors.
Of course, there’s no point in spending time, effort, and marketing budget on places your candidates simply aren’t browsing. So, according to your candidate persona – is your perfect candidate likely to be spending their day scrolling LinkedIn, or Facebook? Laser-focus your efforts on platforms swimming with the right type of talent for this role.
Target passive candidates
Clients tend to target candidates who are actively looking for jobs, but 70% of the market is made up of passive candidates. That’s a number to be reckoned with (and a nice stat to give your potential clients that shows what they’re missing on not working with you)! By using your expert recruitment skills, you’ll be able to reach passive candidates who don’t even know they’re ready for a new opportunity.
Having a passive candidate strategy in place will open you up to a huge chunk of potential candidates that your clients don’t know exist!
Your CRM is your secret weapon here as this is a tool that your clients don’t have access to, so use this to your advantage. If your talent pools are set up with the right criteria, they’ll pull in any perfect-fit candidates you already have in your database. Now all you have to do is contact them and voila, fresh candidates nobody else could have found!
Hyper-personalise your approach
It’s not just about finding great candidates but engaging them, too. If you can’t get them to talk, how can you spec them out to your client? As recruiters, we often focus so much on making those placements (hello commission!) that we can sometimes forget about the human element. Our candidates need to have a feeling we care about placing them in the role best fitted for them.
Remember that amazing candidates are likely to hear from recruiters quite often, so they’ll be able to spot a cut-and-paste job a mile off. Focus on the quality of your outreach, not the number of candidates your message!
Avoid bombarding candidates with generic phrases like ‘you’re the ideal fit’ - show them you’ve done your research by using specific examples and drawing connections between their experience and why that would make them love the role.
And if you really want to stand out, get creative with your approach - using video in your outreach will get you 3 x higher response rate.
Download the eBook below for more tips on where to find top candidates in today's market!
