Recruitment Strategies

It is a dream of every recruiter to quickly fill a vacancy and find the right candidate from the first resume. In order to achieve such a perfect match, you need to understand not only traditional recruitment methods, but also modern, daring and bold recruiting techniques. We will tell you when it is better to limit yourself to a traditional interview, and when a stressful interview is more appropriate than ever.

What is a recruitment strategy?

Recruiting is often equated with personnel selection. In fact, this is not the case. To begin with, recruiting is one of the classic and effective ways of personnel selection. It is a search for representatives of common professions. A specialist who uses this technology to select employees shall prepare a job description and post it on various resources to attract potential candidates. The emphasis is on job seekers.

Types of recruitment

Executive search

Executive search is the recruitment of senior and middle management personnel (department heads, managers, directors), as well as specialists in rare and unique professions. This method of recruitment and selection involves a more active search and is often used by recruitment agencies.

Headhunting

The two previous methods of recruitment are aimed at finding people who are at least theoretically considering a job change. This is not the case with headhunting. This is luring a specialist from another company, who is often a “star” in his or her niche.

Screening

If you just need to quickly select applicants on formal grounds, then a screening method will help. It takes up to 10 days on average. This way, of course, you will not be able to study the motivation and test the various characteristics of the applicant. But when looking for junior specialists, such as secretaries, salespeople, and drivers, this initial selection may be enough.

Preliminaring

Preliminaring is the recruitment of promising university graduates and senior students, both for permanent employment and temporary internships in the company. Such rejuvenation is often beneficial for the company, as “fresh blood” in most cases contributes to a new perspective on work processes and their improvement.

Mass recruitment involves large-scale projects to organize the selection of employees without experience, to whom the employer does not initially impose high professional requirements. These can be not only loaders and cleaners, but also cashiers, consultants, packers and security guards in supermarkets, handymen, promoters in companies, service personnel of hotels and restaurant chains. Large banks and insurance companies may also be interested in attracting a large number of employees in this way.

Recruiting strategies for finding the right specialist

Whichever way you use to search for personnel, you need to answer approximately the same questions:

• who you need to look for,
• where to look for them,
• how to check the candidate’s competencies,
• what will be the basis for the final decision.

The first stage. Collecting the vacancy requirements should not be underestimated. To understand what recruiting tools the recruiter will use for a successful search, you need to meet with the client (head of department, manager or CEO if it is an internal recruitment method). At this meeting, be sure to find out in detail:

• What problem should the person you are looking for solve? After all, if you define a specific problem and specific expectations from the candidate, the chances of finding the right person increase significantly.
• What qualities does the candidate really need to do their job? Does your future administrator really need spoken English? What does your manager think a junior specialist is? Find out what requirements a potential candidate really needs in their job, and what conditions are blindly following templates. And then you will be better able to choose the most effective recruitment methods in this case.
• What is the timeframe for closing a vacancy? Often, the absence of an employee means that the company loses real money. Therefore, you should first clarify all the nuances as accurately as possible to know how much time you have at your disposal.
• All possible details about the vacancy. Often, the manager does not have time. He tells the recruiter very briefly and ends up getting angry that the candidates are always wrong. With this approach, the chances of finding the right employee are reduced to zero. That is why both the client and the recruiter should pay close attention to this preparatory stage and use the recruiting methods that are suitable for a particular vacancy.

The second stage. Decide where you will look for your candidates. Corporate websites, job search sites, social networks, applications, special software, internal resume databases – you already know these sources and know how to use them. We offer several modern recruiting tools that you may not have used yet, but they will definitely come in handy in your work.

Use professional recruitment software. Such systems allow you to quickly and easily build your resume database. With the help of software, you can close every fifth vacancy without using third-party recruitment tools, add candidates from LinkedIn and job search sites in one click, publish vacancies directly from the system, and keep a vacancy from A to Z in a convenient online organizer. It is simply impossible to ignore this introduction of technology in recruitment, because before you know it, you will be “overboard” in the profession. The task of such professional systems is to simplify the recruiter’s task, speed up the process, and even improve employee recruitment strategies.

1. Try the CleverStaff system with a free trial period.
2. Use the power of video for effective recruiting strategies. For example, make a video job posting on YouTube or other platforms that offer this option (Superjob, etc.). Thus, the applicant immediately sees future colleagues, office, atmosphere, etc. The number of responses to a video vacancy is always higher than to a regular one. Plus, such a tool better builds your brand as an employer and speaks of you as a modern company open to new approaches.
3. Use LinkedIn Recruiter for external recruitment methods. In the search bar, you can enter the name of a candidate or specialist who already works for you and click the “Find similar contacts” button. The search will give you a list of profiles, among which there will most likely be suitable candidates. 
4. According to a study by the consulting agency Mercer Human Resource Consulting, about 70% of recruitment specialists consider the recommendation method of personnel search to be one of the most effective. So networking won here too. Recruiters often recommend candidates to their colleagues who were not suitable for them for some reason. In addition, employees themselves can act as ambassadors for their company and advise their friends and acquaintances to try out for open positions.

The third stage. Once the candidates have been selected, it is necessary to assess their competence. To do this, you need to conduct an interview. Such a conversation gives the hiring manager an idea of the candidate’s experience and professional qualities. What types of interviews are there?

• A structured interview is a familiar question-and-answer format. For example: “Tell us about your previous experience. Why do you want to work with us? How is your English?”.   
• Situational interview or case interview – aimed at assessing general intelligence and sociability. A person is described a certain situation based on a problem, and the candidate shall present effective solutions. For example: “Imagine the situation. We are ready to hire you for a position, you start on Monday, but your immediate supervisor will be away for a month from Monday. What are you going to do this month?”.
• A projective interview is a conversation where questions are structured in such a way that the candidate evaluates other people or some fictional character rather than himself. “Why do all politicians lie?”, “What is your ideal colleague?” – such wording relaxes the candidate, and he or she gives more truthful answers.
• Competency-based interview (behavioral) – this recruitment technique requires good preparation from the recruiter himself. After all, he needs to create the most complete position profile and determine the competencies and their level that will be acceptable to the employer. All questions will be focused on professional knowledge.
• Stressful interviews. During such interviews, they can be rude, ill-mannered and disrespectful to the candidate on purpose. The recruiter can leave him or her in the office for 20 minutes, interrupt and ask them to speak shorter, ask provocative questions – the list goes on and on. It all depends on the imagination. This modern method of personnel selection helps determine how well a candidate meets the requirement of stress resistance.
• Brainteaser interview is an interview where the candidate has to solve a puzzle. For example: how can a person transport a fox, a rooster, and a bag of grain to the other side of the river, provided that he or she can carry only one load per river crossing, and the fox can eat the rooster, which, in turn, can peck at the grain.

Not only the candidate, but also the recruiter needs to prepare for any of the above interviews. It is in the first few minutes that a personal impression is formed. To build rapport, start the interview with small talk about something neutral. Then give the candidate a chance to introduce himself or herself. This will allow you to assess communication skills. After that, you can proceed with the questions you have prepared in advance, whether they are professional or stressful. Sometimes the first answer of the applicant reveals a lot.

There are several other selection methods to test the competence of an applicant. This can be a test that determines the general level of human characteristics required for a given job. The recruiter conducts a game that simulates a real work environment. The candidate is immersed in this atmosphere and is asked to speak at an impromptu meeting, analyze the decisions of colleagues, and justify something. This technology is used to identify the business, personal, and professional qualities of potential employees. The game helps to determine whether the candidates fit the company’s corporate culture.

Original methods of recruitment

• Physiognomy is one of the non-obvious ways of recruiting personnel, which is based on the analysis of a person’s character and emotional state by facial expressions, gestures and facial features. This technique has become actively used in the recruitment process. It allows the recruiter to analyze the candidate’s character traits, understand how a person makes decisions – intuitively or logically – based on behavior, reactions, and even the level of neatness and style of clothing. It is worth noting that this technique is used in addition to more classical techniques.
• Socionics is a method that categorizes people into different sociotypes, each of which has its own style of communication and work. Sharp, impulsive movements are typical, for example, for “intuitives”. Sensors like to take up all the free space around them, and so on. This method of selection can be used as an additional one to find people with certain character traits who are better suited to perform certain duties. 
• Graphology – this technique is very rarely used in our recruitment process. The same cannot be said about France, where employees are selected by handwriting in government agencies. The effectiveness of this approach is debatable. But there is a certain dependence. A person who writes neatly is likely to be very tidy and responsible at work.

Recruiting tactics

Checking references is one of the final stages of selecting the right employee. As a rule, the candidate is warned about this in advance and asked to give the names of colleagues who can be contacted. At the same time, there is absolutely no need to rush through this stage until the applicant has successfully passed all the selection procedures. This recruitment tool is used only for finalists for a vacancy. In addition, 90% of recruiters today use social media not only to search for candidates but also to check their social profile.

According to iCIMS Inc. research, 76% of respondents believe that the absence of any feedback after applying for a job is even more disappointing than being ignored after the first date. So, recruiters who care about their reputation should send feedback to all candidates who applied for a job. Even if you already know who you are going to make an offer to.

As for the offer, it usually contains the basic data: job title, responsibilities, salary, compensation, benefits, and other perks. It is worth keeping in mind that the most talented candidates may consider a job offer not only in your company. Therefore, if you send an offer, try to make it personal and creative. You can always attach a handwritten postcard to a standard contract, send a funny gif to the mail, or make a video congratulating a new colleague.

Even if your offer has been accepted, there is no guarantee that the candidate will actually take up their new job. The task of a recruiting specialist is to minimize the risks of a candidate withdrawing from the deal. After all, anything can happen: competitors will make a checker, doubts will take over, etc. In order to avoid this, recruiters often maintain constant contact with a potential new employee and establish closer ties between him or her and the company at the preparatory stage. 

To improve your hiring strategies, it is worth taking the time to gather feedback from your candidates who have been hired, as well as from employers, management, and other decision-makers.

You need to find out whether the employees you have found are up to the task, what the rate of resignations is, and whether you have managed to strengthen the team. If there is a slack at any of these stages, then this is a sure signal that recruiting methods need to be improved. When all the stages have been completed – the employee is found, he or she has started work, everyone is satisfied, feedback has been received – you can start onboarding and focus on other active vacancies.