New Years Resolutions for Every Recruiter in 2020
For many of us, there’s no fresh start quite like a new year. In 2020, recruitment will continue to grow and adapt as the industry is booming. But in an overly competitive market, where candidates have more power than ever, what is it that we should be doing to ensure we stay ahead of the game this year?
Below are 4 new years resolutions that we can use to guide the way we recruit in 2020, to ensure we don’t fall back into old habits and remain successful:
Think more like a marketer
A few weeks back, we published our 2020 Recruitment Trends article. One thing that popped up a lot was recruitment marketing – and how it’s going to have a bigger impact that ever this year.
Recruitment marketing trends and changes are expected to grow in 2020, helping you to manage a positive employer brand for your organisation, or a positive reputation for your agency. Building your online presence through effective content creation will boost your stream of inbound candidates or clients wanting to use your services. The days of just using job boards are long gone. You need to be acting like a marketer in order to attract top talent and retain your clients!
2019 wasn’t named the ‘year of marketing’ for no reason. We’re using marketing strategies in so many different areas of business, that not being dedicated to your marketing strategy will see you falling behind in the market.
Invest in tech
We’re not talking about implementing a ton of AI into your recruitment process here. An effective way to start is to review your current tech stack in your recruitment process. What are you currently using? Or what do you not like? What could do better? Or what extra features would you like to see? And what features do you not use?
So many questions. Investing time into reviewing your current process will allow you to see if a particular piece of technology you’re using isn’t as effective as you thought. There’s so many different recruitment technology options out there, and they aren’t suited to everyone! A platform that works great for your organisation, may flop for another. So, in 2020, take some time to review your current process. Then, review the market to see if there’s something out there that will work better for you.
Sometimes, with all the different software platforms available, it can be difficult to know where to start. Exhibitions can be great for knowledge. Events like Recruitment Agency Expo and In-House Recruitment Live are great as they give you the opportunity to chat with a variety of leading software providers and help you learn which is right for you!
Improve communication
We’re sure no one likes to admit when they’ve ‘ghosted’ a candidate. Maybe we haven’t even realized we’ve done it. After all, recruiters are notoriously busy people juggling lots of different things. But recruiters have a reputation for ghosting whether they like it or not. The truth is, a lack of communication with your candidates can damage your employer brand or put people off wanting to use your services. Word of mouth is a really powerful tool, so we don’t want it working against us!
Whether your candidate gets offered the role or they fell at the first hurdle, always keep in touch. If they didn’t get the role, there might be another role in future that they’re perfect for. And would they like to hear from you after not responding to them previously? Probably not. An easy way to tackle these issues is simply setting aside around 1-hour a day. Even if that’s first thing in the morning, dedicate it to responding to your candidates.
Start using video
To be a successful recruiter in today’s market, we need to start taking more creative approaches to sourcing and attracting new candidates and clients. We know, we’ve already covered becoming more of a marketeer, but the use of video is so vast it deserves its own point!
So, once you’ve got the core components of your marketing activities down to a T, it’s time to throw some video into the mix too. Whether that’s company videos, job videos, video interviews, candidate prospecting videos, videos for business development… the list goes on. There are so many different uses for video in recruitment that you can’t afford to miss out, especially as the different approaches grow in popularity. We’ve got plenty of tools here at Shine to get you started and help you build a solid video strategy for your agency or in-house team.
A video strategy doesn’t have to be pricey. Sure, it can be. But there are plenty of cost-effective ways that you can start utilizing video with a smaller price tag. All we need is a smart phone and the confidence to get started!
Ultimately, we need to be more creative…
Everything that we’ve spoken ultimately comes down to one thing. We need to be more creative! We must break away from standard recruitment processes if we want to get noticed. Sure, recruitment today has shifted a lot from the traditional approaches. But the same model still sits behind what most do.
With the best talent being placed in as little as five days, gone are the times of lengthy recruitment processes that will now most likely stop us from finding our ideal candidate. 2020 is the time we all need to step outside the box. The more we do, the more creative our candidates are likely to be! We’ve been saying for a long time now it’s a candidate driven market out there. So, do we really expect to attract the best without a bit of imagination?