With so much turnover occurring in the current job market, most companies are looking to bring in new employees. Ideally, these employees would be perfect hires who are easily onboarded and remain at the company for years to come. That’s the ideal scenario. But talent like that is hard to find.
As it stands now, 63% of employers say it’s difficult to fill positions and 31% of hirers say they have open positions they can’t fill. Employees are resigning in droves, but many of the applicants for these open positions are simply unqualified.
Recruiters have to be efficient and proficient in their recruiting approach to fill these positions with great talent. Refining your recruiting approach takes strategy and a lot of trial and error. But there are some baseline steps that you have to follow in order to succeed.
Technique #1: Be Disciplined and Consistent
Firing off a templated one-off message to potential candidates is a terrible strategy. It’s a terrific way to waste your time and the time of these job seekers. Proper first contact requires personalization, discipline, and consistency.
Do your research beforehand so you can engage with the candidate in a personable way from the beginning. LinkedIn found that their Inmail received a 20% higher response rate when they were personalized with the candidate’s background and work history.
Personalizing the message may be more time-consuming, but you can help yourself by prioritizing your candidates. Identify the top of the line, high-priority candidates and devote more time to them. The lower priority candidates will get cursory calls and voicemails, but you don’t need to go above and beyond.
The high-quality candidates need a higher level of dedication and consistency from you. They should be receiving some form of communication every single day. When executed properly, a high level of polite and professional persistence can frequently result in compliments from the people you are pursuing.
Technique #2: Make Sure Your Voicemails are Effective
Voicemails don’t just function as reminders to candidates. You can’t just call, say a few words, and hope that reminding them of your existence is enough. Your voicemails need to be communicative and effective.
There are typically two types of voicemails that recruiters use:
Open/Direct:
- Professional
- Compelling
Confidential/Indirect:
- Limited Information
- Creates Curiosity
Open voicemails are typically used for active candidates. These candidates aren’t currently employed and are expecting more standard voicemails. These calls are traditional and more formal. Whereas, confidential voicemails are better suited for passive candidates who don't want to be put in a compromising position with their current employer.
Technique #3: Let Purpose Drive Your Recruiting
After you’ve made first contact with a candidate you need to proceed with purpose. Many recruiters think that’s what they’re accomplishing but most are actually attempting to generate interest. That is not your goal. You’re looking to fill a role, not simply tantalize a candidate.
Instead of saying, “are you interested?” get candidates to explain their qualifications for the role. Practice inverted candidate development. Instead of starting with interest, establish qualifications. Then try and prompt the candidate to simply agree to move forward with the process.
If they agree, ask them to confidentially send you their CV/resume but try to gather some more information about them on the call. Now, at the end of this call you’ve established qualifications, received a resume, and garnered more information about the candidate. You’ve put this candidate well on their way down the recruiting funnel.
Technique #4: Develop Candidate Profiles
Remember that you’re going to come in contact with a lot of candidates during the recruiting process. It’s difficult to keep track of all of the relevant pieces of information about each one. It’s useful to create snapshots of each candidate that can serve as quick references. These are candidate profiles.
These profiles are not resumes or career biographies. They are simply internally focused compilations of relevant candidate information. Some quick tips for creating them are:
- Keep it clear and concise
- Keep it focused on the current role and qualifications
- Tailor it to the internal needs
- Make it easy to read
Technique #5: Be Effective in the Close
Closing isn’t easy. But it is easy to become discouraged as you learn better techniques over time. Don’t worry! Great closing requires experience, tenacity, and strategy. Every “no” is just a “not yet” and that’s one step closer to the ultimate goal: a “yes”.
Both the pre-close and the close can require multiple different tactics and strategies and you’ll need to develop a toolbox full of different approaches that you can deploy for any type of candidate. For some examples of strategies for each stage, feel free to download our guide The 5 Fundamentals of Recruiting Quality Talent.
Keep Learning and Growing
You’ve now got the perfect candidate to sign on the dotted line and that’s no small feat, but there’s more to be done. You’ve still got to onboard them and get them completely up to speed with the inner workings of the company. That process will also require some great strategy.
As for the recruiting process, you surely didn’t do everything perfectly this time, and that’s okay. It’ll never be perfect. All you can do is continue to learn and refine the right techniques. As you grow in experience, the process will become more streamlined and yield better results!
If you’d like information on finding great candidates, please download our guide the 3 Secrets to Attracting & Sourcing Quality Talent!
