How to Become a Strategic Recruiter

“Yesterday’s recruiters’ role is different today and tomorrow. Armed with efficient technological tools and know-how, they’re more empowered to better engage with candidates and colleagues.

“Strategic recruiters search outside and inside their companies to fill vacancies. They know that untapped talents abound internally. They’re proactively developing internal mobility and career paths, too.”

In this post, I will explain five main components of becoming a Strategic Recruiter.

1. Be Data-driven

We all know the saying: “What gets measured, gets managed.” If you don’t have data about your target group and recruitment processes, you’re pretty much just guessing what could be done differently. Alternatively, if you fall into the worst-case scenario, you are not even guessing, you are doing nothing.

By gathering data, analyzing it, and making changes based on the results, you can improve your actions. For example, by measuring candidate experience in real-time, you can quickly see what your candidates appreciate in your recruitment process and what they do not really like. Maybe your processes take too long or the candidates feel like they don’t get feedback? The data will show you the reality.

How to find the data? Your ATS or HR system must have data you can view and analyze. If not, it’s about time to change the system to something more modern (checkpoint 5). Also, you can conduct surveys of your own. You can interview your candidates and your employees or make tests for a certain target group. For example, you can explore what your target group thinks of your career site or job ads.

2. Attract the Right Talent

Create a meaningful Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that resonates.

A core part of being a strategic recruiter is to know who it is that you need to target. Thus, you need to build your candidate personas and answer questions like these: What motivates them? What goals do they have? In which channels do they spend time? How are they looking for a job? And so on.

When you know who to target, you will also discover how to attract the right candidates. Create a meaningful Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that resonates. What does EVP mean? It’s simple. It pretty much answers to this question ‘Why would the people we need want to join, do their best work here, and stay?’.

One example of an Employee Value Proposition (EVP):

“From empowering mentorships to customized coaching, PwC provides you with the support you need to help you develop your career. You’ll work with people from diverse backgrounds and industries to solve important problems. Are you ready to grow?” PwC

What would be yours?

3. Invest in Candidate Experience

60% of job seekers report they have quit an application due to its length or complexity.

We can no longer just close our eyes and trust the candidates will apply no matter what we do. Candidates know to expect more.

How to improve Candidate Experience? The most important thing is communication. Based on the study by Career Arc, 69% of the job seekers believe the response time to candidates awaiting a recruiting decision can be improved the most.

During the recruitment process, let the candidate know how the process is going forward. If the candidate is not hired, offer feedback by phone or email. Could you also reward the candidate somehow? Invite to a Talent Community, send movie tickets, or refer her to your colleague.

Also, the first touchpoints with the company matter. 60% of job seekers report they have quit an application due to its length or complexity. Thus, make sure that candidates do not need to answer too many questions or register for any system. The application process should be as simple as possible.

4. Build your Talent Community

If you want to become a strategic recruiter truly, you must build your talent community (alias talent pool) — now. It’s all about moving from reactive to proactive hiring.

The talent community consists of potential employees you could hire one day. There you can add the candidates you did not hire but who showed potential and also talents from fairs and social media. Moreover, you can gather referrals and create internal talent community groups to boost internal job rotation.

When the day comes, you need to hire a new employee. You already have a list of people who are interested in your company. You may not even need to open a public job ad or pay for recruitment marketing.

To make the talent community work, it cannot be just static. You need to nurture the community members, just like sales leads. Send them newsletters and information about e.g. industry news, career stories and book tips. You can also organize meetups for the members.

5. Utilize Modern HR tech

Based on a study of Ideal, HR managers say they lose on average of 14 hours a week because they need to manually complete tasks that could be automated.

Trying to do recruitment manually or with old-fashioned software leads nowhere. Or at least you will have a hell of a lot more difficult time accomplishing your goals. With the right HR technologies, you are already halfway to becoming a strategic recruiter.

TalentAdore Hire is an easy-to-use recruitment solution that cleverly combines Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). With its consumer-grade user experience, the solution streamlines recruitment processes through workflow automation, enabling companies to treat every candidate as a sales lead.

Overall, TalentAdore’s solution automates those parts of the recruitment process where human input adds little or no value, saving time and allowing the users to focus on their core work: the people.

The key unique features contain:

• Employer branding via candidate communication, including AI-assisted Personalized Feedback
• Talent Community, enabling boosting company internal job rotation and managing temp workforce more effectively
• AI Matching for job ad sanity checks, more relevant applicants, automatic recommendations for both recruiters and applicants
• Data-Informed Decision Making based on advanced analytics
• Consumer grade user-experience with intuitive Hiring Manager View

TalentAdore wants to ensure a seamless end-to-end process for recruiters and hiring managers, hence, the users can also enjoy world-class mobile experience, recruitment chatbots, on-demand video interviews, online competence and personality tests, and pre-onboarding modules directly inside TalentAdore.

Do you want to see how our solution could help you? Book a demo with us!