With a well-planned recruitment strategy, recruiting teams can quickly locate ideal candidates and save time and resources in the process.
14 Recruitment Strategies to Know
- Optimize your career page.
- Optimize job postings.
- Post on social media.
- Create employer branding content.
- Host recruitment events.
- Utilize niche job boards.
- Reward employees for helping recruitment.
- Build an accessible talent community.
- Answer candidate questions online.
- Attend local industry-related events.
- Showcase strong employee benefits.
- Cultivate a diverse and inclusive environment.
- Treat job candidates like valuable customers.
- Find ways to elevate the interview experience.
What Is a Recruitment Strategy?
A recruitment strategy is a formal plan that details how recruiters identify and hire top talent. Recruiters should define the types of roles they’re hiring for, the formats for job advertisements and the criteria for determining top candidates.
While teams may be looking to fill immediate needs, recruitment strategies can also involve forming long-term connections with talented job seekers. For example, a candidate may not be qualified for a current opening, but joining a talent community keeps them in the loop when future opportunities arise that more closely match their skill sets.
Join us to discover actionable strategies to align your employer brand with tech and convert sought-after tech talent.
Importance of a Good Recruitment Strategy
A good recruitment strategy is crucial for finding the most qualified job candidates possible for open positions, as it outlines how recruiters should locate potential candidates and provide consistency in hiring practices. Recruitment strategies can also increase brand awareness and bring in a larger candidate pool for recruiters to consider. This makes for a faster hiring process and more opportunities to build a workforce tailored to company needs.
How to Develop a Recruitment Strategy
Before creating a recruitment strategy, certain tasks are critical for developing a successful strategy. Here are the basics of recruitment strategies that top employers follow.
Review Your Recruitment Metrics and Goals
Take a look at your recruitment metrics to locate pain points in the recruitment process and inform your recruitment goals. For example, your team may aim to increase the number of applicants by targeting new job board platforms or hosting hiring events. Or you may plan to cut your hiring time in half by tapping into different networks and incentivizing employees with a higher employee referral bonus.
Invest in Recruitment Tools
Consider investing in recruitment tools to simplify your recruiting process. Whether it be a video interview platform or a full applicant tracking system, these tools help streamline and automate certain tasks, so your team can focus on other aspects of the recruitment process. As companies continue to adopt hybrid or remote workplaces, it’s important your company has robust tools to conduct virtual interviews.
14 Effective Recruitment Strategies to Attract Top Talent
With the basics in mind, you’re ready to start building a recruitment strategy personalized to your company. For inspiration, we’ve gathered 14 examples of creative recruitment strategies that companies have used to hire top talent.
1. Optimize Your Career Page
Having a well-crafted career page is an essential element of every recruitment strategy for a few reasons. First, candidates expect to find a careers page on your website. Second, it’s a great resource to promote open roles, share content and provide information on the company’s mission, culture and benefits.
Showcase Company Pros
WP Engine’s career page includes all the essentials from the company’s core values to internal diversity statistics, awards it’s won as an employer and plenty of opportunities for candidates to learn more about the company and its career opportunities.
Provide Candidate FAQs
Glossier provided an FAQ section so that candidate questions can be answered before applying. The application process is different for every company, so let candidates know up front when they can expect to hear back from the company and where they can find further information about specific roles. Answering such questions saves both recruiters and candidates time spent communicating information that could be clarified on the website.
Use AI Chatbots
Intel created a chatbot to help candidates learn more about the company in an engaging and interactive way. The chatbot is a great use of an automated tool that helps candidates ask questions anytime, anywhere and receive answers immediately without the waiting that comes with interacting with humans in different time zones.
2. Optimize Job Postings
To get the widest range of applicants possible, many companies aim to rank on page one of a Google search. Here are a few search engine tools and tricks that can help boost your recruitment strategy without the assistance of an SEO professional.
Optimize Job Posts For Search
Google’s job search tool is a great way to get your job posting in front of candidates before they click through to a website or job board. When candidates search for a specific job title, Google will aggregate jobs in their area that match their inquiry. Getting your jobs on Google is easy:
- Edit the HTML of job descriptions on your website so that Google knows to crawl them as job postings. Google will help walk your engineering team through how to do this.
- Jobs posted to third-party job boards may already have this HTML code on the jobs you post to their websites, so ask if your partners qualify for Google’s job search tool.
Target Competitor Keywords
Competing companies like Uber and Lyft are constantly trying to acquire each other’s users, as well as each other’s job candidates. When someone searches “Uber jobs,” the second result is for careers at Lyft. Lyft targeted a hyper-specific paid ad at the “Uber jobs” keyword knowing that anyone searching for jobs at its competitor would also likely be interested in jobs at Lyft.
Target Job Title Keywords
Boeing and Accenture have bought paid ads on Google too, with a focus on job title keywords. By targeting the keyword “software engineer jobs,” they are the first companies candidates see when they start their job searches. And given the level of competition for top engineers, getting an early jump on the best candidates can pay huge dividends.
3. Post on Social Media
Instead of focusing solely on branding your home site, you’ll want to extend the reach of your audience by sharing posts on social media too. The companies below leveraged social media to attract passive candidates on the platforms they spend the most time on.
Create Recruiting Social Channels
To take its social media recruiting to the next level, AWS created specific recruiting social media accounts that clearly target job candidates. Its handle @hereataws helps users distinguish this account from any business account. AWS posts content solely about its company culture, recruiting events, employee spotlights and possible open roles.
Feature Employees
Duolingo embraces social media and is not shy to show off its personality and culture with employee highlights, team outings and celebrations across the board. It frequently utilizes platforms like Instagram and TikTok to feature key employees and core company values.
Share Your Current Projects
Klaviyo’s engineering team stays connected with engineering candidates by writing regular blog articles on projects its team is working on. This helps candidates better understand what they could be working on if they join the team, and it reassures them that the engineering team is an industry leader.
Post on Medium
Meta’s employees often share recruiting content on Medium, publishing articles that help readers prepare for Meta job opportunities and Meta behavioral interviews. At a business like Meta, every department (and individual) will interview differently, so a generic guide doesn’t fit. Instead, provide candidates with the most helpful information for their situation.
4. Create Employer Branding Content
Creating employer branding media is a great way to provide easily digestible and insightful content that can be shared across multiple platforms. Here are a few different content ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
Film a Recruitment Video
A brief 30-second recruitment video, like the one above from Broadcom Inc., could easily be repurposed on social media, the company website or even as a TV advertisement. It’s quick and clever, encouraging candidates to check out the company’s careers page for more content.
A recruitment video also doesn’t have to fit into rigid guidelines. For example, a video by SodaStream incorporates information about the company while including people from multiple departments and of different nationalities and languages.
Record a Company Podcast
Turbonomic provided employee testimonials in the form of 10- to 20-minute podcast episodes. Not only are podcasts becoming more and more popular, but listeners can actually hear the voice and emotion behind what the employees are saying — something that’s lost in written testimonials. The same goes for video testimonials. This provides in-depth insights into your employees’ backgrounds, personalities and the roles they’ve held at the company.
Write a Company Blog
Sift creates in-depth blog posts on its personal site covering news reports, informational guides and employee spotlights. These stories allow candidates to get to know a company’s values and prospective team on a more personal level. Beyond company basics, an employee spotlight blog covers personal interests, hobbies, passion projects and everything in between.
5. Host Recruitment Events
Recruitment events provide recruiters with a chance to get to know candidates’ personalities and backgrounds beyond their resumes. Below are a couple of ideas for recruitment events.
Connect With Universities
From universities and trade schools to niche boot camps, educational institutions are one of the top resources for recruiting fresh talent. Salesforce has a dedicated team for recruiting university students called Futureforce, which works with university campuses to provide resources to help young candidates prepare for their first roles with the company.
Get Your Local Community Together
Grubhub partnered with Built In to host an event where candidates came to its office to casually mingle with company leaders and chat with the teams they were specifically interested in. This type of event removes some of the stress and formalities that come with regular recruiting events, allowing candidates to relax and have a more personalized experience — and the casual nature of these events can apply to virtual meetups, too.
6. Utilize Niche Job Boards
You probably have a rhythm down for posting jobs on your careers page and a few popular job boards, but it’s important to branch out into many different types of networks to reach diverse talent on the platforms they use. Using niche job boards not only yields a wider candidate pool, but hiring diverse talent also creates a safer and happier work environment, making a company more attractive to prospective employees.
Recruit Veterans
Research how to become a veteran-friendly employer with resources like Military.com and SHRM. Once you understand the basics, consider partnering with organizations that help place veterans and build military-friendly workplaces, such as the U.S. Department of Labor and Recruit Military. Lastly, incorporate military job boards into your recruiting strategy like Hire Heroes USA, Hire A Veteran, Military Hire and Hire Veterans.
Recruit Mothers and Caregivers
There has been a long-standing stigma against people, specifically women, who have a several-year gap on their resumes due to being a caregiver for children, elderly relatives or people with disabilities. Externship programs are one way to help professionals who need a stepping stone between their former and future careers.
Recruit Candidates with Disabilities
If you set a goal to hire more candidates with disabilities, compare your company with the national Disability Equality Index to gauge your progress. Research ways you can make your workplace more accommodating, starting with the recruitment process. Make your careers page more accessible by partnering with organizations like the U.S. Department of Labor, Employer Assistance and Resource Network on Disability Inclusion and SHRM. Additionally, use job boards dedicated to people with disabilities like Ability Jobs and Disabledperson.
Recruit New Graduates
Twice a year Wolverine Trading reaches out to college campuses across the nation to connect with students for internships. Students early in their careers can gain professional experience through an internship program, and companies can build a talent network of young professionals who may be a fit for full-time roles in the future.
Recruit Formerly Incarcerated Candidates
Many companies are open to hiring people with criminal records. In 2018, Slack started a program to help formerly incarcerated individuals find work in the technology industry by connecting with The Last Mile. After graduating from the program and gaining the necessary skills, individuals were partnered with the team at Slack for a year-long apprenticeship. Banyan Labs also exclusively hires formerly incarcerated people as coders and helps them find jobs in the tech industry at partner organizations.
7. Reward Employees for Helping Recruitment
Encouraging help from existing or previous employees can lead to unique opportunities for finding talent. Since an employee already works at your company, they may have a good idea of who and what skill sets would fit best the workplace environment.
Encourage Employees to Boomerang
Employees may initially leave a company but later wish to return — workers known as boomerang employees. Boomerang employees are already knowledgeable of your work environment and may even bring a new perspective from their time away. In the search for talent, HireVue is one of many companies embracing the recruitment of boomerang employees, even outwardly welcoming them back on social media.
Establish an Employee Referral Program
Some of the best candidates are lingering within your employee’s networks. To incentivize your team to reach into their networks, create an employee referral program, like OnDeck’s referral program that offers payouts to anyone who refers a candidate that is hired.
8. Build an Accessible Talent Community
A talent community consists of candidates who have shown interest in and maybe even interviewed with your company, but were not a fit for a role at the time. Rather than whisk them out the door, keep in contact with passive candidates for when a more suitable role opens up. If you find a great candidate in your talent pool that you want to invite to an interview, try out this email invite template.
Provide Job Alerts
No matter your company’s size, you won’t always have open roles for top candidates. To bridge the gap, ThoughtWorks allows candidates to sign up for job alerts, so they’re the first to know when a role that fits their interests and experience becomes available. This allows the company to keep warm leads informed and maintain a pipeline of interested candidates.
Allow Anyone to Apply Anytime
Instead of waiting for roles to open up, Zappos wants interested candidates — no matter their skills or background — to sign up as a “Zappos Insider.” By providing their name, email and career of interest, Zappos can send tailored emails with information on open roles and company culture to individual candidates.
9. Answer Candidate Questions Online
If you haven’t searched your company on popular inquiry sites like Quora and Reddit, you might want to consider it — not only to see if anyone is talking about your company, but also to connect with candidates and establish a relationship by providing candid answers.
Get Involved on Quora
It’s no secret SpaceX wants to remain a highly sought-after employer. To help answer the wealth of questions candidates have about the tech giant, its team took to Quora, a question-and-answer website, to help resolve candidates’ inquiries (under ‘Related Questions’). Quora also sends follow-up emails with more content to people who view certain articles to help potential candidates dive deeper into their research.
Host “Ask Me Anything” Sessions on Reddit
A Google employee took to community discussion website Reddit to answer questions related to working at the company. This inquiry generated more than 1,300 replies, 2,000 comments and has 90 percent upvotes. The Ask Me Anything (AMA) format is an opportunity for companies to connect with hundreds or thousands of candidates in a simple, scalable manner.
10. Attend Local Industry-Related Events
While hosting events can draw more talent, companies may also find more potential hires by attending outside events. Businesses shouldn’t neglect talent in their own backyards, leveraging in-person events as spaces to connect with local candidates.
Job Fairs
Larger industry job fairs at a convention center can provide access to a wider pool of candidates with shared backgrounds and career interests than a company-specific event. Businesses should take advantage of city-sponsored hiring events and industry-wide job fairs to put themselves on the radars of more candidates.
Local Hangouts
To meet new candidates, get involved in groups that discuss your industry’s trends and challenges. For example, members of Chicago Women Developers host regular Hack Nights to get to know novice and experienced developers in their community. Spaces like this are a great way for recruiters to connect with candidates who have passions and hobbies that align with the requirements of an open role.
11. Showcase Strong Employee Benefits
Candidates may care about more than the details of a certain role, so a solid employee benefits package can be a difference-maker. If you have a well-rounded employee benefits program, include this in job postings, branded content and other types of recruitment strategies.
Employee Well-Being
Mental health has become a more prominent issue in the workplace, making mental health days a major eye-catcher for top candidates. In addition, implement and advertise benefits like sick days, unlimited PTO and extensive parental leave support.
Flexible Work
Flexible work settings allow your team to pursue candidates across a broader geographic range, and they may also speak to candidates looking for a more personalized work experience. Lay out the details for your remote or hybrid work policies in your company description and job ads, so candidates are aware of the flexible work opportunities your business offers.
12. Cultivate a Diverse and Inclusive Environment
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) can also play a factor in whether a candidate decides to apply for a position. Over 50 percent of U.S. workers believe DEI is important when considering whether to join a company, so organizations would do well to design and execute DEI strategies that cater to candidates of various backgrounds.
Share Diverse and Inclusive Policies
Steps to promote DEI in your workplace can include unconscious bias training, hiring quotas and employee resource groups for women and people of color. Mentioning how you support people of marginalized groups on your job page and within job descriptions will help you stand out from businesses that merely mention diversity and inclusion as a buzzword.
Supplement Job Postings with DEI Language
People of marginalized groups face unique challenges, with women being 16 percent less likely than men to apply to a job and applicants with Black names receiving 10 percent fewer callbacks than their white counterparts. Counter any doubts candidates may harbor by ending each job description with a statement encouraging candidates of marginalized groups to apply even if they don’t meet all the requirements. This gentle nudge may convince candidates of underrepresented groups to apply, increasing your applicant pool.
13. Treat Job Candidates Like Valuable Customers
It can feel repetitive interviewing candidate after candidate, but viewing prospective hires as just another resume can alienate them. To ensure a positive candidate experience, treat potential new hires with the same respect and attention to detail you’d give to a valued customer.
Maintain Transparency With Candidates
Prioritize transparency during every interaction with job candidates. For those navigating your hiring pipeline, be sure to provide them with timely updates about decisions, next interviews and recruiting processes. In addition, avoid questionable practices like posting ghost jobs, so your company doesn’t develop a negative reputation among job seekers.
Get to Know Candidates on a Personal Level
Don’t just fire interview questions at candidates and send them on their way. Take a few moments to ask candidates about their interests and hobbies. This personable approach will leave a more favorable impression on job seekers. And even if a candidate isn’t the right fit, their passions and skill sets may make them the perfect candidate for a future opening.
14. Find Ways to Elevate the Interview Experience
While there’s nothing wrong with asking the usual interview questions, thinking outside the box can result in more fruitful conversations with candidates. Here are a few ways you can change up your interview process and glean deeper insights about potential hires.
Be Creative With Your Interview Questions
Behavioral interview questions are a great opportunity to determine whether candidates have the skills and experience you’re looking for, and it lets them highlight past achievements. Ask open-ended questions and give candidates more freedom in their answers to determine how well they think outside the box.
Give Candidates Opportunities to Talk to Different Employees
Besides an interview with the hiring manager, arrange interviews between a candidate and their potential future teammates. Hearing a range of perspectives can paint a fuller picture of the role and what day-to-day life at the company is like. Organize panel interviews to introduce job seekers to different employees and see how they could contribute to team dynamics.
Join us to discover actionable strategies to align your employer brand with tech and convert sought-after tech talent.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is included in a recruitment strategy?
A recruitment strategy often includes information on company hiring goals, candidate sourcing techniques, marketing practices used to attract talent and an employee retention plan.
What are the most successful recruiting strategies?
Some successful recruiting strategies include:
- Optimizing your company website, career page and job postings
- Posting on social media to showcase company brand and values
- Hosting recruitment events
- Building a talent community
- Attending local industry-related events or job fairs
How do you write a recruitment strategy?
When planning a recruitment strategy, use the following steps to guide your overall strategy:
- Assess current company strategies to inform your recruiting strategy.
- Review current recruiting processes to explore strengths and areas of improvement.
- Study recruitment strategy templates and examples from other companies.
- Gather feedback from various stakeholders to determine recruiting needs.
- Set recruitment goals, budget restrictions and a timeline.
- Decide what technologies to use to carry out recruitment strategy.
- Select channels and media formats for communicating the recruitment strategy.
- Develop new initiatives for earning more job candidates.
- Outsource tasks as needed to support the recruitment strategy.
- Evaluate your recruitment strategy on a regular basis and make adjustments.