This blog post is sponsored by iCims who is a faithful supporter of Blogging4Jobs.  Check them out on Twitter at @iCims. 

Simple Solutions to Your Recruiting Strategy

You see, when it comes to recruiting it is really very simple.  Your recruiting strategy is broken, and a quality candidate to fill your corporate requisition can’t be found.  You’ve likely spent thousands on job boards, posted your openings on online recruiting sites like Craigslist and Kijiji (now part of ebay), and maybe you even tweeted and Facebooked with no success.  So what’s the problem?

The problem is time.  Your recruiting staff is likely overworked, undermanned, or just planned out manned, womaned, or personed out to do the job at hand.  The problem is that you are over thinking and looking for answers to a question in which you are not qualified to answer.  So instead we complete weekly recruiting reports, create a Excel spreadsheet to manage and evaluate the process, and spend our lives defending and presenting our data when another potential solutions awaits that we avoid at all costs.  The problem with your recruiting strategy, I mean the real problem with your recruiting strategy is that you haven’t bothered to  ask the candidate.

Candidate Experience Just like Customer Experience Matters

Corporate recruiting teams don’t engage the job seeker or ask for feedback on their candidate experience.  In fact 50% of companies surveyed by Career CrossRoads in 2011 tell us that we don’t even engage the candidate on any level.  Why would we even contact the candidate if we can’t or won’t provide a simple turn down response.  But we should.

I spent my time as a HR Director begrudgingly submitting those recruiting reports, creating and forumlating those excel spreadsheets while surfing the internet shoe shopping during those fantastic recruiting conference calls biding my time to present a solution.

Four Candidate Focused Recruiting Strategy Solutions

•  Mystery Shops.  These are like recruiting gold.  Have your team complete the candidate application and hiring process for themselves then do the same for a handful of your competitors and meet to discuss your results.  A simple and honest self-evaluation can help you to determine opportunities before moving forward.

• Focus Group Meetings.  New employees are likely happy employees but the hiring and recruiting strategy process is fresh in their minds.  Host 30 day and 90 day focus group meetings with recently hired team members to help evaluate the process and learn directly from your candidate where the hiring opportunities lie.

• Survey the Troops.  Applicant tracking systems offer the opportunity to easily engage a candidate pool via email.  A short survey designed in a survey tool like Survey Monkey helps to offer job seekers anonymity while providing you a platform in which to evaluate your results.  Job seekers are busy folks and often times are not as willing as newly hired employees to provide feedback so it’s important to provide them with an incentive to facilitate the process.  This could be in the form of a white paper or recorded webinar offering job seeker timely tips and feedback.

• Exit Interviews.  If your organization has an online exit interview process and if your organization does not, consider adding one.  I recommend adding an additional question to your online exit interview asking your exiting employee what source they used to locate their new position.  This gives you insights into current job search trends and methods within your own organization especially if companies are using cherry picker tactics to steal your top talent.

Every time I have employed one of these solutions it provided me and my recruiting team with valuable insights beyond what any Excel spreadsheet ever could.  We got to the heart of the matter and engaged our talent pool learning about candidate experience and engagement drivers and new referral sources straight from the job seekers mouth.  Because the candidate should be our top priority, and like any good relationship understanding what your top priority wants starts by asking the right people the right questions.