Talent Attraction & Recruiting Tactics That Don’t Matter

We are in the midst of a pandemic sweeping over recruiting departments in almost every industry.  Stealing time and precious resources from Talent Attraction budgets.  Many staffing leaders right now are planning on what they will do different in 2013 to make staffing even better then 2012.  Below are a few pitfalls to avoid.  Instead, maybe they should invest in people.  Great sourcers and recruiters will always make more impact then almost anything else.

• Redesigning Your Talent or Careers Page ‘Just Because.’ Employer job and career pages are the hub for driving online applicants.  Shiny new, and sometimes seemingly ‘hip’ recruiting tactics.   How cool your branding looks and how sophisticated your follow along advertisements are doesn’t matter.  What DOES matter is how many QUALITY candidates your job page generates.  Redesigns without a clear candidate generation improvement goals are pointless.

• Obsessing Over Meta Descriptions. In the early days of search, making sure your job postings had well-written meta data was the key to ranking well in search engines.  This is not the case any longer.  Its more important to focus on building authentic communities that will provide referrals, retweets, and inbound links that give your jobs weight and authority for search engines but more importantly great candidates are not searching job boards for their next gig… but they might reply to a friend that pushed them your tweet.

• Constantly Pushing New Job Posts. Pushing out your job posts is one of the most important aspects of talent attraction.  Too many companies however overdue it and automate every requisition being pushed out to its social graph.  If you MUST do this, at least set up a separate handle just for jobs and do not push it over your main recruiting handle.  Also, its more effective to refrain from auto-publishing and allow hiring managers, sourcers, recruiters, and other stake holders in the search to push it out.

• Measuring Sentiment Because People lie.  People lie online even more, especially when wearing a badge of ‘potential candidate’ for your company.  Remember that while you may get 500 applicants to your posted role, only 1 will be hired.  That means you will have 499 people who “liked” your job that may not like it very much anymore.  Do not waist recruiting marketing dollars on tracking this, its inaccurate.

Removing What Wastes Time From Our Recruitment Strategy

There are a lot of really solid ways to move the needle with strategic talent attraction and recruitment strategy.  Let’s stop doing what wastes time just because and doing what doesn’t work. Is there something I