11 Things YOU Need To Know When Recruiting Online
1. Research
The first thing you should do when starting your recruitment process is to do some research. This should include research surrounding the skills you’d like to see in your ideal hire. This will allow you to use these in your search criteria and find candidates with relevant skills.
You should also research the terminology that is used in the industry. Skills, responsibilities and company names can be expressed in a wide variety of ways so you should make sure you understand these so you can use them in your candidate search effectively.
2. Thorough Search
The chances of finding the perfect job candidate by submitting the first you find that fits the job requirements are very slim. However there are people out there who source their candidates this way. In order to source your candidates effectively, you should ensure that you conduct a thorough search. Although this will be more time consuming you increase your chance of finding suitable candidates.
3. Basic Searches
Basic keyword searches will provide you with a huge amount of results. However, there are likely to be a large number of candidates who are unsuitable for your organisation, and in order for you to find those who are you’ll have to review them all. This is likely to be very time consuming and due to the volume of results, you may not get through them all. Which means you may be missing out on suitable candidates.
You should aim to use a narrower search so it provides you with a smaller amount of candidates which may be suitable. You must remember that anybody can run a basic search and therefore these candidates are unlikely to offer you a competitive advantage. Also running one search is less effective that running numerous ones, so ensure you consider different searches to find more candidates.
4. Quality
If you want to find those top candidates, make sure sourcing them is your top priority! Recruiting via social media and posting jobs online is great at identifying talent but it doesn’t involve any control over the quality of candidates.
Employee referrals are seen to be great for this, as people are unlikely to refer others if they are rubbish. They don’t want it to come off bad on them! However, the candidates who are best for your role aren’t always known by people within your organisation.
You will want to attract those candidates who don’t know anyone in your organisation, as well as those who are comfortable in their existing role that isn’t actively looking for a new job.
5. Don’t Stereotype
Don’t stereotype the methods of sourcing your employees. You may think employing someone from a referral will provide you with a better candidate than if you were to employ someone from Monster, but this isn’t the case. There are so many ways to source employees and just because somebody says Facebook is great, you may find it isn’t. You must ensure you don’t stereotype methods and try them to see if they are successful for your organisation.
6. Look At Your Recruitment from a Candidates Perspective
It is critical that you take time to look at your recruitment process from the candidate’s point of view. You may think it’s great and ensures cost per hire is low, but you could be missing out on top performers applying for your roles. You might consider your job posting to be great, but if it doesn’t include enough information about the actual job and potential candidates find it uninteresting, you aren’t going to attract to applicants you want. You might find that the great opportunity you are advertising, in fact isn’t seen as great at all. You must ensure you know what your potential candidates want before you advertise.
7. Review Your Candidate Database
Companies put a lot of time money and effort into looking for employees to fill vacancies within their organisation. You use Facebook or LinkedIn accounts to search for various skills hoping to find the perfect candidate. However, you may find there is a quicker and more cost effective way within your organisation. You may think reviewing the CV’s and applications of candidates who have applied for other roles in the past may be a waste of time and that there is a reason they have been overlooked. However, these could provide you with candidates who may be perfect for current vacancies. Just because a candidate didn’t meet the minimum requirements for one job, doesn’t mean they won’t for another.
8. Practice!
Deliberate practice is designed to continually challenge you to enable you improve your performance beyond your existing capability. So make sure you are practicing at work, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of doing what you’ve always done as you won’t be doing anything to improve your performance.
You should make sure you focus trying to discover terms that you didn’t originally search for and analyse the relevance of the results, this way you’ll be able to identify patterns and maybe eliminate different search criteria. You should continually seek different ways to enable an increase of high quality results.
Improving your performance is hard work, but if it was easy to become great – everyone would be!
9. Job Posting
Posting jobs online is probably one of the first steps you take when you have a vacancy; however should a strategy that requires little or no effort be the one you rely on? Alongside other methods, yes.
The use of social media encourages interaction, it allows you to search and interact with candidates that you can see have the relevant qualifications for the vacancy. So whilst you may be receiving applications through your job posting online, it’s likely that a lot of them are under qualified or don’t fit your organisation.
Regardless of whether a person has a job or not the internet allows you to search and target candidates who live in a specific area and have the specific skills, qualifications and experience you need. This widens the pool of candidates, but by searching for precise criteria it also narrows it.
10. Don’t judge a book by its cover
When you are looking through a candidates CV or application form, don’t assume anything! Don’t assume that they don’t have the experience in something specific just because it isn’t on their CV. And don’t assume that they aren’t willing to relocate, or that the candidate won’t commute to your location.
By doing this and disregarding the application, you could be ruling out candidates who have the skills for the role and would fit in your organisation perfectly.
11. Be Social
Being on social media websites is all well and good, but if you aren’t being social it can have a worse effect on your company than if you weren’t to have social media presence at all.
You must ensure you do the following:
- If a candidate takes the time to fill out an application form for one of your job vacancies, message them! Thank them for applying, and let them know how they get on (even if it’s bad news). No candidates count automated emails or messages as social so when you can, personalise them!
- If someone posts on your Facebook/LinkedIn group/Twitter make sure you reply! If you don’t you’ll be seen as anti-social, and if other potential candidates see you don’t reply, they will think you don’t care and won’t bother applying for a job with you.
- You can be seen as anti-social if you have 1,000s of followers on Twitter but are only following a handful of them back. You should ensure you following users back who interact with you. That way you are showing you are interested in your followers.
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