10 Tips For Successful Employee Recruitment

Finding the best possible employees who can fit into your culture and contribute to your business is both a challenge and an opportunity. Retaining the best employees once you find them is easy if you do the right things right. The information provided here will help you with successful employee recruitment, which is key to your continued success as a business. Without talented employees, you will not be able to achieve your goals.

These specific actions will help you recruit and retain all the employees and their many talents that you need. These ten practices will serve you well in your recruiting efforts.

Improve your candidate pool when recruiting employees
Companies that select new employees from candidates who walk in the door or respond to an online ad are missing out on the best candidates. These candidates are usually already working for someone else and may not even be looking for a new job. You need to find better ways to increase the number of your best candidates. Here are steps you can take to improve your candidate pool.

• Invest time in building relationships with university placement offices, recruiters and executive search firms.
• Allow your staff to actively participate in professional associations and conferences, where they are likely to meet candidates you can successfully court.
• Monitor online job boards for potential candidates who may have resumes online even if they are not currently looking.
• Use professional association websites and magazines to advertise for professionals.
• Search for potential employees on LinkedIn and other social media. This is an important step if you are trying to improve your candidate pool of women and minorities.
• Encourage your employees to refer friends and professional colleagues they may know online to your company.
• Bring your best prospects from all of these sources into your company or call them on Zoom to meet them before you need them for an open position. Having an established relationship helps with employee recruitment.
• The key is to build your candidate pool before you need them. These seven practices will serve you well in recruiting.

Hire the sure thing when recruiting employees
The authors of The Human Capital Edge, Bruce N. Pfau and Ira T. Kay, believe that you should hire a person who has done “that exact job, in that exact industry, in that specific business climate, in a company with a very similar culture.”

They believe that “past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour” and suggest that this is the strategy you can use to hire winners. They say you need to hire the candidates you believe can hit the ground running in your organization. You can’t afford to take the time to train a candidate who is only possibly successful.

Look at internal candidates first
Offering your current employees opportunities for advancement and lateral entry will boost morale and make your employees feel like their talents, skills, and accomplishments are valued. Always advertise positions internally and let your employees know if you are advertising the position externally as well. Provide reasonable application deadlines.

Give potential candidates an interview. It’s a chance for you to get to know them better. You’ll learn more about the organization’s goals and needs. Sometimes a good fit is found between your needs and theirs.

Become known as a great employer
Pfau and Kay advocate not only being a great employer but letting people know you are a great employer. This is how you build your reputation and company brand. You want the best potential employees to seek you out because they respect your brand and want to work for you.

Google, which regularly tops Fortune’s Best Companies list, for example, told Axios that it received 3.3 million job applications in 2019. This was up from 2.8 million job applications in 2018, an 18% increase from the previous year.2

Take a look at your employee practices for retention, motivation, accountability, rewards, recognition, work-life balance flexibility, promotion, and engagement. These are your key areas for becoming an employer of choice.

You want your employees to brag that your company is a great place to work. People are more likely to believe your employees than what you write in company literature or on your recruiting website.

Involve your employees in the hiring process
You have three ways to involve your employees in the hiring process.

• Your employees can recommend excellent candidates for your company.
• They can help you review the resumes and qualifications of potential candidates.
• They can help you interview individuals to assess their potential “fit” in your company.

Companies that don’t use their employees to assess potential employees are underutilizing one of their most important assets. People who participate in the selection process are committed to helping the new employee succeed. It can’t go any better for you and the new employee.

Pay better than the competition
Yes, you get what you pay for in the job market. Take a look at your local job market and see exactly how people in your industry are paid. You want to pay better than average to attract and retain the best candidates. Sounds obvious, right?

Well, it isn’t. Employers talk every day about how they can get employees on the cheap. It’s a bad practice. Have you ever heard, “In the job market, you get what you pay for?” Sure, you may get lucky and attract a person who has golden handcuffs because they are following their spouse or partner to a new community or need your benefits.

But they will resent their pay grade, feel unappreciated and leave you for the first good job offer. The cost of replacing an employee can be two to three times their annual salary. In the job market, you get what you are willing to pay for.

Use your fringe benefits to your advantage when recruiting employees
Keep your fringe benefits above the industry standard and add new benefits when you can afford to add them. Also, educate your employees about the cost and value of their fringe benefits so they appreciate how well you are taking care of their needs.

Employees value flexibility and the ability to balance their work with other life responsibilities, interests and issues. You can’t be an employer of choice if you don’t offer a good benefits package that includes standard benefits like health insurance, retirement plans and dental insurance.

Employees are increasingly looking for cafeteria-style benefit plans where they can balance their choices with those of a working spouse or partner. Pfau and Kay recommend stock and ownership options for every level of employee in your organization. Consider profit-sharing plans and bonuses that pay employees for measurable performance and contributions.

Hire the smartest person you can find
In their book, “First Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently,” Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recommend that great managers hire for talent. They believe that successful managers believe, “People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to bring in what’s been left out. Try to bring out what was left in. It’s hard enough to do that. “3

If you are looking for someone who can work well with people, you need to hire a person who has the talent to work well with people. It is unlikely that you will be able to train the person to lack talent later. You can try, but then you’re not building on the employee’s strengths, which 80,000 managers in a Gallup survey strongly recommended.

The recommendation? Hire for strengths; don’t expect to develop weak areas of performance, habits and talents. Build on what’s great about your new hire in the first place.

Use your website for recruiting
Your website represents your vision, mission, values, goals, and products. It is also effective for recruiting employees who experience a resonance with what you state on your website. Your recruiting website should provide insight into the culture and work environment you offer for employees.

You should create a jobs section that describes your available positions and includes information about you and why an interested person should contact your company. A recruiting website is your chance to shine and a highly effective way to attract candidates.

Check references when recruiting employees
The purpose of this section is to keep you out of trouble with the candidates you seek and select, and the employees you currently employ. You really need to check references carefully and run background checks.

In the litigious society we live in (don’t even ask what percentage of the world’s lawyers are based in the U.S.), you need to exhaust every avenue to make sure the people you hire can get the job done, contribute to your growth and development, and have no prior offenses that could jeopardize your current workforce.

You could even be held liable if you failed to conduct a background check on an individual who then assaults another employee in your workplace.

Every company must start somewhere to improve the recruitment, hiring, and retention of valued employees. The tactics and opportunities described here are your best bets for recruiting the best employees. These ideas can help your business succeed and grow, creating a workplace that meets your needs as well as the needs of your potential and current outstanding employees.