Create a Flawless Recruiting Strategy

You have a sourcing applicants problem.

Looking at your current lack of applicant flow, you know you need to act.

You believe there is the potential to improve your hiring strategy for your company. Your management team is bought in and they are aware of the changes that need to be made to help fill your open jobs.

You're ready to build a recruiting flywheel.

The problem is, you might not know what to do to create a recruiting flywheel and what order to do it.

It can be overwhelming to try to change things, while also keeping up with the other day-to-day demands of an organization. Especially an organization that's trying to source, screen, and hire applicants.

Maybe you're feeling like you don't have the time, energy, and resources to attract job seekers you need to make things better.

Executing a robust hiring strategy is all about doing the right things, in the right order.

The Solution to Finding More Qualified Applicants

I call this strategy of attracting more job seekers The Recruiting Roadmap. The Recruiting Roadmap is focused on one simple premise: ICE

• Impact: What can you do each day to make the biggest impact to get more qualified applicants?
• Confidence: What's going to give you the highest amount of confidence in making improvements to your hiring strategy?
• Effort: What is going to work the best in attracting job seekers with the least amount of effort?

You can also think about this as taking the least effective dose. Our goal here is to create an efficient hiring strategy that drives success in hiring great employees.

How to Create a Recruiting Roadmap

In creating a Recruiting Roadmap, we start with low-hanging fruit that will make massive improvements to your hiring strategy, for the least amount of effort.

Next, we move up the tree to the fruit that's a little bit harder to get to, strategies that take a bit more effort.

Then, we plant new trees that you can harvest as your organization grows in the future. This will help you to keep feeding your hiring efforts in recruiting and finding qualified applicants.

5 Steps to Creating a Recruiting Roadmap

Step 1. Focus on the Job Seeker

Focusing on the job seeker is by far the most overlooked part of sourcing applicants. We are in such a rush to get our jobs live on the job boards that we jump right past this most fundamental part.

The most powerful thing that you can do in recruiting is to focus on the job seeker, not the organization.

This runs completely opposite of how almost every organization approaches recruiting. Oftentimes, employers focus on what their needs are, what the job description looks like, and what the job requirements are.

While these things are important, you have to maintain a balance between what the employer wants and what the job seekers want.

The problem is, over the last few decades, we've gotten so far out of balance that we aren't recognizing what job seekers are looking for. To fix it, and change our view when posting jobs, we need to identify these key factors:

• Job Seeker Audience: What kind of job seekers are we looking for? Who is our target audience and what are they looking for in a job?

• Job & Company Offer: How does the experience of working for us appeal to our target job seeker?

• Message to Attract Job Seekers: How can we explain our company in a compelling way that will make our target job seekers want to apply for our jobs?

• Applicant Screening: How will our applicant screening tools and processes identify qualified job seekers? How will we sort qualified applicants from the unqualified ones?

Figuring out your target job seeker is vitally important to nail down before moving to the next step in the recruiting roadmap. Find a couple of employees in your company that you want to clone. The employees that you say "I wish we could hire 100 more of you." Focusing on these as the benchmark target job seeker will help as you work through the foundations of your job ad content strategy.

Step 2. Understand How Job Boards Work

Job boards are the core advertising source for active job seekers in every industry across the United States. While you do get some passive job seekers, for the most part, job boards attract people who are actively searching for jobs.

To improve job seeker engagement with your job ads, you must:

• Ensure your job ad is included on the job boards.
• Get your job ads ranking well.
• Increase the likelihood of views to your jobs.
• Drive job seeker engagement.
• Maximize the conversion of job seekers who apply for your jobs.

Step 3. Build Your Company's Fans and Followers

This is where we expand and use disruptive forms of advertising to attract more passive job seekers. Most likely, the people that you're engaging in this area are not actively looking for a job. Passive job seekers are generally more powerful sources of applicants and need fewer candidates per hire.

You can easily drive these applicant sources by:

• Identifying the fan bases you want to engage
• Join or set them up
• Share your job
• Ensure your content is engaging for job seekers
• Convert them into applicants who are prequalified in your inbox.

Step 4. Learn the Power of Employee Referrals

Your Employee Referral program is the most powerful long-term source of qualified candidates because you own it. You have full control and power over this applicant source as an organization. Regardless of your company size, employee referrals should be the driving engine for the largest portion of applicants to your organization.

The most powerful source for qualified applicants is your own employee referrals.

Applicants who come from employee referrals are 5-10x more likely to be hired than job board applicants.

But, the really powerful part is when an organization takes control and proactively drives this source of applicants. Beyond just checking the box, it requires having a hiring strategy. Focus not only on your employee's best friends and family members, but also on weak connections.

Here's what you can do to drive employee referrals with your company.

• Launch or relaunch an Employee Referral program.
• Ensure that you are actively communicating your Employee Referral plan with your employees.
• Drive high conversion with meaningful insentives to your employees.
• Expand the power of your Employee Referral program to create a drumbeat of qualified applicants.

Step 5. Evolve Your Hiring Strategy

Adjusting and improving your hiring strategy is what's going to spin the Recruiting Flywheel around. But to proactively spin the flywheel, we have to segment it into smaller hiring flywheels.

We do this by segmenting into different roles, different parts of your organization, or different sources. Most likely, when we get into evolving, we're not just going to be spinning one big giant flywheel. Instead, we're going to be spinning a bunch of small ones that will help keep the others spinning as well.

In the upcoming weeks, we're going to take each step of this Recruiting Roadmap. I will break it down and provide you with how-to guides, templates, and checklists for hiring that you can use to execute your own Recruiting Roadmap.

We'll focus on how to make the fastest impact possible to your hiring with the least amount of effort and money involved.