From submitting requisitions for hiring to onboarding candidates, recruitment teams put months of effort into making each cycle a success. However, talent acquisition is cutthroat.
Why?
- There is a disproportion in the number of skilled and available professionals compared to the number of vacant positions. A ZipRecruiter survey found that 57% of employers lack qualified candidates.
- With more companies adopting remote and hybrid employees, the hunt for the best talents has gone global.
- With evolving expectations of the new gen employees, companies strive to adapt, intensifying the competition further.
So, what can you do to make your employer brand stand out?
Frame a detailed talent acquisition and recruitment strategy covering the ins and outs of your entire hiring funnel.
But first-
What is a talent acquisition strategy?
A talent acquisition strategy is a company’s tailored framework that determines how to identify, assess, and hire the best candidates that fit the company’s culture and contribute to long-term growth.
From recruitment methods and practices to using an ATS and onboarding tools, it maps out every component that:
- Helps your recruitment team conduct a fair, efficient, and effective hiring process
- Lets you hire the best possible candidate
- Portrays an inclusive and positive employer brand for your company
How to build a talent acquisition strategy?
A well-structured talent acquisition strategy should be flexible enough to adapt to industry changes, trends, and candidate expectations. It keeps your company’s talent acquisition efforts competitive, resilient, and focused on long-term growth.
To build a solid talent acquisition strategy, these are some things you must keep in mind:
- Your employer brand is your biggest asset in acquiring the best-skilled professionals. So, work on polishing it as much and as often as you can
- Leverage recruitment analytics and identify your most profitable job boards.
- Assess industry standards and competitors to design an attractive compensation plan
12 talent acquisition strategies to hire top talent in your company
Here are our 12 best talent acquisition strategies to make your recruitment process more efficient and result-driven:
1. Align talent acquisition strategy with business needs
A sound talent acquisition strategy requires clarity on your long-term business goals. You must know what exact qualities you are looking for in your new hire to devise a plan accordingly.
- Start by understanding your current and future business objectives. Include your upcoming product launches, expansion into newer fields, growth plans, etc.
- You must also clarify your mission and vision before strategizing a talent acquisition plan so that it focuses on candidates who are passionate about your business’s purpose.
- Run a skill gap analysis and your expected attrition rate to specify the existing and potential expertise needed in your workforce. This keeps your talent acquisition strategies aligned with your business’s growth needs.
2. Clearly define roles and candidate requirements
List all the key positions within your organization and identify the responsibilities associated with each. This keeps your requirements organized for the TA team and makes it easier for them to create accurate job descriptions.
- Be as specific as you can while crafting job descriptions.
- Besides hard skills, outline behavioral traits like communication skills, problem-solving abilities, leadership qualities, and adaptability.
- In short, determine competencies that are essential to succeed in your company.
You can create an ideal candidate profile for each role. This acts as a reference for your recruiting team and helps them understand the qualities to look for during passive candidate sourcing.
What’s more, with a tool like Kula ATS, you can screen and evaluate candidates based on predefined criteria to make data-driven hiring decisions.
3. Maintain a transparent hiring process
Lead by example with a transparent hiring process to help candidates make informed decisions. This fosters mutual trust between your recruitment team and the candidate early in the hiring process.
Set proper guidelines for curating job descriptions. Mention the sections and elements they must include through your talent acquisition strategy, such as:
- A comprehensive analysis of the position
- Required expertise and experience
- Cultural competency
- Assessment criteria
- Salary range and benefits
- Growth opportunities in the role
Once a candidate passes through the first screening round, communicate the expected wait time for the next round. You should also convey your process for reference checks early on.
Never leave any candidate hanging. Instead, offer constructive feedback even if an applicant doesn’t make the final cut to strengthen your employer brand further.
With Kula ATS, TA teams can provide a personalized candidate experience wherein applicants can track their progress throughout the interview process on the portal. This way, they’ll stay informed about their current application or upcoming roles while enjoying transparency.
4. Define DE&I policies
Diversity has become a significant element for a business’s success on a global scale. Forbes surveyed companies with more than $10 billion in annual revenues, and 56% cited diversity as a driver of innovation.
Plus, a company with a strong focus on diversity portrays an organization the socially aware Gen Z and millennials can be passionate about.
Here are some policies you can add:
- Using gender-neutral terms in your job boards
- Commitment to recruit at least 20% to 30% talent from underrepresented groups
- Including people of color and different genders in the recruiting panel
- Regular DE&I training for your employees across the hierarchy
- Special educational and training opportunities for employees from underrepresented groups
Add a separate DE&I section under the career and employment page and branded job boards. Promote the initiatives with your job posts on social media to attract diverse candidates.
However, ensure your DE&I policies don’t look like a token or a tick in the checklist from the candidate’s perspective.
An example
Here is an inclusive talent acquisition strategy example worth mentioning. Beverage company Talking Rain found that, historically, their workforce mostly consisted of white males. However, they needed a more diverse workforce to grow globally.
The company deployed applicant tracking system (ATS) features like recruitment analytics and identified the right channels to reach a diverse candidate pool. They also pivoted their traditional referral model to a more inclusive structure.
5. Create an employer brand
What customer centricity is to sales, a positive employer brand is to attract quality candidates. Modern candidates do their research on an organization before applying for their vacancy.
- Ensure your online presence answers their potential questions about your culture, professional growth opportunities, overall employee well-being, etc.
- Regularly post behind-the-scenes of your employees at work on your company’s LinkedIn and other social media profiles.
- Congratulate employees on achievements publicly. Add testimonials from past employees on your career page.
- Identify specific attributes that make your company unique. It can be a purpose, a social commitment, or a fun brand personality.
Highlight your employer brand on your website, social media, and job boards. In this case, ATS offerings, like Kula’s out-of-the-box career site builder, help create a branded job page for your company.
6. Partner with the marketing team to reach more candidates
Involve your marketing team in your talent acquisition strategy to amplify your outbound recruiting initiatives to a broader candidate pool.
You can ask your social media marketing team to create a talent community on LinkedIn or Facebook. Start a monthly newsletter campaign and share content on DE&I initiatives, remote work, and other employment topics. It creates interest in your employer brand and gets inbound job queries in your pipeline.
Your marketing team can also plan on-campus job fairs to get fresh talents in your pipeline.
7. Offer flexible work options
A recent Deloitte report noted flexible work arrangements as a growing priority among Gen Z and millennials. As they are a majority of the current workforce across industries, your talent acquisition strategy must highlight flexible work options in the candidate sourcing plan.
Offering location and timing flexibility makes you a more appealing employer and widens your reach to a global talent pool.
Keep remote work options open in job posts whenever possible. You can emphasize your company values the quality of work over the hours put into it.
8. Create a competitive benefits and incentives plan
Analyze your competing employment firms and assess their benefits package. Educate yourself on the industry standards and offer competitive compensation and incentive plans.
Here are some attractive benefits you can offer:
- Life insurance
- Medical insurance
- Paid vacations
- Parental leave and benefits
- Retirement plans
- Education sponsorship
- Free professional courses
To stay competitive, evaluate your benefits package every year against industry benchmarks and update accordingly.
9. Prioritize candidate experience
Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes and design a recruitment experience accordingly. Today’s generation prefers phones. So, ensure your job postings and application processes are optimized for mobile devices.
Use a reliable ATS like Kula to automate recruiting workflows. This ensures that your candidates get timely reminders and notifications during the entire screening process. Here, you can automate personalized, multi-stage message flows and conduct multilingual assessments to streamline candidate experience.
10. Limit interview rounds
Adding multiple interview rounds in your talent acquisition strategy may look like you are being thorough with your evaluation process. However, too many screening sessions can frustrate your candidates and lengthen your time-to-hire.
To solve this, Kula ATS offers AI-powered candidate matching to filter out unsuitable candidates early on and reduce your interview rounds.
Design a structured interview process to screen hard and soft skills. This way, your interview process becomes consistent for every candidate. You can also conduct group rounds and one final round with senior stakeholders.
11. Simplify the onboarding experience
Once a candidate accepts the job offer, make the onboarding experience as smooth as possible. Share the paperwork digitally and ask your hires to e-sign them. Send the necessary equipment early on. Create channels to help them gel with colleagues and ask questions.
To further simplify the onboarding process, consider implementing a buddy or mentor system. You can pair new hires with experienced team members to guide them. This approach helps newcomers navigate their roles and the company culture and facilitates smoother integration into the team.
Encourage buddies or mentors to check in regularly, answer questions, and provide insights based on their experiences to create a supportive network — extending beyond formal training sessions.
12. Proactively communicate
Communicate everyday responsibilities and tasks to the candidates proactively. Create an itinerary for their first month on the job so that they know their everyday commitments. Clarify expectations on the first day again to eliminate any potential miscommunication earlier.
Follow these best practices to ensure a smooth candidate experience:
- Initiate communication with new hires before their start date to provide essential information and set expectations.
- Develop a comprehensive 30-day itinerary, outlining daily tasks, meetings, and training sessions.
- Reinforce expectations on the first day to eliminate any potential miscommunication and ensure alignment with job responsibilities.
- Schedule regular check-ins with new hires during their first few weeks to address any questions or concerns.
- Create internal channels to ask questions and get clarification on job-related matters or company policies.
- Offer access to resources, such as welcome packets, online portals, and training materials to acclimate them to their role and the company culture.
- Use an ATS like Kula with powerful automation and a visual builder to streamline processes and ensure interdepartmental consistency.
Finally, gather feedback from new hires about their onboarding experience to identify areas for improvement and enhance future onboarding efforts.
Conclusion
Creating and following a talent acquisition strategy may seem like a lot. But with the right ATS, it doesn’t have to be.
Kula ATS offers recruitment workflow automation so recruiters can focus on the strategies and ensure a productive and smooth hiring process. You can track applications, automate tasks like candidate sourcing and resume parsing, and analyze your entire recruitment funnel without added effort.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free trial and improve your talent acquisition strategy!
