As a business owner or HR professional, you know that one of your most valuable resources is a good employee. You invest a lot of time and money into finding and hiring the right candidate. It’s essential to your business that you’re recruiting top talent in the field. As with all years, there are new trends for recruiting top talent, but COVID-19 has had a unique impact on hiring in 2020.
Many companies wonder if they should even start or continue recruiting in the midst of this pandemic, while others wonder how the coronavirus affects the pool of candidates. Anytime you need to fill a position is the best time to hire — and right now there’s a lot of amazing talent on the market that wouldn’t normally be there. You don’t want your customers to feel the effects of an understaffed business. Here’s a look at some of the best recruiting practices for 2020.
Focus on Retention Hiring
When you’re looking at prospective candidates, you want to look at their value as an employee now and in the future. Does the candidate have the potential for a management position? Do they look like they can adapt and grow into a new position?
You want to hire a now and future employee. It’s a good idea to identify prospective talent that will remain loyal to your company if not the specific job you hire them for today.
Train Your Recruiters
When recruiting top talent, you need the top recruiters working for you. This means that you need to constantly train your recruiters and ensure that they’re up to date on the best recruiting practices.
You might consider training them in sales and marketing so that they can sell the right candidate on a job or market to the top talent for a given position. Teaching them creative writing can help your recruiters create content that speaks to potential employees.
Proactive Communication
During this period of uncertainty, recruiting top talent includes proactive communication. You want to touch base with promising prospective employees to let them know where they are in the hiring process and answer any questions they may have.
It’s a good idea to ensure that all communication has a personal touch. You want to remember to use the person’s first name. Avoid sending out form emails. Instead, send a personalized note over a social media platform such as LinkedIn. Consider building your pipeline by nurturing them through a value-add email sequence.
Be Prepared for Remote Onboarding
With so many states issuing quarantine orders and companies keeping their employees protected, it’s likely anyone you hire during this time will go through the onboarding process remotely. It’s beneficial to have a plan in place for this type of introduction to your company.
You need to start with the required paperwork and issuing them any required company equipment. You can arrange to upload a lot of the paperwork online and receive it back the same way. You’ll have to hold frequent meetings to assign tasks, ensure the employee understands the scope of the tasks, and check to make sure they’re settling into their new role.
Potential Assessment
You want to hire the candidate with the most potential. When you look out at your current staff, you probably notice that your best employees do the lion’s share of the work. These employees tend to share three characteristics, including ability, drive, and social skills.
Before starting the interview process, create a list of questions to help you evaluate these characteristics in interviewees.
Enhance the Interview Process
Recruiting top talent starts with the interview process. You might consider a hiring panel with a diverse group of employees to ask questions and provide feedback about the candidate. As part of the interview, you should consider asking the interviewee to follow behind a potential colleague. Think about ways to keep things moving during the pandemic (video interviewing, of course, being key here).
Before hiring, create a list of attributes you want in a specific candidate. You can include items such as skills, education, social skills, and anything else you think is essential. Write interview questions designed to discover these items, and stick to your script.
Transparency During the Hiring Process
You want to be upfront with all potential candidates. This includes being upfront about expectations for the interviewing and hiring process. You need to let them know what you’re looking for in a candidate, the types of technology that you’re employing in your search, and how you’re searching for the right employee. If you’re still actively interviewing, but final interviews won’t be conducted in-person until it can be done, then be certain to tell candidates that.
You need to let them know the salary range instead of asking them to ask for a range first. It’s a good idea to provide feedback about the interview and stick to your timeline for hiring.
Keep Candidate Engaged
In 2020, best recruiting practices will include keeping candidates better engaged throughout the hiring process. You should do this on multiple platforms. It’s a good idea to use every channel that you have available to you. This can include social media, chatbots, email, and others to encourage open communication. Make each communication personal and valuable to the candidate because you don’t want to overwhelm them.
Value Cross-Functional Skills
You want to find candidates that are already highly skilled but also can be trained to learn cross-functional skills. You’re looking for candidates who will seek to develop cross-functional skills on their own. It’s a good idea to find someone flexible enough to work with a mentor outside of their intended department to learn from each other.
You can use corporate training to close any gaps in knowledge and create a well-rounded employee. It’s also beneficial to find online resources and courses.
Strategic Candidate Insights
You want to know everything that you can about a possible employee to build the best workforce possible. You need to dig into their work history, talk to former employers, and read over their social media accounts. It’s also beneficial to exam your current employees and decide the direction you want to take your company culture. Recruiting top talent is only possible when you know your definition of the top talent because your company needs may differ from another’s.
At Interseller, we can supercharge your ability to connect with, engage, and nurture top talent. We help you find accurate contact data and consistently tap top talent on the shoulder with highly personalized email touchpoints. It’s our goal to help you find and connect with the best employees for your company. Contact us to learn more about the services we offer.