Effective Talent Attraction Strategies to Ramp Up Recruiting

Off the back of the ‘Great Resignation’ there emerges a powerful opportunity for those willing to adapt their strategies and find new ways to appeal to workers. Savvy founders and talent acquisition teams are scrambling to adjust to a new level of demand from the talent pool, and those who don’t are doomed to lose out.

As the necessary adaptations to current shifts have allowed businesses to survive, so now, the focus is moving to how they thrive in this new environment. Part of these adaptations includes the ability to reshape how to attract and retain the right workforce.

Good talent fit leads to the right productivity, stability, and overall performance. To find it in this new world means redefining company cultures, approaches, and image. This means improving talent attraction strategies.

Talent Attraction

What brings your talent to you is a subjective matter, and depends on whom you’re looking for and what you’re offering. What remains objective, however, is that standards have risen across the candidate pool, and businesses need to take note, quickly.

Talent attraction, therefore, needs to be an immediate focus of anyone looking for top talent in the new working environment. But what exactly does it entail? You may have heard the terms “talent attraction” and “talent acquisition” used interchangeably, but (at least for this article) we’re going to differentiate one from the other.

To clear up potential confusion, we will use the following definitions:

Talent Acquisition is the strategy and onboarding stage of the recruitment process. It’s an active process, involving the filtration of candidates by HR and more control over the means by which candidates can apply.

Talent Attraction, on the other hand, can be described as a more sales and marketing approach to bringing in talent. It’s about image, communication, and displaying the company vibe to make yourself as attractive as possible to the best-fit talent.

In the new wave of company culture, this involves studying the current state of company culture, recruitment methods, and hiring processes; then deciding on how to adapt them to the current climate.

The Importance of a Talent Attraction Strategy

Filling a role isn’t hard. Finding the right fit for that role is what makes attraction so important. Finding the people who are going to take your business to the next level is what makes your company different than the competition.

More than that, finding people who will want to stick around after you’ve invested in their training is a tough mission in the post-covid working environment. In order to improve retention, adapt to the new demands of the workforce, and find people who actually want to work for you, you need to be attractive to them.

Not appear attractive, but be attractive.

Attracting the right talent takes putting yourself out there and setting bait. If you’ve got plenty to offer, you need to figure out how to get that offer on the plate in front of the candidate. This calls for some talent attraction strategies.

Talent Attraction Strategies

Top talent is going to be focused on what you can offer them. Working for you needs to be a lot more than just a salary if you’re looking for the best fit for the role, and the first steps, though they may appear obvious – and you may even think you have them down already – need some serious scrutiny in face of the current situation.

These strategies work in tandem with one another, and no single strategy should be picked over another. Forming an effective talent attraction strategy involves addressing the issue of candidate expectations from multiple angles.

Here are five strategies to get you going.

1. Define Your Brand

This is the first step to attracting the right talent. If you don’t have a clear company message and image, your prospective talent can’t tell why they would want to work for you over one of your competitors. This brand displays almost everything you offer, from benefits to culture.

Talent will seek out information about your company, even if it’s not immediately available. This means you need to be ready for them. An effective company brand gives you the opportunity to demonstrate an attractive image of your company culture as well as the roles you’re looking to fill.

Consider these points:

• Understand and outline your core values – Be able to identify and articulate the philosophy behind your company. This means what matters to you, how you want to accomplish your goals, and the kind of environment you are cultivating at work.
• Define what makes you stand out – benefits come here. Demonstrate them
• Explore your own company – Focus groups, high performers, etc. can help you identify what it is about them and your company that makes such a good fit. They can give you valuable feedback that you can use to find similarly-fitting talent.
• Include competitive analysis – You have to be able to highlight what makes you stand out. And that means you need to analyze your competition. Knowing what’s going on outside of your business helps you develop the workings on the inside.
• Be Proactive – If you don’t put the work into defining yourself, others will do it for you. Your brand is your reputation, and with no control over it, your image will be left up to others to imagine. Or worse, maliciously manufacture.  

If you’re an established company, you may think this has all been done. You’ve got a website; you’ve got a motto; you’ve even got a mission statement in large letters on the wall of the canteen. But times have changed, and you might need to go back over your media and materials and make sure they’re still aligned both with your company culture and the desires of your prospective talent.

2. Be Available Online

Tied to pushing your brand, it’s critical that you’re visible on the internet and social media. This shouldn’t be a surprise in today’s age, but you need to be where people are looking. Here are some pointers:

• Post vacancies on social media – You need to get out and spread the word if you have roles that need filling. Proactive posts on social media groups that you have previously identified as being relevant to your ideal talent will go a long way to marketing your roles.
• Post on your website career page – don’t leave this useful space out. When candidates are shopping around, they’re going to be doing their due diligence. You want an easily accessible and rapidly-updated career page on your website.
• Stay active on social media – Don’t just post, but interact with prospective candidates; posting follow-ups or industry updates in places where they will notice.
• Have an easy-access career page – It’s important that once you’ve led a candidate to your site, they are immediately engaged. Make sure your career page keeps them engaged.

The value of a career page can’t be overstated. This is where the sales approach really pulls its weight in attracting talent. If you lead candidates to your careers page and you have the same dull and repetitive application or role information pages as everyone else, you’re hardly going to make a memorable impact to a selective candidate.

With help from Jabord, you can create a highly-converting career page and with options for interactive pages, you can let your candidates browse all of the information they want, in the order they want it. It’s the perfect way to highlight why what you’re offering is different from your competitors.

3. Be Authentic in your Work Culture

Too many companies are stiff with their delivery when it comes to creating an atmosphere or an image in the workplace. Like a fake smile, forced attempts at a positive or inclusive image stand out a mile off and will deter your best talent. Authenticity is highly valued by the most valuable, and it’s important that you stay true to yourself when putting yourself out there.

Candidates will research you, so it’s not going to help you if there are mixed messages in your media. Conflicting philosophies, tones, or attitudes will create a cloud of confusion and reduce trust in your brand.

• There’s no “I’ in TEAM – Ditch it. Cliches are unattractive and sound like they’re coming from the faceless maw of corporate. Staff want personality, not soundbites. Words and phrases like “synergy” or “out of the box” create an ick factor for candidates relieved to be out of the office.
• Collaborate – Create a collaborative environment that will bleed out into social media and gain your referrals from current staff. Teamwork requires and creates authenticity, so as well as boosting productivity, it will help you with your talent attraction.
• Be transparent – Management can’t hide away and make decisions in private and then expect anyone under them to feel respected and valued as part of the team. Continual meetings, formal and informal, lunch break socializing, and other forms of interactions across the hierarchy bring a sense of inclusiveness and approachability and allow opportunities for critical members of staff to really feel their importance.
• Force it – This might sound like a paradox, but if you struggle to be authentic, you’re going to have to make it happen. Team-building exercises, public speaking courses, and on-site recreational activities, all contribute to a more relaxed environment at work, and when people are relaxed, they’re more authentic.

If there’s one thing that’s the most attractive in people, it’s authenticity. Working environments are made of people, and consequently, this authenticity creates the most attractive work environments. When people respect those around them, they are more obligated to pull their weight and fill valuable roles in the team.

With authenticity comes responsibility, and in building your company culture to attract the best-fit talent, it’s one of the most significant factors to consider.

4. Give Something Back

In so many cases in business, giving something out brings something back. The benefit of offering advice and sharing knowledge voluntarily are unquantifiable and therefore often ignored in favor of the more immediate returns of a classic transaction. However, ignore these at your peril.

Many of you will have used most of the following principles in your networking practices, so just adapt them to suit being attractive as a company too:

• Offer advice – Online forums, lead generation pages, and social media are great places to share what you know and tie it into your brand. Find the questions people are asking and try to answer them with your expertise. Give people advice on how to enter the industry. Not only does this spread your brand awareness but it also leads candidates straight toward your door.
• Share information – Similarly, passing out general industry info can further widen your reach and draw people in. It might not be a specific question that needs answering, it can just be in the form of a public discussion with other industry members. Sharing information brings a sense of collaboration and shows people not only that you are qualified and respectable, but also that you can be relied upon.
• Create a comfortable onboarding process – This one is particularly useful, and doubles up as a marketing strategy. Make applying, communication, and applicant tracking a smooth and pleasant process for anyone, regardless of fit. That way, the ones that you lose will still have something good to say about your experiences.

If word gets around that this process is enjoyable, that’s free advertising for you right there. Not to mention, with the increase in selectivity, poor candidate journeys are no longer tolerated and will block entry to the talent that you’re looking for.

Spreading value creates value, and it will come around. Create moments, and display your position as an expert, and you’ll have talent flocking to you.

5. Be a Good Deal

Out final and best strategy for recruiting top talent might involve a bit of soul searching on your part. Candidates are increasing in job apathy, becoming more selective, and generally valuing their time and their efforts a lot higher than they did before the momentum of the rat race was shattered by the pandemic.

If you don’t understand how this wake-up call changes employee expectations and self-respect, you’re going to be outcompeted by those who do. It is more important now than ever that the jobs you’re offering are worthwhile and satisfying to your candidate. You’re not only competing with other companies anymore; you’re now competing with the memory of furlough and working from the comfort of home.

Times have irreversibly changed when it comes to workplace conditions and a revolution of high-value talent is demanding high-value compensation. To adapt to these changes, you will need to:

• Communicate quickly – Response time is important in a world where the candidate has options. At every point of their onboarding journey, they need to be engaged respectfully and in good time. You are competing with people who will be making a lot of effort, so you need to exceed that.
• Consider substantial increases in compensation – Workers are realizing that they have value. They have raised the bar and it’s your job to match their value with your compensation if you want to recruit the best. This is undoubtedly going to involve a shift in financial
• Attach bonuses – baiting the hook with loyalty bonuses can go a long way to differentiating your company from the competition. This is a buyer’s market and you may need to put a little sugar on what you’re selling.
• Consider hybrid work – This is one of the most attractive components of the modern workplace. If you are forcing people to be where they don’t need to be, you’re going to lose your talent to a better deal elsewhere. Wherever possible, factor in hybrid or remote work options.
• Work more closely with recruiters – recruiters might now be a bottleneck in your adaptation. It’s important to find out whether they are changing their approach, and whether their strategies are in line with yours. If not, find the ones who are.
• Streamline the hiring process – If the industry average is 28 days to hire, you’re going to need to do better. The entire onboarding process should not only be an enjoyable experience but an efficient one. Remember, candidates have options, and the longer the latency, the more opportunities for them to jump ship.
• Provide a high level of detail in the role – The first touch of your candidate’s journey needs to cover everything they want to know at that moment in a concise yet comprehensive manner. This doesn’t mean listing every negotiable detail, but they will be looking for certain holiday packages, room for advancement, and a summary of the job description and who they’ll be working for. This is hard to get across on a conventional career page; much less so on an interactive career page.

Improving the conditions for your staff is genuinely the best thing you can do to attract top talent. Improving the culture, the benefits, and the atmosphere at work, as well as diversifying the ways in which your staff can contribute, is the new path to success for modern companies.

Conclusion

Talent attraction begins with your image. You need to have an appealing direction, culture, and compensatory system for your perfect candidate to consider you. Then, you need a smooth and fast onboarding process to complete the recruitment.

To retain them is another matter; it’s important to maintain inclusivity and equity among the members of the company and create an environment that they value. This hasn’t always been the case, but as workers come to realize their worth, it’s up to companies to match it.

In essence, be better. Better than you have been and better than the competition. Jobs have been a necessity for so long and for so many people that the environment has relaxed around the worker. This is no longer the case, and it’s time to take employee wellbeing seriously. In this environment, you need them a lot more than they need you, and they finally know it.