Imagine a scenario – you have spent weeks and months devising the best recruitment strategy. However, you are still not getting the results you were looking for. Recruitment is not easy; however, hiring in this ‘Great Resignation’ era has made things more difficult.

Statistics show that the rate of quitting jobs has been the highest in the past decade. Due to all the job shifting and quitting, recruitment has become a more challenging affair.

So, what is wrong with your recruitment strategy? Why is it unable to attract the top talent that your organization is looking for? Let us look at some reasons.

Why Is Your Recruitment Strategy Failing?

1. Setting Up Unmeasurable Hiring Objectives

While it is quite sad, most companies are unclear about their recruitment goals and objectives. This is one of the first steps you need to take by recruiters. For instance, you need to be able to answer certain questions clearly – what is the reason you are recruiting, what is the result you are looking for, etc.

Setting up measurable hiring objectives only becomes important when recruiters do not see the expected results. When you set specific objectives and goals before applying your recruitment strategy, you can measure the success or failure and the Return on Investment.

Your recruitment strategy, if formulated correctly, will help you increase employer brand awareness. You will also be able to measure other objectives, like the percentage of the traffic of people navigating to your site via social media.

2. Not Setting A Target Audience

When there is a new open position in an organization, recruiters will try to fill in the position as quickly as possible. Since they want to finish this quickly, they tend to skip a few steps. Recruiters will avoid spending time discussing the calibre of the candidate who will be selected for the job role.

In the case of marketing for the new role, recruitment messaging is lost. The talent acquisition process becomes a lot more difficult due to less engagement.

Therefore, recruiters need to make dedicated efforts to update the job description. It should also contain the appropriate language that can attract the relevant candidates. To do this, you can start creating candidates persona for ideal candidates that you want to fill the vacant job positions in your company.

3. Work On Your Employer Brand

One of the most important elements to help you get a competitive edge in labour marketing is establishing your employer brand. However, most companies tend to struggle with it. Since most brands do not know how to establish a strong employer brand, it can result in a poor candidate experience and may even cause negligence for the current workers/employees.

Candidates today have the luxury of checking out the reviews of organizations and companies even before they start applying for jobs. If the company has a poor employer brand, they hesitate or even deny submitting their information.

Content marketing is one of the most important strategies that can help you improve your employer’s brand. If used correctly, it can have a positive effect, amplify your brand, and raise awareness. In content marketing, you can start by publishing valuable and educational content to develop strong and long-lasting relationships with the candidates.

4. Relationship With The Hiring Manager

As a recruiter, it is common to have a falling out with your hiring manager. However, such incidents can have a disastrous effect on the recruitment process and are one of the top challenges you will face as a modern recruiter.

Certain issues you could face if you do not have the right relationship with your hiring manager is lack of proper briefing and debriefing, ineffective communication, etc. It can have quite a bad impact on your overall recruitment strategy. Therefore, you must have a collaborative relationship with the hiring manager. You can start by communicating more, define key metrics, and even end up preparing interview questions.

5. Use Online Tools

Nowadays, it is common for companies to set up dedicated pages on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. While these social media tools are perfect for recruitment, most brands do not have to post anything more than job ads. Such posts mean you are not having two-way communication with potential candidates and are simply trying to push the job ads.

To deal with this issue, you can start by adding a personality to your posts. You can post images of things like the office environment, achievements, new starters, etc. This will help you build the candidates’ trust as they gain more insights into the company.

Then, there are various recruitment tools available that you can use, like SignalHire. It can automate processes such as email search using the SignalHire browser extension, greatly improving the speed of those who handle such responsibilities. It also offers HR benchmarking features to improve your recruitment drive by offering the required data and statistics.

6. Streamline The Interview Process

Job interviews have been around since 1921. Even after a century, most companies can still not use the best practices. Overall, your goals need to sell the job role to the candidate by offering them the required insight into the job position they are filling and the company they will join.

For instance, it is common for companies to keep the candidates waiting for the interviews. It does not feel nice being a candidate since he/she has spent a lot of time for the preparation. Such bad candidate management will only provide a poor experience for the candidates, and they will end up looking elsewhere.

7. Failing To Identify Selling Points

This point is a bit related to the previous point – however, it is important because it involves communicating with the candidates. Candidates today are very smart and will immediately start looking for alternatives if they do not see any benefit for the open job position, especially if you have not articulated them correctly. This includes all the recruitment process steps – writing down the job description, screening the resumes, interviewing the candidate, and offering them the job role.

As mentioned previously, developing candidate personas can help you identify selling points. You will better understand various aspects of the candidates like goals, values, professional challenges, pain points, etc.

With the help of this method, you will step into the candidates’ shoes and understand their problems. It will also help you identify the benefits the candidates are actually looking for when looking for a new job.

Let us take an example. If your candidate personas are millennials, they will be looking for more flexible working hours rather than financial rewards.

Final Thoughts

Recruitment today has become a costly exercise. There is no guarantee that you will end up with the perfect candidate that fits the job description correctly. If you have spent a lot of time on developing a recruitment strategy and it does not deliver the results you are looking for, it can be very frustrating and stressful.

Remember that your recruitment strategy is not broken. It simply needs some tweaking. You should see positive results if you try out the list of ideas mentioned in this article. Ultimately, it is all about finding the right sweet spot.

If you have any questions regarding this article, you can leave them in the comment section below.