Back to all articles While many agencies and HR departments continue to employ traditional tactics, there are a range of modern recruitment methods you should be utilising to ensure your hiring process is truly effective.
Businesses are built on people, so without the right staff on your team, your performance, productivity, reputation and retention rates will suffer. But what can you do to ‘up’ your recruitment game?
One of the primary modern recruitment methods is the use of well-designed recruitment technology. While some of this may not be accessible to you directly (cost and implementation-wise), if you’re looking to hire a recruitment agency, check to see if they favour the traditional methods, or are smart enough to have a range of the following technologies at their disposal. Otherwise, to be honest, you might as well save your money and keep your recruitment in-house.
Recruitment technology has fast-overtaken traditional recruitment methods. While a human touch and the experience that can only come with hands-on hiring is still absolutely necessary, this shift towards software and digital solutions enables a much deeper-dive into potential employees. Because while evidenced experience matters, people are much more than their CV.
Here are five tried-and-tested modern recruitment methods you or your outsourced provider should be using:
1. Tracking recruitment technology
Applicant tracking systems may sound like a simple sift done by software and without the human sense-checking. But as systems have developed, so have their benefits. Often, these systems exist within a more sophisticated, broad-reaching solution, but even in their own right, if you’re taking care of your recruitment internally, they could save you a lot of time.
You can set your criteria to group candidates by skills or experience, and filter quickly through cover letters and CVs to shortlist those who are the closest match to your requirements.
2. Video and virtual
On a concise and sanitised CV or cover letter, everyone comes off sounding pretty much the same personality-wise. But fitting well with the internal business culture can be as crucial to building an effective team as their skills.
Using video to introduce applicants is a great way to get a feel for the person behind the professional. You’ll be able to get an idea of their communication skills, character, energy and much more – so you can assess their suitability for the business as much as the role.
Further into the recruitment process, you can encompass virtual meetings to provide internal experiences remotely – thank Covid for that! From initial interviews to showing potential employees around the office, incorporating video technologies plays a significant part in more modern recruitment methods.
3. Digital behavioural assessments
Personality and behaviour are key to any successful hire, so modern recruiters are starting to put more emphasis on an applicant’s character and behaviours. You may need someone more driven and energetic, or a problem-solver who takes things in their stride. With certain traits lending themselves more to certain roles, these digital assessments help you get a much deeper and accurate view of an applicant’s suitability.
4. Optimisation
Any modern recruitment agency will be using SEO to help ensure their job adverts are being found by the right people. If you’re going it alone, learn a little about the basics to help you hone your job descriptions for the search engines – and the candidates using them to find their next step.
Also, it’s essential to optimise your online application system to ensure accessibility across all devices – this should be a given nowadays. You need to offer the facility for people to apply while on the move or away from their laptops to ensure you’re capturing as many of the best candidates as possible.
5. Automated applicant communications
In an ideal world, we’d offer a personalised reply to every applicant – but we all know that world doesn’t exist. Sending out responses can take a vast amount of time through the duration of the recruitment process, especially if you had hundreds of applicants.
By automating communications you or your recruiter can quickly respond to those who don’t hit the set analysis criteria, or those who didn’t make it through any subsequent parts of the process – all with an on-brand message to end things on a nice note without the admin.
Here at Mayseven, we use our fantastic you&me recruitment technology system to do the above and a whole lot more – so if you need help with your recruitment, get in touch to find out more.