Have Confidence in Your Recruiting Strategy With These 4 Steps

Does recruiting feel completely out of your control? Do the problems your organization faces with attracting and engaging great talent damage your confidence? 

If you're a person involved with recruiting at your firm, you probably don’t have much confidence about this upcoming year. In fact, you might even be at your wit's end… ready to give up.

Things might feel out of your control, more specifically, for your ability to…

• Solve problems, 
• Take the right actions,
• Start seeing progress, 
• See indicators that things are getting better, 
• And, be able to influence the end result….

That's all where confidence comes from! 

The problem right now is the world is in utter chaos - Some things are better, and some things are worse. But overall, most of us feel uncertain about what the future holds… even in the next month. 

Building a talent engine for your firm

For HR and the hiring world, the biggest issue is creating a dependable and scalable talent engine for your organization. A scalable and dependable talent engine means that you have a proven strategy for hiring. But most teams don't have anything in place that they actually believe will create that outcome. 

With an efficient talent engine, you have confidence in hiring. You have levers that you can pull that will work. When you pull them you'll consistently get a flow of qualified talent who…

• Feels excited about the prospect of working for you
• Will be less likely to ghost or reject you
• Will accept your offers so you can afford them
• Will get going and be successful as soon as possible
• Are committed to sticking around long enough to make an impact on your organization, 
• Won’t bail at the first offer they get for a few more dollars per hour. 

What happens when you lack confidence in your recruiting strategy?

Almost everybody in the business world right now feels unsure. If they don't feel like they can drive and generate qualified applicants for hiring, then they are lacking confidence. 

So what we end up doing is pulling back. We don't want to make the wrong decision or waste our time, money, or energy…

We don't see any choices or options that are proven to work out there (or any that are even hopeful to work), so we don't make any decisions at all. 

We freeze. But, even doing that is a decision… a decision that actually gives you less control. When you decide not to change... not to act... not to do something that causes some momentum in a good direction... then you're left with the whims of the market and your competitors.

If you lack confidence… You’re not alone! 

Look, you're not alone in feeling this way. Almost every HR person and every organization I run into right now feels this way, especially about hiring. 

In fact, our team here at ApplicantPro felt the same way back at the beginning of 2022. Confidence was lowering. Back in q1 almost a year ago, we were noticing…

1. Our applicant flow was down for internal jobs. It was slipping. 
2. The quality was a bit down. 
3. People were taking longer to get back to us for interviews. 
4. Some of our jobs were staying open for a really long period of time, but shouldn’t have been ones we’ve generally struggled to fill. 
5. My team felt like we were no longer as unique as we used to be… it felt like we were just another job in the crowd of jobs that all seem the same. The funny thing is... looking at the data, we were actually out-recruiting almost every client in our system.

But that didn't matter. 

Think about it… If you're trying to grow a business at 45% per year, after 15 years of…

• Growing 30 to 50% every single year, 
• Adding 1000s of new clients per year, 
• Building tons of new features, 
• Launching new programs, 
• Dealing with the chaos and disruption of trade shows and SHRM events, 
• Dealing with the chaos and disruption in the labor market,
• Changes to job boards, 
• New competitors entering,
• And, consolidation...

Most likely, the biggest constraint will be hiring… your ability to grow your team when you need to grow it. And the truth is… we were growing fast! 

In 2022 we grew from 140 employees to over 260… Hiring over 160 people during the last 12 months. 

Are you being asked to expand your teams?

I'm guessing you’re being asked to help your company grow, expand, move forward, or at the very least just ensure that you keep your headcount where it's at with quality people. 

Maybe you’re feeling like you can’t or don’t know how to do that, which probably causes you diminished confidence. 

Here’s what we did to increase applicant flow by 300%!

For the last year, we’ve worked to massively level up our own recruitment marketing game.  And let me tell you… We saw amazing results and boosted our confidence. 

We increased our direct applicant flow for our jobs by 300%. 

We saw a 200% increase in applicants from free job boards. 

We saw double the employee participation in our referral programs. This resulted in an almost 5x increase in our employee referrals. 

And that has been increasing each quarter, so 2023 is looking even better when it comes to sourcing qualified talent. Across all of our positions from entry-level to customer support up through sales, we’re seeing great results. 

Great results even for some really, really difficult jobs to recruit for in product management and programmers.... jobs that are currently seeing massive pressure from competitors. These competitors offer insane amounts of money and generate high turnover within our industry. Even with that competition, we are still able to source qualified talent!

But it wasn't just that… 

Our recruitment marketing worked for us! Our confidence soared!

Recruitment Marketing has changed the hiring game!

We also took on the hiring and recruitment for a firm that is a client of ours for three months while their HR person was out. We increased their management applications by 250% and left them with a strategy to dramatically increase their entry-level and team-lead applicants. 

We also launched a small business recruiting program in 2021 and brought on over 1000 small businesses with 5 to 30 employees. 

But, instead of just selling our software to these small businesses, and teaching them to go do it on their own, we did something more… 

We took over their sourcing! 

Taking over their sourcing means we…

• created job seeker personas, 
• wrote multiple versions of their ads, 
• ensured that those jobs weren't just distributed to job boards, 
• targeted the right people with the right message, 
• and, drove those people to apply. 

The results were fairly impressive! They gained confidence. Our small business clients who would typically be at a disadvantage in a tight labor market were now out-recruiting our big clients who were running our software on their own. They were generating almost 50% more applicants per job and spending 1/5 of the ad spend.

Stop and think about that for a minute…

This idea that there are no applicants out there, or the market is so tight that there's nothing you can do, simply isn’t true. There are small businesses with less money, less team, less budget, and less to offer people who are generating more applicants for less money than you are. It's not there to brag, it's there to show you that…

There's potential! 

There are ways to solve some of these problems. This is really just to give you hope. There's a way to solve your organization's talent problems! I’m giving some credibility to some of the ideas I'm going to be sharing pretty aggressively this year. 

4 Steps to Build Confidence in Your Recruiting Strategy

I am going to challenge you to set a goal… Go grab your results from last year or last quarter… 

1. Assess your flow. How many applicants did you generate? Divide that by the number of jobs, the number of hires, as well as even your number of employees or locations. You're just trying to get your applicants, per job, per scale.

2. Assess your sources. Grab the total number of applicants for each of your sources. Divide that by the total applicants to figure out the sourcing mix or what percentage of total applicants are made up of each of your sources. 

3. Assess your sourcing power for each of those sources. Take the number of applicants you generated during a given period of time and divide that by the number of hires from that source. This will tell you which of those sources aren't just making up your applicant flow, but which ones are the most powerful when it comes to actually generating hires. 

4. Set a goal. Decide what you're going to focus on for the next quarter. 

How much energy and action are you willing to put toward it? 

What level of improvement would take it to a win where you feel like it is showing progress and giving you confidence? 

We’re offering free hiring needs and strategy audit consultations! 

We can set up a time for you to jump on a call with one of our experts to unpack where you’re at today… talk about what’s working and what isn’t… outline a recruitment marketing plan of attack that will put you at the top of the hiring competition in your area!

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