Recruitment is a crucial stage and one filled with challenges for any organization. That is why the recruiter occupies a strategic role for the company and its development.
Having a strong and distinctive employer brand helps attract more candidates, potentially better suited to your company culture and your needs. But the employer brand is only one of the tools of recruitment. At each of their interactions with the company, the candidate forms an opinion about its attractiveness and its values. The company must therefore think about the candidate journey as a whole, from the first meeting to onboarding, including the job interview, in order to meet the candidate’s expectations at each stage
To meet this challenge, we offer you a simple, structured and effective method to improve your candidate acquisition.
Why work on your candidate acquisition strategy?
It is essential for a company to work on its candidate acquisition strategy for various reasons:
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To recruit more effectively and more quickly
By working on your recruitment strategy, you will be able to improve your application process and
- Increase the number and quality of applications received,
- Be more visible to the candidates who are the best fit for your company,
- Generate more unsolicited applications,
- Recruit more quickly
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To optimize your recruitment costs
Recruitment is generally a costly process. A failed hire is too. By working on your candidate journey, you will put the right actions in the right places, while optimizing their effectiveness and the efforts required to implement them. Not only do you save time, but you also rationalize your investments.
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To implement a continuous improvement approach
Drawing on marketing methods to improve your recruitment strategy naturally leads you to set objectives and identify measurement indicators or KPIs. By tracking these indicators, you regularly measure the results of the actions implemented throughout the candidate journey. This allows you to act quickly if an action needs to be reviewed, or if you need to optimize the process.
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To mobilize all teams around recruitment
Recruitment takes place under better conditions when it is everyone’s business across the company. It requires the involvement of very diverse skills (marketing, sales, IT, management team, etc.). The method proposed for building your recruitment strategy allows you to involve all the teams concerned in both the thinking and the implementation.
4 key points in the recruitment strategy
Recruitment is a process that can be improved and worked on just as one would for a sales process. The recruiter must focus on the idea of creating desire and winning over candidates throughout the process. Here are 4 key points to consider regarding your recruitment process:
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Candidate selection
This is the fundamental question: how do we select our candidates? What are our selection criteria? How can we eliminate as many biases as possible in our selection?
If you have worked on your employer brand beforehand, an initial selection takes place upstream: the company will interest and attract the “right” candidates, that is to say, those who align with its brand values.
Tools can be used to refine candidate selection, better understand the applicant and their value for the position to be filled. Among these tools are personality tests, for example tests such as the “Hogan test.” Personality tests are designed to limit cognitive biases. They have the advantage of allowing the recruiter to give feedback to the candidate on their test results and therefore provide them with added value, even if the latter is not hired.
The interview remains fundamental at one point in the candidate journey, to assess the “fit” between the team and the candidate. The involvement of the future employee’s team members, their opinions and their feedback are important in selecting the person to be hired.
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The job description or job posting
Job postings or job descriptions remain the basic tool of recruitment, often the company’s first point of contact. This is what can spark an applicant’s desire to join the company.
The important points that can influence attractiveness and visibility are:
- The job title,
- The industry,
- The information provided about the company,
- The job description.
The skills and qualities required should be the subject of careful thought beforehand, ideally with the help of managers who know better the requirements of the position to be filled. The idea is to identify the essential qualities being sought. Multiplying requirements can, on the contrary, be counterproductive and could cause you to miss out on very interesting potential candidates.
The job description is a communication medium in its own right, which already reveals the company’s values. The tone, visuals and medium of the posting are all points to work on carefully, using A/B testing if necessary.
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The fluidity of the recruitment journey
Just as putting yourself in your customer’s shoes helps improve the buying journey, improving the candidate journey first requires analyzing the experience lived by the applicant.
Points of contact with the company have multiplied and the journey followed is far from linear, which makes this work complex.
Points requiring attention:
– put in place the tools that allow them to save time and eliminate “frictions,” by offering simple and seamless contact and application. Pay attention to breaks in the experience throughout the journey and between the different channels.
– provide the candidate with the information and answers they need at each stage. In particular, explain how the recruitment process works: number of meetings, how each meeting unfolds, feedback, etc.
– deliver added value to the candidate
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Identify the KPIs or key performance indicators to track
As in marketing, it is important to use data to optimize the recruitment process over the long term. It is therefore a matter of identifying the relevant indicators as well as the tools to put in place to collect this information. These indicators can be qualitative (questionnaires, surveys, etc.) or quantitative (volume of applications, retention rate, quality of hires, etc.).
A new method for improving your recruitment journey
To improve your recruitment journey by taking all its dimensions into account, we have built a 4-step method that allows you to approach the topic in a systematic and structured way. To gain relevance and enrich the discussion, we recommend following the method as a team in order to compare viewpoints and experiences.
Step 1: The Candidate Acquisition Canvas
With the Candidate Acquisition Canvas, you learn to understand your candidate persona as precisely as possible: their needs, constraints, expectations and search methods. Based on 8 key questions that detail the candidate’s approach in their journey, the Canvas is designed for simple, clear and comprehensive work.
Step 2: The candidate journey
This step consists of formalizing the candidate journey in detail, that is to say the stages and actions carried out by the candidate throughout their job search, from the 1st contact with the company, up to the first week of onboarding, after signing their employment contract. Each stage of the journey is analyzed in detail from the candidate’s point of view, based on what was identified during the work with the Acquisition Canvas.
Step 3: The recruitment matrix
The recruitment matrix invites you to identify the acquisition actions the company can implement to meet the candidate’s needs at each stage. It makes it possible to be exhaustive in the approaches and the levers to activate. Tool and organizational dimensions are also taken into account. This is an essential step in building an appropriate recruitment plan.
Step 4: The recruitment plan
This is the last step: all that remains is for you to determine the priority actions in order to build an effective and realistic action plan. To prioritize investments, consider the following points:
- At which stages are we weak or insufficient? Where are we losing candidates?
- What are our priorities: receiving more applications? Improving our conversion rate? By focusing on the right side of the journey, close to signing the employment contract, you will work to improve the retention rate. On the left side of the journey, you will focus more on your visibility and your employer reputation.
– What is the gain/effort ratio of the actions under consideration? Some actions may require more effort than others. It is up to you to decide whether that ratio is worth it.
To help you: 1min30 offers to apply the method and build your Candidate Acquisition strategy by leading a collective intelligence workshop inspired by Design Thinking methods. This one-day workshop brings together your HR, marketing, communications, sales, IT, etc. teams around the topic of recruitment. The workshop is intended to be the starting point of your new strategy for more effective recruitment. You can also discover this method for yourself with the book the 3 marketing methods for HR.
