Tips For Recruiting in a Tight Marketplace

It’s incredibly demoralizing to go through the job search process, including writing a job description, researching the best places to post the description, responding to candidate applications, and interviewing potential new hires, only to lose your top candidates to competitors.

Here’s the good news: It’s not necessarily about you. It’s about the current hiring climate. We are in a tight marketplace that is candidate-driven. That means that job applicants have minimal competition for the positions they are interested in. There are more open positions than there are qualified job seekers!

Recruiters and hiring managers understand that candidates have a definite advantage— in the application as well as the interview process. When qualified candidates can be choosy about where they apply and where they accept job offers, it certainly makes recruiters’ jobs a whole lot more challenging. Fortunately for us, there are some great strategies available that can help smooth the issues that accompany this hiring climate.

First Things First: Create a Great Company Culture!

Before you even start looking for candidates to fill the open positions in your company, you should be thinking about what makes your company stand out. Why should candidates be excited about working for you? What can you do to generate buzz in your industry about what you have to offer prospective job candidates?

The answer is simple— well, it’s simple to explain. Unfortunately for you, it can be tough to put into action: you have to build a desirable company culture.

What is a company culture, anyway? You can figure out what your company culture is currently like by asking yourself these questions:

• How do your employees feel about the current work/life balance?

• What is the satisfaction level of your employees as it relates to salary and benefits, advancement opportunities, bonuses, and raises?

• Do your employees feel like they have coworkers they enjoy and work with well?

• What is the attitude towards supervisors? Do employees feel that they are valued by their supervisors for the work they do?

If this list helps you realize that some things are lacking in your culture, you should ask yourself how your company can start improving in these areas?

When you develop a strong culture, you are creating an environment where employees are satisfied, enthusiastic, and eager to talk about how much they like their jobs with friends, family members, and outsiders. You can post countless ads on classified and recruitment sites, but you’re never going to be able to pull truly exceptional talent without a company culture that potential employees find interesting and exciting.

You can’t make this change all by yourself.

Yes, hiring managers may have a lot of influence over your company’s culture. But they can’t do a complete cultural overhaul on their own. If you’re the person in charge of recruiting and hiring new talent, you can control things like the applicant’s interview experience and the speed that you can take people through it. You can also hire people who will be a great match for the culture you are intentionally building.

However, you can’t shape workplace culture on your own.

Involving your colleagues, coworkers, and superiors is going to be an important part of building a company culture. Creating a desirable company culture requires buy-in from a lot of different individuals and decision makers. It is important that you do what you can to build enthusiasm for this idea among other managers and supervisors.

Are you ready to start improving your company culture so that you can appeal to the best job candidates?

Here are some of the strategies we recommend for improving company culture with the intention of improving recruitment success:

1. Focus first on what you have the authority to change. By evaluating your existing policies, you can determine what needs to change and how you can make things better for the company from your position.

2. When you recognize something that is outside of your purview that needs to be changed, be an enthusiastic and positive advocate for better policies. Avoid overstepping boundaries and ordering people around who aren’t in your chain of command, but consider how you could suggest to the appropriate decision-makers that there is an improvement to be made.

3. Create opportunities and enthusiasm for people who report to you to think creatively and become problem solvers.

4. Don’t undervalue the people you work with. Find ways to make people feel important and valued, and spread that attitude to others.

Taking the Next Steps

There are a lot of other things to know about what is going on in recruiting right now, especially considering this tight recruiting field. Check out our free offer, Recruiting Trends in 2019, to learn more about what’s going on in this candidate-driven economy and how you can improve your hiring practices to get the best of the best to come work for you. We would love to talk with you about developing a great action plan for your company so that you hire the best possible team members in 2019!