7 Simple Approaches to Exponentially increase your Recruitment ROI

Introduction

Now in the year 2022, the Tech Talent space is a war zone. Too few skilled and experienced candidates in the market and due to the rapid Digitization of every aspect of business, the demand for Tech Talent is sky-high.

As a result, Tech Talent recruitment has become complex and exponentially tricky in the last couple of years. Organisations and their recruitment teams struggle to shape up well enough to handle the challenges. The issue that recruiters face today are plenty:

1. Right Skilled Candidates are more and more difficult to find.


2. High effort in candidate assessments


3. Very high Salary Demands.


4. Huge percentage of offer drops (often > 50%)

Organizations with large volumes of requirements and a large army of recruiters are still trying to catch up and cope with the challenges. However, companies with not-so-large requirements and a matching army of recruiters are struggling badly. Many positions are not getting fulfilled resulting in revenue loss for businesses. We hear from our recruiter friends every day as to how many positions are staying open for months together due to a lack of suitable profiles.

We have done some research into the best practices we adopt for our clients to bring the best results and would be happy to share some of them with the larger recruitment community.

Understand the target profile from the Business:

As a starting step before jumping into profile sourcing for any position, it is necessary to spend some good time understanding the position details from the business. The recruiter must be able to create a persona of the ideal profile in their mind. The Technical Skill requirement is foremost, but at the same time, you must understand the personality, leadership, negotiation, communication, presentation and team working traits of the profile persona to the extent that will help you pinpoint the right candidate.

Strategize your approach:

Armed with the above details, the recruiter should put in place a mini-plan or strategy to attack the requirement at hand. The strategy must include determining what sourcing channels are suitable for this kind of position, how many evaluation rounds must be used to take a final decision, set of screening questions that would effectively filter in suitable candidates.

The strategy is important because if you are able to minimise the profile intakes through your upstream evaluations, you will minimise a lot of efforts in the downstream phases, resulting in minimal efforts for the organisation on a particular position.

The other elements of your strategy should include how to source this position - whether to use internal recruitment teams or is iit a more challenging position that requires efficiencies of scale that would be available through a professional recruitment agency.

Target your Channels:

One of the most important aspects of the initial sourcing is to determine the sourcing channel that you will use. There are plenty to choose from:

As you can see, with an employee of these characteristics, you win from all sides. Do not be afraid when candidates admit that they are eager to learn because this shows that they have all the availability in the world and the intention to improve your business and grow professionally. This could be the next step for your company to continue to scale.

1. Professional Job Portals


2. Social Media - FaceBook, LinkedIn


3. Other professional mediums - Stackoverflow, HackerEarth

Each of these channels offers certain advantages and disadvantages. Not every channel is perfect for every position. Sometimes, you may have to combine your search through multiple channels to get to the right candidates. E.g. if you are looking for highly competent senior engineers, it may be worthwhile seeking them out on platforms like Stackoverflow and connecting to them over Linkedin or Job Portals.

Use Professional Recruiters

As I mentioned that the Tech Hiring space has become extremely challenging and complex, it is worthwhile to consider bringing in a professional recruitment agency to help you with more challenging requirements where the position is a niche, there are very few profiles in the market or you have to hire at scale. A responsible agency will be able to provide you with the right advice and support with the hiring in these cases. It is better to research on seeking out such agencies with a good breadth and depth of expertise in the Talent space and can provide you unbiased advice rather than pushing their narrow services down your throat.

A professional agency will be able to tap into their existing database, use various channels effectively, use their networks, competent recruiter teams, and a variety of tools to achieve the best results in the shortest possible time for you. They would also be able to unbiasedly advise you on the challenges of hiring such positions and set the right expectations.

Referrals and Connections

Referrals and personal connections are a wonderful way to get the right talent for your organisation. You must institutionalise a referral program for your organisation and run campaigns from time to time to create awareness amongst existing employees and excite them about the program.

There are some compelling advantages of referral programs:

1. Candidates are comfortable in joining companies where their friends are already working and they get the right feedback about the company.


2. Employees refer candidates only when they are sure that they are the right fit for their organisation. Bad hiring risks are much lesser through referrals.


3. Offer drop rates are minuscule when candidates come through referral channels.


4. Referral candidates as well as the referees stay loyal to the company.


5. Invest in Early Talent and Skilling Programs

Talent structure in organisations is mostly like a pyramid wherein most employees are at the juniormost levels and with each higher level, the numbers decrease. Given this kind of structure, it is imperative that most talent demands are at the bottom or juniormost levels.

Demand for such early talent or junior developers or engineers can be met not only by skilled resource hiring but an effective way to meet requirements at these levels is by developing them. Bootcamp-based early talent skilling programs and hiring from them are a very effective way of hiring junior engineers at scale. The candidates being developed in programs such as Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD) or Train-Hire-Deploy (THD) remain committed to making it happen as these programs provide an excellent opportunity to them to start great mainstream careers. These Bootcamp HTD or THD programs are also an effective way to bring an additional resource pool into the industry that is the need of the day given the entire Tech Industry is reeling under talent shortage.

Create a Sales Pitch

Opportunities in front of the candidates in today's day and age are plenty. It is imperative that organisations create an effective sales pitch to project the nature of work, culture, benefits and the organisational brand in front of the candidates. This is an effective way to attract candidates to your organisation and create a desire to work for your organisation. This sales pitch has to be used by everyone who is a part of the candidate experience through the entire recruitment process. The entire team has to be made responsible to talk highly about the organisation at every opportune moment to the candidates. This includes the recruiters, the HR, the technical interviewers, the hiring manager to the leadership team who are talking to the candidates at various points of time.

Storytelling is very effective in any sales pitch. A candidate-pitch must include experiences from the employees talking to them. This will help the candidate relate to realistic scenarios and how the organisation may help them in challenging times, help them progress in their career, etc.