How to Diversify your Recruitment Channels?

Introduction

Recruitment is a highly complex process. Challenges are aplenty in today's context. The key challenge Recruitment Services are facing today is a severe shortage of candidates in the market. It is observed across the board. The reason is a buoyant business scenario, high demand and plenty of jobs for each candidate in the market.

It is therefore inevitable that companies cannot stick to traditional and linear methods of Sourcing candidates. Strategies around your SoH or Source of Hiring have to change and diligent, long-term strategies are to be adopted if you are to stay in Business.

While Naukri.com or monstar.com remain the traditional ways of hiring, here are some not-so-traditional or alternative channels that companies have to nurture to stay competitive with the candidates.

Research and Target Demographics with Specific Skills concentration

If in the city of Coimbatore in the state of Kerala, there are a few companies with large Cyber Security teams, then it makes sense that companies looking for Cyber Security professionals focus on this geography and put special effort into it.

Such insights can be acquired and shared/nurtured within the recruitment teams of companies. There are solutions like LinkedIn Talent Insights which will give you this kind of candidate demographic data, albeit expensive. If you can lay your hands on that, great. Otherwise, continuous research is an alternative. Try to find out companies that you can target and geographical or other demographic concentrations of such companies and candidates.

Include Diversity, Inclusion and equality in your Talent Acquisition strategy

There is a multitude of reasons for establishing a workforce that is diverse, in terms of Gender, and other dimensions such as underrepresented communities, persons with disabilities, and so on. Organizations conduct their businesses within societies and must represent the construct of the broader society and help with the challenges of society. That being the higher agenda, in the context of recruitment, companies tend to get shortsighted on the target candidate populations. This will lead to missing a large and potent candidate pool out there to leverage. Targeted campaigns for hiring and inclusion of diverse people in your organizations often produce great results, also elevating your organization as an inclusive organization to the broader pool of candidates.

Use Social Media to spot potential candidates

Most of us live on Social Media. Our candidates are also expected to be found on Social Media. Good and great candidates are professionally active on Social Media channels, and tech Channels. It is better to keep track of candidates of Interest, connect and engage with them, and post regular updates from your organization so that this candidate pool of interest is aware and updated about your organization and its activities.

There are groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. that focus on discussions on specific topics. A lot of good candidates regularly contribute technically and otherwise and those are indications of mature and active candidates. You must work on creating and regularly enhancing your potential candidate databases from various Social Media platforms.

There are other platforms that are noteworthy and are hotbeds of potential high-quality candidate activities. Platforms like GitHub, Stackoverflow, Kaggle, Medium, and so on. A recruiter with an eye for high-quality candidates and continuously building future potential candidates' databases must cultivate these channels and engage with candidates on a regular basis.

For example, if your organization is hot on hiring Cyber Security professionals or Golang developers, you must connect and engage with specific groups on these technologies and remain active there, building a brand of your organization in those groups. When opportunities arise, you may directly approach candidates and bingo they already know you as an active member of the group.

These above techniques involve long-term vision and planning. However, after a certain level of engagement with a targeted population of candidates, hiring can become easier.

Strong Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to build future pipelines

Any progressive organization must use a high-calibre Applicant Tracking System. For any upcoming position, the ATS can probably become your first stop shop for suitable candidates. Over time, ATSs develop a large Database. An efficient ATS must include features for smart searching of candidates. One of the must-have features of a good ATS is to find the "most relevant" candidates based on the text search criteria provided. An ATS should also be able to parse key details on uploading the candidate's CVs. Some bits of AI/Ml need to be used in order to enable these above features.

The above features are going to ease your candidate search to a great degree. The smarter your ATS is, and the larger your candidate database in the ATS, the more efficient your candidate search will be.

Roll out an attractive and effective Referral Strategy

Many companies have employee referral options and schemes for their employees but few that actually work. A referral program on paper and hidden somewhere on the corporate intranet literally gathers dust. Referral programs have to be marketed well on a regular basis. Leaders of the organization need to talk about the referral programs frequently, success referral stories need to be shared and the referees must be acknowledged well. It has to be a continuous process, otherwise, a referral program is as good as non-existent.

Referrals are great in many ways - both the referred and referee are better connected and engaged with the organisation and are happy employees. Referral instances encourage others also to follow suit and can easily create a ripple effect.

Scaled Hiring through Bootcamp-based methods

It is also highly recommended to invest in targeted Bootcamp-based skilling programs like Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD) or Train Hire Deploy (THD) models for junior-level candidates and make them employable for your positions. HTD/THD programs target a pool of candidates who are struggling to get into the mainstream due to the lack of a set of "employable" skill sets. You can actually nurture this talent pool with a long-term vision to subsequently grow them within the organisation. There are several benefits to the Bootcamp- based HTD or THD models: 1) you get ready skilled candidates, 2) talent acquisition is scaled, 3) cost-efficient and 4) much faster.

Teksands runs bootcamps on multiple key technologies on a continuous basis, such as on 1) Data Engineering, 2) Cloud, 3) DevOps, 4) Machine Learning, 5) Full-stack, 6) Cyber Security and so on.

Organize and participate in Tech Events

Tech Events are where interested Tech professionals go to learn new stuff. Participating in physical Tech events is a good idea when you are looking to invest long term brand employer build building to be an attractive employer to the potential pool. Having speakers from your organisation, and having kiosks to talk about your brand and career opportunity often is beneficial.

However, you need to be selective about the events you will invest to participate in - based on the kind of brand you want to build, and your specific technology focus, you must know that the target audience profile for that event are matching. You should not spend a fortune on setting up a kiosk in an Open Source conference when in fact you are looking for candidates in niche OEM areas.

In summary, there are plenty of alternative channels apart from popular job portals. Job portals are great for just-in-time hiring. However, you need to form a long-term vision for employer brand building and hiring. Plan your engagements in alternative channels with at least a 2-year advance view. When TA acts in a way that their only responsibility is serving the current positions and not looking beyond, the company loses the scene completely in the candidate market.