How to Recruit More Talent

If yours is a large company with a household name brand, you probably have no shortage of applicants for your open positions. But if your company is, like most, smaller and lesser known, you may have a harder time trying to recruit highly qualified candidates who are strong culture fits for your company. To make the best hire, recruiters need lots of high-quality candidates to choose from. But how do you find large numbers of strong candidates if they’re unfamiliar with your company brand? Here are a variety of strategies that may help. Contact former employees If you have former rock-star employees who have moved on to other positions, get in touch and see if they would be interested in coming back. If not, they may know someone else who would be a good fit at your company and be willing to make a recommendation. Encourage employee referrals Your current employees understand your culture and needs more than anyone else. Ask them to share your company’s needs with their networks and to keep encouraging others to apply. Make it worth their time by offering a cash reward for any employees who recommended candidates who eventually accept offers at your company. As a bonus, employee referrals make great hires. Build a strong employer brand Don’t look at recruiting as a one-position-at-a-time thing. Develop and project a strong employer brand at all times, through social media posts, a robust careers site, blog posts, videos and photos. The more information you share online about your brand, the more potential candidates will learn about your firm. Use targeted job ads With the help of social media and search capabilities, recruiting aides like Glassdoor can offer targeted job ads that reach qualified candidates based on their current job titles. For instance, AppDynamics, a fast-growing tech company with little name recognition, needed to hire qualified engineers in a competitive market. The company used Glassdoor’s targeted ads to reach the specific types of professionals they needed, resulting in 22 engineering hires over 12 months. Targeted job ads also helped increase visibility for Jobvite, a social recruiting and applicant tracking platform. By staying top-of-mind for job seekers through targeted ads, Jobvite gained 11 times more applicants, going from six or seven applications per month to 80 applications per month in only six weeks. Engage with candidates online In addition to using targeted ads, AppDynamics also enhanced its Glassdoor profile, as company leaders realized that the site was often one of the first places potential candidates look to learn more about a company. An AppDynamics survey showed that 95 percent of the company’s 200 new hires over a year used Glassdoor to help find their jobs. “Getting in front of sought-after engineers to work on cool technical challenges at a lesser-known company can be difficult,” says Luan Lam, head of global talent acquisition at AppDynamics. “When you speak with a candidate, they often research the Internet to learn more about the opportunity and many times, the first thing they see is Glassdoor. We quickly realized that not keeping an eye on our profile hurts our recruiting efforts.” Employers can improve their profiles by encouraging current staffers to post reviews and by adding information and links to company videos, photos, blogs and other media.