Skill Gap? Scarce talent? Specific talent needs? We know first-hand how difficult it can be to find the right talent in a continuously changing recruiting landscape.

Lionstep offers active sourcing as a service, being 100% performance driven to find talent that is not just qualified but also willing to work for the business! We provide 3 actionable tips to improve your recruiting process:

1. Clear and attractive job description

Your job description will impact the degree of qualified applicants. Make applicants understand who you are looking for and rule out unqualified profiles as early as possible.

There is a common misconception that in order to improve hiring—nearly always aimed at making it faster & cheaper—the solution is to throw as many applicants into the “funnel” as possible. The classic funnel being: reader→ applicant → interview → job offer.

Don’t forget:

Every applicant costs you money—nowadays applicants have started to “ghost” employers or leave their applications midway through the process
Every application exposes a company to legal risk: company obligations to candidates (ex: not to discriminate, privacy)
More need to focus on selection: Collecting lots of applicants in a wide funnel means many won’t fit the job, so the next hiring process—selection— has to single them out. This process is very complex.

Create a qualified applicant pool to improve the yield.

The job description should ideally provide a realistic job preview:

Describe the company as short and accurate as possible.
What is the job title? Where is the job? Full-time, or part-time?
What are the profile requirements?
What are the job responsibilities?
What are the job/company perks?
How does the average work week look like for this job?

A great way to create a job preview is to include a rough percentage guide on how the job is set up, for example:

Business Development: 20% market research to find new business opportunities, 15% discovering more business in current clients, 30% new prospect outreach, 20% outreach to requests from leads, 10% fostering relationships with clients

Maybe even add a video showing the team behind the business, the office space and how the employee culture is set. These previews help applicants gain further insight to rule out in advance whether they would be willing to work for the company.

Choose realistic requirements: distinguish between “must-have” and “nice-to-have” requirements

Are the years of experience realistic?
Is the salary when measured with the profile requirements realistic?
Do some benchmarking and check what competitors are requiring for the same job.

Test: If a potential candidate asks questions related to the job during an interview, you need to use this feedback to further improve the job description.

2. Improve the candidate experience

Candidates often get their first impression of your company during the recruitment process. A positive experience not only boosts employer branding but also ensures talent finishes the recruitment processes and does not abandon you mid-way.

Think about the candidate you want to attract and then make sure you attract them with the right candidate experience:

A short and precise application process: avoid asking for information you can find on resumes or online profiles. Analyse where there is an application drop-off and improve the process!
Your website: Candidates will check out your website, make sure it’s up-to-date, has a great design, is user friendly, and not full of bugs or uninformative
Provide feedback: Let candidates know if the application went through, how long it will take to get back to them, and don’t ghost them! Your candidates want feedback and your feedback can influence your reputation!
Interviews: Make it as easy as possible to schedule interviews and ensure you ask the appropriate and right questions. Stay tuned for another article on what questions to ask.

3. Advance your sourcing:

In some cases qualified talent is very scarce and maybe the specialized skills are hard to find.

Nowadays hiring strategies should incorporate both active and passive candidates to improve the recruiting process.

It is important to source candidates from both groups, otherwise the talent search is limited. Passive candidates can offer a lot of value as they are already doing the job somewhere else. Some ways to find passive candidates include:

Using referrals: employees might know someone who can fill the position
Social media: LinkedIn is a great platform to find search for talent
Recruiting services: They can open doors to completely new networks. However classic services like headhunters are often incentivized to negotiate higher salaries due to higher payouts. Lionstep is tackling this issue with a new standard in recruiting that is “pre-paid”, where you load up credits and Lionstep pre-screens and qualifies the talent.

Looking for your next candidate? Find out how to optimize and improve your recruiting process with Lionstep. Connect with us.