What is one hiring strategy/trend that can be used to help counteract today’s staffing challenges?
To help you find solutions to staffing challenges facing organizations, we asked HR managers and business leaders this question for their best ideas. From focusing on your company culture to enticing employees with benefits, there are several strategies that hiring managers may use as the antidote to the staffing challenges facing them.
Here are 12 hiring strategies to counteract today’s staffing challenges:
- Focus On Your Company Culture
- Provide Candidate FAQs and Recruitment Chatbots
- Use Social Media To Enhance Your Recruiting Strategy
- Highlight Career Progression Opportunities
- Let Your Team Members Do The Talking
- Implement a Fast Hiring Process
- Outsource Hiring Efforts To Recruiting Agencies
- Make Your Compensation Scheme Transparent
- Target Diversity and Inclusion
- Offer Flexible Work Hours
- Establish a Talent Pipeline To Avoid Scrambling
- Entice Employees With Benefits
Focus On Your Company Culture
Candidates these days are looking for a supportive company culture at work, as well as a management team who will nurture it and introduce the processes and procedures during onboarding. Be sure to focus on your team’s mental health, as well as provide ample, flexible time off to ensure that everyone is always functioning at their best. This will ensure that every candidate understands the value of what your company has to offer, far beyond a salary and standard benefits.
Lauren Kleinman, The Quality Edit
Provide Candidate FAQs and Recruitment Chatbots
Our hiring strategy provides potential recruits with candidate FAQs and access to our chatbots for recruitment inquiries. Because every company has a vastly different application process, these resources and tools are vital in initiating an excellent recruitment experience for job seekers. If applicants experience an immensely informative, intuitive, and engaging recruitment process, they can spread good word-of-mouth about your employer brand to help attract more candidates.
Nunzio Ross, Majesty Coffee
Use Social Media To Enhance Your Recruiting Strategy
Today’s talent acquisition leaders face many challenges. They’re struggling to fill more roles than ever, while also retaining talent, finding qualified candidates, and doing it all in less time. Social recruiting helps by reaching higher quality candidates faster and more efficiently, since the vast majority of the workforce spends an average of 2.5 hours a day on social media. Social media is the #1 place candidates go to research employer brands. The network effect of social media allows brands to constantly be reaching more candidates than they could elsewhere.
But to stand out and make an impact, social recruiting should be done at scale, meaning, with enough frequency and variety of content posted to both branded and employee profiles. And because social recruiting at scale takes time, and time is perhaps the #1 thing HR and recruiters don’t have. Therefore, many choose to strategically automate their social recruiting for maximum effect with minimal effort.
Debora Roland, CareerArc
Highlight Career Progression Opportunities
Make your job postings stand out and attract candidates who are looking for stable careers by highlighting career progression opportunities for each position you want to fill. This will help you find people who are more likely to stay with your organization for the long term, which translates to reduced employee turnover and increased savings for your business. Moreover, this practice will improve perception of your company, as candidates will see that they’ll be supported in pursuing their goals.
Johannes Larsson, JohannesLarsson.com
Let Your Team Members Do the Talking
While many companies are shouting from the rooftops that they are the “Best Place to Work” to attract top talent, we let our happy employees do the talking for us. Employee advocacy is an excellent employment brand builder. Team members expressing how much they enjoy working for your company speaks volumes. So we regularly post videos of team members sharing their experiences working at Lovebox. And whether applicants listen to our CMO Alix or Marhold, our Head of Software, these videos provide a day-in-the-life look at what new hires can expect while working for us. In addition, our employee referral program encourages the team to recommend qualified candidates for open positions in return for a referral bonus. Employee advocacy humanizes our brand while providing the social proof that job seekers trust.
Jean Gregoire, Lovebox
Implement a Fast Hiring Process
A quick hiring strategy is one of the best ways to address today’s staffing challenges. This may involve assessment tests to help determine if the applicant pays attention to detail or possesses the proper communication skills needed for the job. Job applicant response time should be within 24 hours to entice qualified ones to pursue their application and proceed to the next steps.Many businesses and recruitment companies face staffing challenges, making it difficult to find the most qualified and passionate talents for the job. Also, job applicants have become choosy when submitting their resumes to prospective employers, wherein they prefer applying to companies with an easier and faster hiring process.
James Parsons, Content Powered
Outsource Hiring Efforts To Recruiting Agencies
Work with staffing agencies to outsource your hiring efforts when talent dries up. Recruiters have resources, networks, and skill sets cultivated to find and match candidates to your business’s needs. Using a recruiting agency can also help free up bandwidth for small businesses or businesses needing more staff to help with hiring efforts. Companies can either outsource the cost and skills to hire new staff or pay a hiring team to do the same work in-house at the added cost of the owner’s time and energy to supervise, vet, and hire these teams.
Sometimes, owners should stick to what they do best and leave the specialized work to the specialists. Recruiting agencies are solely meant to and tasked with recruiting the right talent for the right businesses, so try hiring through them to save some time and money.
Zach Goldstein, Public Rec
Make Your Compensation Scheme Transparent
Pay transparency is becoming more popular for employers and more important to prospective employees. These candidates want to understand how they will be compensated for a role at first touchpoint to assess their viability in applying.
More job listings on LinkedIn are presenting pay ranges for prospective roles based on potential experience. I suspect that these roles that give some level of expectations to candidates end up receiving more applications than job listings with unclear salary requirements. It doesn’t hurt companies to list what they pay their employees for a given role unless they’re trying to underpay their staff. When the same information is accessible from a quick Google search, why not give prospective employees a bone and enjoy the larger pool of talent to select for your business?
James Shalhoub, Finn
Target Diversity and Inclusion
Right now, we’re in an Employee’s job market, and diversity, inclusion, and representation are what job seekers look for in prospective employers. The Carlysle Group found that, “companies with diverse boards generate earnings growth an average of five times faster than non-diverse boards, with each diverse board member associated with a 5% increase in annualized earnings growth.” Diversity brings new ideas and boosts creativity, which makes for a more globally competitive and profitable business in today’s fast-paced market. Employees are proud to work for companies that uphold inclusive principles, which raises employee satisfaction and retention.
Brandon Adcock, Nugenix
Offer Flexible Work Hours
Offer as many flexible work options as possible. Over the past two years, many employees have come to understand that they love working from the comfort of their own homes. And it’s been well demonstrated that remote workers can be just as productive as office-based staff. Many job seekers are now looking to keep this way of life, and companies must be able to offer this perk if they want to stay competitive.
Employers can combat company burnout by setting strict boundaries around work hours. Remote workers love the flexibility in their hours, however, they sometimes use this flexibility to their detriment and overwork. Setting boundaries like “work stops at 5 pm” and “no working on weekends” helps free employees from the expectation that they keep working even when others in the company have logged off for the day.
Paul Moody, ProMoverReviews
Establish a Talent Pipeline To Avoid Scrambling
Create a talent pipeline. We focus on present hiring needs while projecting future circumstances. Reaching out to passive and active candidates helps us cultivate an authentic employer identity and reduce time-to-hire rates. The current job market is fluid, and the only way to avoid scrambling for new hires is by establishing a pipeline of qualified, interested candidates.
Ankur Goyal, Coterie
Entice Employees With Benefits
Bet on the benefits if you want to counteract staffing challenges and can’t do it with exorbitant salaries. They are the second most common consideration in employees’ hiring decisions right after paycheck. Offer your employees a range of benefit opportunities. Consider the standard ones (sports and medical packages) and the more creative ones (like themed events or competitions). Aside from the fact that you have to offer them, you also can’t forget to promote them. While applicants read about them in the job ad, senior employees may not know some benefits exist. Create a comprehensive list of things you offer, even things that may not seem like benefits at first glance. Free coffee or free parking? Small office library? Everything counts.
Nina Paczka, MyPerfectResume
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