For all this chatter about clever graduate campaigns and feel good stories of people finding work holding cardboard signs, this is anything but an easy job market for employers.When you need skilled people, you have to fight for them. Many of the best people aren’t even looking for work. To get them on board – and keep them – money isn’t enough. These candidates will get paid well where ever they go. So, the trick is to make sure they love you, they really love you.
It used to be job seekers who had to dust off their best outfits, and practice their firm, but friendly handshake. Now it’s your turn.If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, you need to start that relationship off with a bang.Think about it. What’s it like to apply for a job with you?If you’re making people deal with confusing long-winded processes, stale form letters, or even worse – getting no reply at all – then you’re losing your chance to choose from the best talent. Asking them to trudge though a dry, traditional process is like saying, “Welcome to Office Space. You will wither and die here”.
The good ones are clever. They know what they’re worth and they know they can pick and choose. So if your candidate experience is lacking, maybe because of vague job descriptions or information that’s too hard to find, they won’t even bother. And on top of that, these people are also more likely to share their experiences on social media, or over a glass of wine with friends (who you probably also want to hire sometime).So even if you have a million billion dollars and heaps of perks to lure people to your business, the candidate experience is still super important – and often overlooked. So that’s awesome news for those of us who don’t have big budgets and a ping-pong table in every corner. If everyone else is offering a really meh candidate experience, it’ll only take a teeny bit of effort to impress those impressive applicants.
Make sure people can find your job ads. This is in the derp-you-don’t-say basket, but it’s one that heaps of people fail at. So, put the link where people can find it - social media channels are great for this. Your own website is good too - although make sure it's on a page that's easy to find from your home page. When you’re posting it on job boards, use clear descriptive headlines and try to make these things your ideal targets are actual searching for, otherwise people will scroll merrily on past.Kill the forms Maybe there’s someone out there who loves filling out forms, but I’ve never met them.So, forms are the enemy. Kill them.You need to gather info, sure, but either make that process super fun, or think carefully about what you really need to know. We’ve had people get in touch with us because they’ve had such an amazing time doing a Weirdly quiz, they want to know who else is hiring using Weirdly so they can apply for those jobs as well. Yay for us, but also, more importantly, awesome for our clients - when candidates start seeking you out because of your recruitment process, that’s a proper win.Test for culture-fit How well a person fits with your team and your vision is often the difference between a good hire and one that doesn’t work out so well. So, think about ways you can prescreen people. This won’t just cut down on the time you spend sifting through CVs – it’ll also attract people who care about a company’s culture and vision. And guess what? Those are the people you want to hire – the ones who could get a job anywhere, but are looking for a role they can feel passonate about. You can use Weirdly to help you do that, but making sure your job ad reflects your culture (rather than standard recruitment or HR speak) is also important.Make it mobile. 70% of people are looking for jobs on a mobile and almost half of people won’t bother with application process they can’t access through a mobile. Add those numbers together and you’ve got an answer: make sure you’re mobile.Reply. Nicely. Don’t be the black hole of recruitment. It costs exactly zero dollars to write a friendly “thanks for your application” autoresponder. That way applicants feel acknowledged- and reassured that they did everything right. Be friendly, be brief and tell people about the next steps.Then, if they’re unsuccsessful, don’t leave them hanging. This is another chance for you to leave an awesome impression of the company.And that’s what this is all about really. Hiring the right person right now is important, sure, but building and keeping a reputation as a great place to work is going to make your job way easier in the long run. So when those hot-shot employees are sitting around over that wine talking about where they’d love to work, yours is a name that comes up.
Want to jazzy up your own candidate experience? Give Weirdly a go today - it takes just 30secs to get started
