How To Make Your Recruitment Agency a Strategic Talent Acquisition Partner
The role your recruitment agency plays as a strategic recruitment partner is going to get much more important. According to FuturePeople’s Recruitment Trends Report, half of Australian businesses haven’t changed their talent acquisition strategies in the past year. And in a skills short environment, your agency has the potential to add huge value to your clients by demonstrating that you can help evolve outdated talent pipelining strategies.
So what talent acquisition issues are business leaders struggling with, and how you can add value, forge closer relationships, and ultimately rise above your competition?
Failure To Disrupt The Traditional Recruitment Model
According to FuturePeople’s report, not only are businesses failing to move away from the age old ‘quick fix’ mentality to talent sourcing, but they’re also failing to fully embrace emerging technologies to enable better, faster, and more efficient hiring decisions. While technology does play a part in companies’ sourcing techniques, 30 percent of organisations surveyed were focusing on social media alone.
In addition, FuturePeople highlights that businesses aren’t influencing and engaging millennials who will make up 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. What’s more, what candidates expect—‘a strong online presence and profile as well as seamless and innovative recruitment processes’—is often far removed from what they experience.
These points speak for themselves. Employers are not only missing out on an abundance of talent by failing to engage all segments of the workforce, but they’re also falling short when it comes to outdated recruitment processes. The candidate experience is arguably business critical. And the good news for your recruitment agency is that you have the skills, experience, and tools to ensure your clients get it right.
A Killer Candidate Experience
You don’t need us to tell you how damaging a poor candidate experience can be. So what are the top five ways your recruitment agency can offer clients a killer talent engagement strategy that’ll create the crucial pipeline of candidates they need?
Consistency is key. Your clients need talent today, tomorrow, and in the distant future. There’s no use adopting a start-stop approach. You need to be building awareness now so that when the time comes for the talent you’ve engaged with to look for a new role, they turn to you. It’s a long game, but it will pay off if you adopt a consistent approach to your engagement strategy.
Here are some strategies to do so:
1) Get personal: If a candidate gets a sense they’re nothing more than a number in a database, it’s game over. They won’t engage and they won’t view you or your client as a company they’d want to hand over their careers to. Ensure you’re personalising all content that goes out. And use your applicant tracking system (ATS) to capture interactions and manage relationships as well as to segment your candidates into different groups so you can tailor the content you send. Finally, don’t be lazy! Communicate with your pipeline in the way they want to be engaged with. Do they want an SMS, an email, or a LinkedIn message? Don’t be tempted to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach!
2) Content is king: Candidates want information so make sure your content strategy is adding value. Your blogs, mailers and social streams should be about what you know your candidates care about, not just about you and what you do. Every time you send a communication to a candidate, ask yourself what’s in it for them? And ensure your content is tailored to relevant demographics. What millennials want will differ from what baby boomers want!
3) Tech, tech, and more tech: As FuturePeople’s research reveals, candidates demand a seamless and innovative recruitment process. Your agency must embrace automation to ensure you can meet this requirement on behalf of your clients. AI, predictive analytics, and gamification are all ways to achieve this, and you want to ensure you are using them before your competition does.
4) Measure, measure, measure: There’s no point in developing a candidate communications strategy if you don’t know if it’s working. Ensure you know the source of every candidate. Contrary to wishful thinking, they don’t all just apply for jobs or magically ‘call in’. What pages are they visiting on your website? What mailers are they reacting to? Understanding this will give you clues as to the content they want more of and how they want to access it.
Australian businesses and their talent acquisition strategies are struggling to keep up with technological innovations, changing workforce demographics, and candidates’ demands. But your recruitment agency is in a perfect position to help them by advising and developing robust candidate engagement strategies. And if you, don’t your competition certainly will!
Want to learn more about how to engage your candidates better to provide a top-notch candidate experience? Check out our Communications Strategy Checklist.
