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Recruitment is a critical aspect of any organization’s growth and success. To achieve this, aligning your recruitment strategy with your growth objectives is paramount.
Understanding the challenges of growth and identifying the specific roles needed to achieve your goals is the foundation of a successful recruitment strategy.
We spoke to Hugo from Growth Hiring to dive deep and explore recruitment strategies and best practices that can help you attract the right talent to drive your organization forward.
What is a recruitment strategy?
Recruitment strategy is fundamentally about aligning with your organization’s growth challenges and identifying the talent needed to achieve your growth objectives. It commences by understanding the challenges faced by hiring managers and their growth goals.
How does it work? 🤔
As far as Growth Hiring is concerned, the first crucial step is defining the profile of the ideal candidate you intend to recruit. This profile creation is pivotal to the recruitment process. It involves delineating specific characteristics and qualifications required for the role. This profile serves as the foundation for your recruitment strategy.
In essence, the initial step involves outlining the qualifications and characteristics required for the recruitment of suitable candidates. This profile becomes a crucial starting point for a successful recruitment strategy and a set of characteristics that will make it possible to recruit this or that person.
The three main recruitment strategies:
In the realm of recruitment strategy, the core concept revolves around the ability to reflect on how to effectively identify desired profiles once they have been clearly defined.
When it comes to the strategies themselves, there are various channels available to successfully reach these candidates. In reality, there are three distinct channels, each offering its unique value and opportunities:
- Exploiting the managers’/ higher-ups’ networks
- Inbound sourcing
- Outbound sourcing
Channel 1: Exploiting the company’s networks
Here, it’s all about soliciting the hiring managers in your company and engaging their networks, involving them in the recruitment process right from the sourcing stage.
Example 🔍
There are various avenues to explore within this approach, such as:
- Tapping into the founders’ network,
- The team’s network,
- Or even the network of talent acquisition managers.
The idea is to figure out how to engage them as early as possible in this process, for instance with programs such as employee referrals and such. This can be a huge win-win program as it can reap rewards for both the company and its teams.
Think of this channel as a mid-to-long-term strategy since you need to build relationships and loyalty based on trust.
Channel 2: Inbound Sourcing
The second channel is the inbound strategy. In this approach, you focus on various tactics that can be implemented either in the long term or as part of a broader strategy.
Example 🔍
For example, one aspect involves indirectly engaging with candidates, or having them come to you (inbound).
The objective is to encourage hiring managers to participate in webinars, podcasts, and similar initiatives, effectively involving their teams in the recruitment process.
Additionally, there is a comprehensive strategy associated with employer branding. This involves establishing a brand’s presence on various platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or other channels where people express interest.
It’s about connecting with potential candidates where they are most active and engaged. This makes it somewhat of a long-term strategy as you need to build a consistent presence in order to attract the most desirable profiles.
Expert Tip 🧠
The inbound strategy also encompasses shorter-term tactics. For example, you can create LinkedIn posts to generate immediate interest and inbound inquiries from potential candidates.
This goes in the same focus as to how you can attract candidates to you, involving all longer-term strategies:
- Employer branding
- Content creation
- Overall brand visibility
As well as medium-term strategies that showcase your employees as industry experts and people who the candidate would want to work with.
Channel 3: Outbound Sourcing
This strategy focuses on how to proactively approach and engage potential candidates once you’ve identified your growth objectives and the specific profiles you aim to recruit.
It involves implementing a direct approach, often referred to as “sourcing,” where you leverage the right channels for candidate identification and outreach.
Expert Tip 🧠
The goal is to locate potential candidates who align with your recruitment needs. Once you have a general idea of the profile you want to recruit, the next step is to fully identify them through various acquisition channels.
You can employ tools such as Sales Navigator and Pharrow where you create lists of target companies, this is called the ABM strategy on LinkedIn. Once you’ve identified these individuals, the challenge is to obtain their contact information, including email addresses, to engage with them across multiple channels.The idea here is to increase touchpoints and enhance conversion rates at each stage.
At this point, you need to craft a compelling initial outreach message. This message should be designed to have the maximum impact and elicit a response, setting us apart from others who may not be as successful in their outreach efforts. It’s about creating meaningful connections and initiating conversations that lead to successful recruitment.
So, the outbound strategy is all about a systematic and strategic approach to identifying, engaging, and building relationships with potential candidates, starting with effective candidate sourcing and culminating in impactful outreach messages that drive responses.
Combining the strategies
The idea behind all these three strategies is not to use each of them separately or focus on one more than the others. Rather, it’s to consider how you can make each one complement and enhance the others.
You almost always want to make the most of your colleague’s LinkedIn network (and general network as well). It is also crucial to devise strategies that integrate both inbound and outbound approaches.
The essence of this approach is to view these strategies as part of a holistic recruitment ecosystem, where each component contributes to the overall success.
Expert Tip 🧠
By creating synergistic recruiting funnels, you can ensure that when reaching out to potential candidates, they have already been exposed to your brand or messages on platforms like LinkedIn.
This prior exposure significantly increases the likelihood of receiving a positive response to your outreach since they will have an idea about your corporate culture and they can project more easily.
This leads to a more efficient and effective recruitment process that not only identifies top candidates but also builds strong connections with them, ultimately leading to successful hires.
Example 🔍
Having a well-optimized LinkedIn profile can lead to candidates reaching out spontaneously as they themselves have been quite exposed to your brand so they might relate to your values.
Sharing your own content on LinkedIn and reaching out first to those who engage with it ups your chances of getting a response. And if you’ve hosted a webinar or created similar content that potential candidates have seen, even better!
Another use case for how you can use this harmony is to prioritize, for instance, in your outbound strategy, all the people who are part of the founders’ or the hiring manager’s networks, all the people who have participated in webinars, and/or all the people who follow your company page.
As you continue to create content and expand your network, this will become a more significant acquisition channel for you to improve your headhunting and direct approach later on.
How to set up a recruitment strategy?
Now that you have an idea about the different channels you can use for recruitment, it’s time to devise a holistic strategy.
The process itself is quite simple, Hugo even makes the analogy of a prospecting campaign:
- Define your goals
- Define your sales ICP
- Create a scorecard
- Align the whole thing with your hiring manager
Step 1. Define Your Goals and Needs
The first step in developing a recruitment strategy is to clearly define your hiring needs. As a recruiter, your task is to conduct interviews with hiring managers to understand the specific characteristics and qualifications required for the role.
There are two key aspects to consider in this phase:
a. Candidate Unique Value Proposition (CUVP)
Here you need to understand what unique elements will attract candidates to your organization.
You then identify differentiators in your approach, job description, mission, and team collaboration.
Lastly, you create a template for the Candidate Unique Value Proposition (CUVP) to effectively communicate these elements to potential candidates.
Expert Tip 🧠
To drive the prospecting analogy forward, think of the CUVP as a memorable competitive edge.
What makes you the best company for the candidate to join? How are you different from the others?
And here, you can use the aforementioned strategies, wherein you’d have your LinkedIn community posts, your webinars, etc. speak for you.
The candidate has already (potentially if you exploited your company’s network correctly) interacted with you, so they already know you’re different!
b. Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP)
Once you understand the unique elements of the role, you need to create an Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP), which is a comprehensive description of the ideal candidate:
- Develop a set of characteristics that define a qualified candidate for the job: This includes both technical and soft skills, along with any certifications or education requirements.
- Utilize the insights gained from the CUVP to inform the ICP.
Expert Tip 🧠
Continuing with the prospecting analogy, the ICP is the same as well… The ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)!
You have to define a proper persona to go after – someone who fits your CUVP, but is also the right fit for the job in question.
The Ideal Candidate Profile serves as a fundamental tool for identifying and evaluating potential candidates. It is crucial to establish a clear definition of this profile to effectively target and engage with them.
Step 2. Create a Scorecard
Once you have a clear understanding of the candidate requirements, the next step is to well… score your lead! (The prospecting analogy never ends, it really is the same). 😅
The scorecard is a tool that allows you to assess and rank candidates based on specific skills and attributes. It plays a crucial role in the recruitment process:
- Map a range of skills and qualifications on a scale of 1 to 5.
- Include competencies and hard skills that you have established in previous steps.
- Use the scorecard as a consistent reference point throughout the recruitment process for candidate selection.
Step 3. Align Your Strategy
Though we mentioned this in the second stage, it really deserves its own step.
In this final stage, it’s important to align your recruitment strategy with the insights gained from the CUVP and the scorecard. This alignment ensures that you are targeting the right candidates effectively.
Expert Tip:
This is the lead qualification stage of the process parallel to sales prospecting: Do they meet the criteria laid down by your CUVP and scorecard?
Expert Tip 🧠
Remember that candidate experience is essential throughout this process. Focus on making every interaction with candidates unique and memorable:
- Craft Standout Job Postings: Make postings unique and appealing and highlight company strengths and unique selling points.
- Enhance the pre- and post-interactions with the candidate: For instance, you can think to provide prompt, constructive feedback to rejected applicants and/or offer clear feedback after initial interviews.
- Define Transparent Next Steps: Outline clear, transparent process steps for candidates. What happens now? What’s next? etc.
Step 4: Map out the next steps in your own process
Once you have defined your need and your sourcing strategy, you also need to optimize the rest of the recruitment process. This means mapping out the different steps of your process and creating interactions that are tailored to the candidates you are exchanging with.
How? Well by automating some of those pesky repeatable tasks!
Example 🔍
they have the best possible experience. This involves doing it in a very efficient way, and there are many things that you can automate. For example:
- Pre-call: A simple recruiting email with extra resources for the candidate to help them prepare well for the interview can go a long way.
- Post-call: An already-written message where you just give the reasons why the candidate was accepted or rejected and how they will move on to the next step.
- Set up videos that introduce your company, your team, your culture, etc., and also help the candidate prepare better. Video format is also a good way to deliver a lot of information in a concise way.
All of these examples are easily automatable, or at least optimizable because they’re typically the same for every candidate. However, when you take the time to do them, they become extremely valuable!
You’re basically constantly thinking about how to provide the candidate with an experience that is entirely different and makes them say:
“I had an amazing time! Even though I wasn’t hired eventually, I had a good time, I learned things and I was treated well”.
Automation is great! However, at the same time, you need to make sure that the recruiter can really focus on what they do best and where they have the most impact and value, which is exchanging with candidates.
So you have many stakes when it comes to automation; do so for what can be automated but always make sure to preserve the human touch, because that is the essence of recruitment. It should never be taken over.
This is the type of approach we value most at LaGrowthMachine, and that’s why we are the only multichannel automation software that includes Voice Messages in your outreach sequences.
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