5 Essential Steps of Effective Talent Acquisitions 

When you’re tasked with filling numerous open positions, you will typically source and engage candidates using the same traditional methods you have always used, such as posting a job online, waiting for the flood of resumes to come in, then over-relying on tracking candidates via spreadsheets and emails. Although these steps are proven to work, this is not a winning strategy and it actually makes the recruiting process longer, more expensive, and less effective for building a powerhouse workforce.

So, what can hiring leaders do to make their recruiting process more strategic, cost-saving, and proactive? The answer will be to change recruitment strategy from reactive hiring to talent acquisition.

Talent acquisition links different phases of the hiring process by implementing a more proactive strategy that leverages more robust software solutions to better discover, communicate with, and hire top talent. Using this approach enables companies to transition out of older recruiting models by using tools that facilitate a more streamlined, cost-effective approach towards recruiting, selecting, and hiring.

Here are five practical steps to effective talent acquisitions: 

1- Attract, leverage your company culture and cast a wide net 

Recruiters need to stay competitive in the hunt for top talent. Other companies might have bigger recruiting budgets, and if you have a lengthy application process, it’s likely turning candidates away. Also, an inability to really highlight the organisation’s brand differentiators is a roadblock to attracting like-minded candidates who also believe in the company’s culture and goals. 

So how can you avoid these recruiting pitfalls, better engage higher quality candidates, and build a more robust talent pipeline? You can leverage advanced talent acquisition software that enables you to focus on:

• Employer branding 

• Easy, configurable applications processes

• Empowering passive candidates 

• Candidate recruitment and communication

See also: Startup Recruitment: The First 4 Roles to Hire  

2- Select, utilise advanced tools to go beyond resume 

Resumes show a candidate’s work history, but oftentimes, not much else. To compensate for the high volume of applicants, recruiters might spend just six seconds reviewing each resume. In this short time, the only key indicators they can analyse are who the job hoppers are, whether the candidate meets the minimum education requirements, and if there is a steady career progression, to name a few. The resume information they see does not provide deep insights into a candidate’s prior successes, show tangible performance numbers, or highlight professional goals

Recruiters need tools to efficiently analyse candidate applications, better predict future performance, and determine which candidates they should prioritise. The Harvard Business Review found that 80 percent of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions, and with the cost of each mistake sometimes equal to five times that employee’s salary, teams need more advanced tools to dissect candidates.

To remedy these challenges, you should implement application selection tools for:  

• Talent scoring

• Candidate assessments 

• Creating talent pools 

• Faster candidate searching 

3- Track, leverage dashboards to manage the interview process 

You have narrowed your talent pool to a workable number and are ready to begin the interview stage. But your department still manages the process via emails and spreadsheets, which leaves key people out of the loop on applicant statuses, leads to lost information, and ultimately slows down the hiring process. This makes managing requisitions and reports more difficult.

Further exacerbating the problem for hiring teams is that today's candidates are using several different software tools, which creates a slow, bumpy process. In addition, since the HR systems at larger companies are on average over 5 years old, recruiters are often frustrated with the outdated tech they are forced to still use. All these inefficiencies (and headaches) add up to costly extended vacancies and reduced organisational output. Therefore, you should choose tools that centralise all candidate/interview data, utilise hiring dashboards, centralise requisition management, and comparing resumes and applicant tracking to minimise the inefficiencies. 

4- Interview and hire, make smarter final candidate selections 

Although your team spends their days meeting with candidates, managing high volume interview schedules and keeping everyone informed about applicant statuses is a tedious, slow-moving process. 

Many hiring teams’ current interview approaches do not efficiently use their resources, which means time and money are going down the drain. Hence, find a software that can help leverage stronger software that enables your team to: 

• Boost hiring teams’ strategic influence 

• Better manage interviews 

• Conduct background checks and partner integrations 

• Track and measure hiring costs 

5- Onboard, provide strong onboarding to engage employees and shorten the time to productivity 

The candidate has signed an offer letter and is aware of their start date. But onboarding is full of challenges. A proper onboarding experience should be based around getting new hires up to speed as soon as possible about the organisation’s culture and goals to drive engagement and shorten their time productivity. So why is it that so many companies have zero onboarding? 

Lacking an onboarding strategy can lead to unnecessary new hire turnover annually, which results in severe drains on the bottom line. For you to really drive your onboarding ROI, your team will need to leverage:

• New hire portals, such as managing document, tracking and completion 

• Automating workflows and forms management 

• Assign and manage training with learning 

In short, talent acquisition utilises innovative software to effectively attract, select, and onboard new hires. Recruiters need to leverage their company culture and implement a simple application process to attract candidates. Interview scheduling and background verification tools will help further streamline the process. Lastly, recruiters can provide an engaging onboarding experience that was automated for them and unique for their new hires.

Next read: 5 Practical Steps of Job Placement in Recruitment