4 Ways Empowered Recruiters Manage Organizational Recruiting Initiatives

When recruiters are empowered with technology and better processes, their time is freed up to focus on the high-impact, high-value activities they typically don’t have time for.

One of these high-impact areas is managing organizational recruiting initiatives. Uncovering new sources of talent, candidate experience, and employer branding all have a high degree of visibility. They have a direct impact on the organization’s broader ability to attract top talent.

Initiative #1: Uncover New Sources of Talent

Every recruiting team knows their tried-and-true sources of talent: the universities, companies, and professional groups that consistently yield great candidates. Unfortunately, every other organization vying for similar candidates is tapping those same talent pools.

When the unemployment rate is as low as it is, recruiting teams need to get creative. Empowered recruiters can conduct research and investigate new, less obvious sources of great talent. For example:

• Interview recently hired employees. Ask recently hired employees where they found your opportunities, and why they decided to accept your offer. Look for commonalities in recent hires to get a grasp on where your best candidates are coming from.
• Engage with professional organizations dedicated to underrepresented groups. Veteran groups, disability advocacy groups, and diversity employment programs are great examples of these. T-Mobile does an excellent job of this.
• Investigate local opportunities. With much of hiring and sourcing performed online, many recruiting teams have moved their strategic focus to their career sites and platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Depending on the role, classic localized recruiting - like job fairs - may be a higher impact, less competitive playing field.
• Rethink job requirements. Many jobs can be performed without specific work experience, particularly if you can find high potential candidates capable of ramping quickly. Test what happens when you start considering candidates from less typical backgrounds. It’s likely the extra time hiring managers spend searching for a “unicorn” is more effectively spent ramping high potential candidates without a typical work history.

Initiative #2: Collect Feedback

Feedback from candidates and hiring managers provides crucial insight into what’s working - and what’s not working - in the hiring process. It has the potential to uncover bottlenecks that may not be immediately apparent to recruiting leaders.

With hiring managers, empowered recruiters have the time and resources to conduct post-hire interviews. Qualitative data from interviews yields insight into recruiter:hiring manager relationships across the organization, opportunities (and pitfalls) with new tech, and process bottlenecks.

For candidates, empowered recruiters have the time and resources to design and follow-up with post-disposition surveys. Quantitative data from candidate surveys yields insight into opportunities for employment branding, blind spots in the candidate experience, and areas where they are most likely to drop out.

Together, feedback from candidates and hiring managers provides a more nuanced look at your team’s existing recruiting strategy. It charts a more data-driven path forward.

Initiative #3: Build Your Employer Brand

Most TA teams wish they could prioritize employment branding. They just don’t have time to pursue it. When you give time back to recruiters, they build world-class employment brands.

Empowered recruiters have the opportunity to:

• Engage and follow up with candidates in a way that reflects positively on your brand. According to the Talent Board’s latest research into candidate experience, 32% of candidates withdraw from the recruiting process because of poor rapport with recruiting professionals. With their time back, recruiters can give high-priority candidates the personal touch.
• Update and fix job descriptions. Most job descriptions are optimized for the hiring manager: they present candidates with a list of duties and necessary prerequisites. This approach doesn’t just put your brand in a bad light, it also drives away candidates. Job descriptions that focus on benefits for the candidate see 3x more qualified applicants.
• Create employee-centric content that shows off your workplace and workforce. Give candidates better insight into your workplace with employee testimonials, “day in the life” content, and case studies featuring your high-performing teams.
• Audit competitor’s employment brands. There’s a lot of employment branding advice out there. A competitive employer brand audit will help you identify where you should allocate your resources and build a more attractive brand than your direct talent competitors.

Learn How to Conduct a Competitive Employment Brand Audit + Free Template

Initiative #4: Uncover Process Inefficiencies

We’ve already looked at how feedback from hiring managers and candidates can uncover process inefficiencies. Empowered recruiters can also dig into your recruiting data to analyze and develop metrics they wouldn’t have time to previously.

This means you can uncover:

• Sources of hire which yield the highest quality candidates;
• Hiring funnel throughput, to see where candidates are dropping out;
• Time to fill for each hiring manager, to understand where recruiters can develop stronger relationships;
• Type of submitted candidates for each hiring manager, to understand what prerequisites (work history, previous years’ experience, etc) lead to hires, and which can be optional;
• Types of content successful candidates engage with throughout the hiring cycle; and
• Types of outreach (email, text, chat, etc) which yield the highest proportion of successful candidates.

And this is just scratching the surface.

All of the above provide crucial strategic direction for upcoming recruiting initiatives. They also equip you with the necessary ammunition to build a compelling business case for new technologies. Recruiting leaders can create a virtuous cycle where better data leads to better tech and better process, further empowering their recruiting teams.

Learn the 4 other ways to empower your recruiters.

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