12 enduring recruitment strategies to hire top talent in 2023

Forum Sheth
February 11, 2023
5 min read

1000+ open roles at a tech company, another 800 open positions at a food delivery brand, and several hundred roles to fill at an ed-tech company - these are just some of the many companies inviting applications at the beginning of 2023. 

Despite the forthcoming economic challenges expected worldwide this year, companies will continue to hire. Hiring never comes to a standstill altogether. Someone is always hiring.

Whether your organization has recruiting strategies in place already or you're just beginning to set the base - in either case, you need to have strategies that help you roll with the punches.

What is a recruitment strategy? 

A recruitment strategy is a hiring plan that your company uses to attract, engage, and hire talent for the roles your company plans to recruit for. This includes details like the timelines and geographies of those job opportunities, the evaluation process, budgets, and the tools you plan to use.  

As a founder or a recruiter, you must have a straightforward recruitment strategy in place. Of course, you can always mold it when the need arises, but having a clearly defined plan helps keeps things in order. 

Define your recruitment goals  

The ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based) goal setting has worked for ages and still continues to. In fact, having SMART goals during such times helps even more. 

What should you include in your SMART goals? 

  • A close estimate of all the positions and their numbers to be filled in a year 
  • Recruitment KPIs that matter 
  • Timeline for the goal(s) to be accomplished 
  • Resources required for achieving the hiring goals 

Think of this as a vision board for your recruiting teams. All of you will have a single, focused picture that you’ll be chasing leaving minimal space for surprises or chaos. 

Set aside a hiring  budget 

Recruiting, like all other functions of an organization, requires several things to keep it running. A well-thought-out recruitment budget covers salary allocation, events & marketing, employee referral bonuses, tool spends, and other miscellaneous expenses.

Embed inclusivity (DEI) into your yearly vision board

Prioritizing inclusivity in recruitment improves the perception of your organizational beliefs and values, attracting a wider pool of candidates, especially the ones who need to be seen.  

Detailed read: Ways to bringing diversity into your recruiting efforts  

Categorize the roles based on the efforts required

Hiring for a role in a particular department is seldom similar to hiring for another. So when you set out to define your yearly recruiting plans, a proven way to make sure your plans turn out successful is to categorize the projected open roles based on the efforts required to close them. 

Factors/categories you can define for the roles: 

  1. Easy-to-fill 
  2. Hard-to-fill 
  3. First-time hiring 
  4. Regular hiring 
  5. Global vs Domestic
  6. Remote vs Hybrid vs Onsite 

This will help you adopt the relevant approaches required to close every type of role.

Focus on employer branding

As a recruiter, you definitely understand the importance of employer branding. What's helpful is to brainstorm and write down the initiatives that you'd like to execute toward employer branding.

Read: Employer Branding Trends 2023 

Factor in industry trends

To move with the changing conditions in the job market, you must be aware of the latest happenings. Few things to do while your yearly recruiting planning:  

  • Estimate the impact that economic conditions can have on the job market 
  • Keep up with geography-wise trends if you are hiring in multiple countries 
  • Study salary benchmarks 

Implement an employee referral program

It’s not uncommon knowledge among recruiters how leveraging employee networks helps speed up hiring and assures better quality.  But knowing whether your employee referral system, which you have run previously, will still work is an important question to ponder when you lay out your yearly recruitment strategy. Find out what works and what doesn’t - and go ahead and formulate a plan where both the org and the employees can make the most of your referral program. 

Read: Fixing a broken referral system 

Invest in tools that actually help save time and hire faster 

Unlike a few decades ago, as recruiters, we now have several tools at our disposal. However, it can be tempting to include multiple tools. Knowing exactly what kind of tool(s) will help you with your goals helps keep your recruiting tech stack neat and your data organized. 

There are a few things you must know in order to clear off the common notions about recruiting tools: 

  1. An ATS doesn’t solve ALL your recruiting requirements 
  2. A Talent CRM is different from an ATS  
  3. Everything that you do as a recruiter cannot be automated. But a lot can definitely be. For example, the outbound emails or LinkedIn emails that you send out to passive candidates. 
  4. While it still seems comforting to operate on good old excels and sheets, a recruiter must acknowledge that the days of manually maintaining records are long gone. 

Automate to the great extent possible. And choose recruiting automation tools that help you do that. 

Define your high-level hiring process from the get-go 

A high-level hiring process sets the tone for all your recruiting approaches. Your high-level hiring process must include:  

  • Your format of intake meetings 
  • Org-level stages of interviews 
  • Values that must be carried throughout the hiring process
  • The kind of messaging you’ll embrace for candidate engagement 

Keeping the high-level process as the foundation, you can then expand it further for category-wise recruiting needs. 

Set up regular check-ins at different levels 

Don’t let your goals, plans and processes rot in documents. Make sure you set up disciplined check-ins. 

Within your recruiting team

  • How frequently will you run a status check-in? 
  • In what intervals will you analyze your recruiting data and KPIs?  

With hiring managers and leaders in your organization

  • Share quarterly updates on recruiting statuses, highlights and blockages 

With the interviewees 

  • Set up a feedback mechanism to find out if your interviewing and engagement efforts are working as planned 

Induce a practice of leading with empathy

Last but definitely not least, this and possibly the next few years are likely to be challenging for organizations and candidates. And nothing beats a recruiting approach better than leading with empathy and operating as an ally. 

Read: How to engage and hire people who’re laid off?

Remember that a lot of what you plan cannot be set in stone. The key to effective and faster hiring is to quickly adapt to changing job market conditions. Utilize the above strategies as your guide, tweak them as per your goals and needs, and create a playbook that works best for you. 

Let us know if you have anything to add - tips, upvotes, disagreements, or anything. 

To thoughtful recruiting! 

Forum Sheth
kula
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