13 min read

14 Effective Hiring Strategies For 2024

Finn Bartram

QUICK SUMMARY

Use these strategies to help you attract and hire the talent you want and give them a memorable candidate experience.

While developing talent is important, recruitment remains a vital yet notoriously difficult business function.

Use these recruiting strategies to help you attract and hire the talent you need.

Employer value proposition and branding
Tap into the hidden workforce
Leverage current workers
Use a mix of recruitment marketing tactics
Encourage collaborative hiring
Build a talent pool
Create an internship program
Create a returnship program
Look further afield
Get niche with sourcing
Utilize candidate feedback
Provide interview training
Plan judiciously
Re-evaluate Your Tech Stack

1. Work on your employer brand and value proposition

“A strong employer brand is a magnet for values-aligned talent because it doesn’t beg the candidate “Do you want a job?” Instead, it asks, “Are you like us?” - Eric Harris, CEO, Mindhandle

A strong employer brand makes attracting the talent you want much easier.

Employer branding, like "regular" branding, is a combination of your purpose, mission, values, culture, reputation, product, and unique voice.

The core of your employer brand is your employer value proposition (EVP). It’s essentially everything you offer workers in return for their time and skills.

Taking the time to create an EVP will help you attract and retain relevant talent and create a better experience for current workers.

It's much easier to get your messaging consistent if everyone is clear about what you offer as an employer, but how will that become clear. Well, obviously the most important thing is your actions, but another is how you present it.

Consider making a videos that are specific to your recruiting process. These aren't a commercial, but rather an informational asset that explains in depth the company's mission, values, culture, and job roles. This has a few significant benefits such as:

Build awareness of your employer brand
Pre-screen candidates who don't identify with company values
Help candidates understand the company's ethos
Improve candidate engagement and interest in the role
Set clear expectations around your culture

2. Go after hidden workers

It’s estimated that, in the U.S. alone, there are 27 million ‘hidden workers’ i.e. people excluded from the workforce by the processes that organizations use to find talent.

Targeting this demographic is a potential hotbed of willing and talented workers. You might just have to make some accommodations.

Imagine these weren't potential employees, but potential customers. You would do everything in your power to unearth them and get your products in front of them. The same rule applies here as you broaden your options to include neurodiverse individuals, retirees who are open to returning to work and, in some cases, ex-inmates who have paid their debt to society and need a route toward changing their lives.

The removal of barriers for these groups holds the potential for tremendous business benefit while simultaneously benefiting broader society and further building your employer brand.

You may also need to recalibrate your hiring practices to ensure they’re inclusive and target a diverse talent pool.

Ways you can do this include:

Allowing time for sourcing
Creating inclusive job ads
Ensuring the application process is accessible
Challenging referrals
Create returnship programs for workers who’ve been out the workforce a while
Implement structured interviewing
Be aware of potential of biases introduced by AI recruiting software.

For a deeper diver here, read recruitment expert, Mariya Hristova’s article on creating a recruiting diversity strategy.

3. Leverage your current workers

“Candidates who are referred by current Grainger team members often end up doing well when they join the company. Current team members understand what is needed and are often great at spotting talent.” - Randy Tosch, VP of Talent, Grainger

Hopefully your current workers are brand champions and would happily recommend your roles to friends and family (that’s why the EVP exercise is so important).

Referral programs are a great way to find new talent who will already be familiar with your brand and represent good value if you're on a strict recruiting budget.

Ways to encourage workers to promote your roles and help find new talent:

Create an employee referral program that offers incentives, such as bonuses or gifts, for successful referrals.
Regularly communicate open roles to all employees, providing detailed information about the job requirements and ideal candidates.
Invite employees to participate in recruitment events, like job fairs or campus recruiting.
Equip employees with marketing materials, such as digital flyers or email templates, that they can easily share with their networks.
Share testimonials from current employees about their experiences with the company to inspire others to refer friends or family.
Establish a program where select employees serve as company ambassadors, responsible for promoting the organization and its job openings within their networks.

4. Leverage a Mix of Recruitment Marketing Tactics

Most organizations use basic recruitment marketing tactics like job ads, outreach messages, careers pages, and social media. To stand out, consider these additional approaches:

Company Ambassadors: Encourage employees to share job openings within their networks.
Review Sites: Use employee reviews to boost your employer brand.
Recruitment Events: Engage directly with candidates at events.
Community Outreach: Promote your involvement in community activities to enhance your brand image.
Content Marketing: Share blogs and posts that reflect your company culture and values.

Going back to the idea of the candidate experience looking somewhat like a customer experience, you want everything from your job ads to your interview process to be interactive, engaging and respectful of the person's time. You want to provide resources for follow up questions and additional information about the role as necessary.

How to optimize your social media for recruitment:

Targeted Campaigns: Focus on specific demographics that align with your ideal candidates.
Showcase Culture: Regularly highlight your company’s charitable efforts and employee successes.
Engage Directly: Interact with candidates by answering questions and sharing behind-the-scenes insights.

Be authentic and track your ROI (resource spent vs the increase of target candidates) to see what’s most effective. Regularly test and update your recruitment marketing strategy to stay ahead of trends.

5. Encourage collaborative hiring

The term collaborative hiring refers to the practice of involving various stakeholders, sometimes from different business areas, over the course of the hiring process.

From the candidate’s perspective, they get to meet more potential team members and gain a better sense of the organization, company culture, and team. This is especially valuable if you're trying to hire at the managerial level.

For the organization, a collaborative hiring method provides a standard hiring framework that unites the team and divides the big task of making a hire into more manageable chunks for each person.

Benefits include:

More and better recruitment conversations
Diverse opinions and division of interviews
Better candidate experience
Reduced bias.

You can encourage collaborative hiring through:

Creating a well-defined recruitment process
Effective workforce planning
Socializing the talent pool
Understanding stakeholder roles
Fostering team collaborating in hiring.

For a deeper dive, read our collaborative hiring guide.

6. Build a talent pool

Sometimes the timing just isn’t right and, for one reason or another, a candidate that’s entered your hiring process will drop out or miss out on the role.

But that doesn’t mean that they won’t be a great fit for something else later down the line. That’s why it’s important to keep their details on file (within the limits of recruiting compliance regulations) as a pool of potential candidates who’ve already interacted with your brand.

Recruiting software such as applicant tracking systems will often have a candidate database feature to make this easier.

By simply building some messaging into your recruiting email templates, you can keep in touch with this talent and make them one of the first ports of call when sourcing for a new role.

This is especially useful when it comes to high-volume recruitment periods.

7. Create an internship program

Your ability to win over early-in-career talent is going to be essential to setting the foundation for your workforce in the years to come.

A strategically aligned internship program will help you recruit the talent your organization needs, bring in fresh ideas and perspectives, and positively impact your employer brand.

The interns you hire are more likely to stay at your organization compared to non-intern early-career graduates.

Internships can be highly effective recruitment strategy if designed and administered properly. For more, read our article on how to start an internship program.

8. Create a returnship program

A returnship program is a type of paid internship designed specifically for individuals who have taken a lengthy career break and are now looking to return to the workforce in a professional capacity.

It can also be utilized by underemployed workers not using their skillset or education, or are looking to break into their new role or industry.

From an employer’s perspective, returnship programs help to widen the talent pool and promote diversity and inclusion by providing opportunities for often overlooked individuals from different backgrounds.

Throughout the program, the organization helps people develop new skills and potentially awards them a permanent position upon completion. It’s almost like a working interview!

From an employee’s perspective, a returnship program provides an opportunity for individuals to refresh their skills and gain knowledge in the field they wish to pursue. This can help them become more competitive in the job market after a break in employment or a period of underemployment.

Lastly, launching a returnship program sends the message that the company values its employees’ personal lives and provides a way back if they need to take a career break.

For more, check out Jessica Cieslinski’s excellent article on how to launch a returnship.

9. Look further afield

Sometimes your immediate location isn’t replete with talent. The good news is that it’s never been easier to hire talent from further afield and it's a often-used tactic in startup recruitment in particular.

This could be from another area of the country or even another part of the world. Professional employer organizations and employer of record services can make this process much easier and help you through the remote hiring process.

You can also check out our guide to hiring remote employees and hiring international employees.

10. Get niche with sourcing

Candidate sourcing is sometimes the best way to fill an open position. However, discovering and engaging new candidates can be one of the toughest challenges in the recruitment process.

We all know the main sources: jobs boards, LinkedIn, the aforementioned talent pools.

But it pays to get unconventional. Some other more niche sources of candidates could be:

Reddit
Slack/Discord/online communities
Short skill challenges/Hackathons
Hosting events and webinars
A thought piece or story about your work.

This is not to say job boards lack value, but you may need to niche down on your approach to these as well. Try posting open positions on industry specific job boards to find specialized talent and attract better leads. Some good examples of this are:

11. Utilize candidate feedback

If you’re not getting feedback from candidates then you’re missing a trick. This feedback is crucial to help you improve and streamline the hiring process.

Couple of ways you can solicit feedback from candidates:

Candidate surveys: After the interview or hiring process, send a survey to candidates. Include questions about different stages of the process, such as application, interview, and communication.
Phone calls: Especially for later-stage candidates, recruiters should have built enough rapport to ask for feedback about the hiring process. This is the most effective method as it allows them to dig deeper into responses.

12. Provide interview training

As interviews are such a crucial element of the hiring process, it pays to provide training and guidance to everyone involved in them.

This can include:

Creating clear guidelines that outline the desired interview process, including structure, question types, evaluation criteria, and legal considerations.
Hosting interactive workshops or training sessions to cover interview basics, best practices, and the importance of consistent and structured interviews.
Training colleagues on soft skills like active listening, empathy, and effective communication, which are crucial for creating a positive candidate experience.
Providing training on unconscious bias and diversity to promote fair and inclusive interviewing practices.

13. Plan judiciously

Taking the time for headcount planning and creating a hiring planning strategy is incredibly important.

Be it annually, semi-annually, or quarterly, getting all the team leaders together to discuss recruitment KPIs and understand how each team will grow and develop is key to sustainable growth.

The process will help strategic alignment, hiring efficiency, workforce diversity, and even employee retention.

The process will look something like this:

Define company and team goals.
Assess specific skill needs/gaps. Often, the easiest way to identify your needs is to look at gaps in skills and experience (a skills gap analysis). Additionally, creating an org chart to go with the new hiring plan helps visualize reporting lines and working relationships.
Assess if the skill gap is coachable for the current team. If not—create the positions.
Work with HR/Talent Acquisition to create a job description
Work with other team leaders to discuss your ideas for hiring this person so there’s no overlap.
Create a plan on when you need to hire and how you will do it.

For a deeper dive, check out Mariya Hristova’s excellent article on hiring planning.

It's always worth keeping updated on the latest recruitment trends and it might also be worth checking out a recruiting conference near you.

14. Re-evaluate Your Tech Stack

Your recruitment software solution plays a key role in your hiring strategy as it directly impacts the effectiveness of your hiring team. The technology typically offers some levels of automation to simplify tasks for the team, as well as important features like a candidate database, auto-scheduling and the ability to integrate with software in your tech stack.

Just having an effective applicant tracking systems (ATS) in place will increase the efficiency of your candidate screening, provide AI-driven smart matching capability, and winnow down the manual work your team has to go through as part of the recruitment process.

Other reasons to take a second look at the tech your using include:

Improved candidate experience
Enhanced data and analytics
Adaptation to remote and hybrid work.

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