As far as the social media front goes, there’s a major uptick in the use of Instagram as an employment-branding platform, and companies are finding creative ways to not only communicate their brand on this platform but also engage their staff to share pictures or videos that have to do with their employment experience. Create a specific corporately-sponsored hashtag to provide prospective job seekers with a unique insight of what it’s like to work at your company, but make sure it’s very unique to your brand and something that nobody else will mistakenly copy.

Most importantly, do your homework. Understand what your employment value proposition is, and make it stand out from the crowd to gain a leg up on your competition. Why would your ideal candidate want to come work for you? If you aren’t crystal clear on that, all the money and time in the world is going to be wasted because you will be chasing the wrong types of people.

Create a positive candidate experience

Your ideal candidate’s experience with your business is not solely based on the application itself, but encompasses everything from their first touch point with your brand all the way to either onboarding them for the role or rejecting their application.

These prospective employees are also likely current customers of your brand, so above all else, treat them like you would a customer. Provide them with an application process that is simple and works on any device they choose to use. More than 40 per cent of career site traffic is coming via phone these days, so have a posting that makes the application process simple no matter which platform your audience chooses to use.

Try to see the application process through the eyes of an applicant and rate their experience based on ease of use, time sensitivity and personalization. Are you currently forcing candidates to run through a maze of applications or assessments and then failing to acknowledge them with a follow-up email? Always be clear with candidates about your recruitment process and when they can expect to hear back from you. Remember and recognize that word of mouth — whether positive or negative — can adversely affect your hiring processes both now and in the future, as candidates are likely to share their experience with others.

Assess your talent and measure your success

The Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) estimates a bad hire to cost up to five times their annual salary to replace, so it’s important to make better, more informed decisions when hiring. An effective way to do this is by implementing candidate assessments into the recruitment process to save your organization time and money associated with making the wrong hiring choices.

Assessments can provide insights into the skills, abilities and culture fit of potential employees, and once you start collecting this data over time, your company can start to make better decisions with every hire. Analytics can help companies gain insights into their workforce and are becoming front and centre in terms of predicting who to hire, where they’re going to come from, how long they’re going to stick around for and how well they perform.

The mistake most companies make when implementing candidate assessments is grabbing a generic assessment, plugging it in and assuming it is right. Ask yourself what it is exactly you are trying to achieve with your assessments. Are you looking to measure behavior, culture fit or competency in a sales or management role?
Think about what are you trying to accomplish in your workforce — are you trying to hire people who sell more, or are you interested in lowering turnover? All these questions should be asked and answered before you go down that path.

Sourcing best-fit employees is based on a combination of factors, but considering all of these elements will help you ultimately build a stronger, more stable and cost-effective workforce in your company.

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About the author:

Cameron Laker is the CEO and Co-Founder of Mindfield, a technology-enabled talent solutions provider that partners with companies to improve the quality of their hourly workforce by tying business outcomes such as sales performance, tenure and engagement to the selection, hiring and measurement of quality candidates. For more information, visit mindfieldgroup.com and follow @mindfieldgroup.