Hoops HR Blog

Fine Tune Your Recruiting Strategy to Target Top Performers

Written by Alan Margulis | Nov 18, 2017 9:45:00 PM

Recruitment strategy is a major factor in your organization’s success. For small and medium-sized businesses in particular, hourly front line talent is the company’s lifeblood. Yet many companies scrutinize their employees far more rigorously than their recruiting processes

.To attract the top available talent in a cost-effective manner, our HR experts recommend learning about best practices in recruiting and refining your strategies. Begin by identifying your current staff’s capabilities, levels of commitment, and reasons for leaving. Then apply the following suggestions to quickly boost the performance level of your new hires while reducing your hiring costs.

 

Determine your hiring criteria

What are the position requirements against which you will measure available talent? Go beyond past experience and previous positions to include the unique skill sets and character traits that have distingusshed your own top performers. Personality, attitude, and demeanor are difficult to identify in traditional resume and cover letter applications, but more advanced platforms can provide this valuable insight.
 

Expedite the screening process

The stronger your local economy, the more you need to quickly identify in-demand talent and move them quickly through the evaluation process. To do this, find a high quality source of pre-screened talent for your industry and pull profiles based on your hiring criteria. Traditional job boards simply increase your unqualified applicant volume and costs-per-hire while hindering one of the most essential elements in a strong recruiting strategy—easy comparisons of candidates by specific criteria.
 

Create a shortlist of top candidates

Once your initial screening turns up candidates that meet your criteria, narrow your list by considering career trajectory, objectives, and more specific factors to get down to your top ten candidates. Adjust this number to your preference and divide your candidates into three tiers to be interviewed in sequence. You don’t need to interview them all; in fact, successful recruiting organizations are aggressive in making quick offers to top-tier candidates.
 

Get applicant feedback

Talk to new hires in person and candidates who did not accept your offer with a follow-up phone call. Find out what they liked and didn’t like about your hiring process, as well as your company. If they accepted another position, find out what factors influenced their decision. This is the easiest way to uncover easily correctable issues with your process, and in the story you communicate to candidates about your company and culture.
 

Evaluate five simple metrics

Better recruiting results in the highest quality of hires, in the quickest possible time, at the lowest possible cost. Continually improve your ROI by evaluating performance with these recruiting metrics:

  1. Candidates selected vs. candidates interviewed
  2. Candidates interviewed vs. candidates offered
  3. Candidates offered vs. candidates hired
  4. Days-to-hire from position approval
  5. Hires that pass one year anniversary

Fine tuning your recruiting process will not only result in a stronger staff, but it will also make your job easier by reducing the resources (and time) you spend on hiring.

When employers sign up for Hoops they get instant access to a pipeline of pre-screened, availability talent. Our 1-Click Connect system makes it easy to contact candidates, saving time and money. Get started today!