Let’s cut right to the sobering truth: the war for talent is upon us. Even more sobering is that recruiters unprepared for battle are already at a disadvantage. But don’t start searching for a white flag to wave just yet, there’s still hope! Small changes to a recruiting strategy can transform you into a fierce competitor ready to go toe-to-toe with talent giants like Google, Time Warner, and Zappos. Let’s follow the first rule of war (OK, enemies might be a bit dramatic but you get the idea) with a quick look at three ways big companies are scoring top talent, and what you can learn from their success.

Investing In Big Data

Google is famous for cherry-picking the world’s best talent to work for its growing online empire. For most of it’s history, submitting your SAT scores and answering questions like, “How many golf balls would it take to fill-up Fenway Park?” was par for the course during the Google interview process. While most of their recruiters thought it an effective way to hire some top guns, there was little to no data to back it up.

Things changed when Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President for People Operations, and his team ran a study to determine whether anyone at Google was particularly good at hiring. He notes, “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It was a complete random mess.” This was the catalyst that caused Google to make significant changes to increase the efficiency of their hiring process.

You may be asking yourself what you should learn from Google’s failure, but it’s really how they uncovered their failure that provides the best insight. Leveraging big data will show you what pieces of your recruiting strategy should be optimized. More importantly, it will help you uncover those “diamond in the rough” candidates that were overlooked due to indicators that simply won’t predict future performance (GPA, university, resume, etc.).

Incorporating Assessments

If big data is the cave holding all those precious diamonds in the rough, employee assessments are the picks you use to bring them to the surface. It’s one of the easiest steps you can take to lower your cost per hire and decrease your year-over-year turnover rate.

Just ask Time Warner. After years of dealing with a high first year employee turnover rate and an abundance of bad hires, they decided to implement company-wide assessments strategy to help improve efficiency. A recent case study in Talent Management shows how successful the change was. After implementing assessment tests into their hiring cycle, Time Warner found a, “16% lower first-year turnover rate for customer service, versus those not using it. After implementing company-wide pre-employment testing, the estimated cost savings was $2.6 million.” This is in addition to a 70% increase in employee productivity.

Time Warner’s incorporation of assessments leveled the candidate playing field and allowed the best, most productive candidates to rise to the top.

Creating a Solid Candidate Experience

The importance of a great candidate experience has been a hot topic in recruiting circles as of late. Many of the most prominent employment brands are spinning positive candidate experiences to reflect a strong company culture, and attract top talent.

Zappos invested heavily in candidate experience long before it was a hyped-up buzz word. With tens of thousands of applicants rolling in each year, it would be easy for the company to rest on its laurels, but they’ve committed to providing everyone who sends in an application a “Wow!” experience, regardless of if they’re hired or not. Zappos does this flawlessly from it’s first contact with job candidates and carries it through the entirety of the hiring process. They start by limiting the number of applications they receive for a specific role so that each candidate is responded to, and follow through with personalized notes to all candidate’s at each stop of the process. This opens the doors to boundless word of mouth exposure. Even candidates who are turned down are impressed with the polite, personal letters Zappos sends out, a refreshing change of pace for folks who are used to hiring managers with dismal communication records.

The most important thing to remember about implementing a flawless candidate experience is that you’re not just recruiting employees, but are sowing the seeds of your reputation. The best part is that these changes are relatively easy to implement. Applicant tracking systems like Jobvite have features that alert candidates when their application has been received, and more personal emails take just a little bit of thought and 30 seconds of your time.

With these lessons from the big boys securely in your recruitment arsenal you’ll have all weapons you need to confidently wage the talent war. Now get out there and join the fight!

Originally posted on Smarterer's HR & Recruiting Blog