7 Ways to Become a More Successful Recruiter?

How to become a more successful recruiter is a major concern of today’s modern recruiters.

The war for talent is raging on, and recruiters are facing new challenges. Do you have what it takes to thrive in today’s highly-competitive recruiting industry?

What makes a successful recruiter?

Recruiting industry has been going through a period of immense change in the last few years.

Unlike before, today’s labor market is completely candidate-driven.

According to research, 90% of recruiting professionals think that today’s labor market is candidate driven.

Consequently, finding and hiring ideal job candidates, especially those with in-demand skills, has become an extremely hard, expensive and time-consuming endeavor.

As the "War for talent" is getting more and more intense, recruiters are faced with new challenges which have changed the way we recruit.

The recruiters who are ready to embrace these new challenges will be successful, while the others will be left behind.

How to become a more successful recruiter?

In order to successfully tackle these new challenges and get ahead in the talent game, recruiters must adopt new recruiting strategies, tactics and tools.

Here is the list of the 7 most important recruiting strategies that will help you become a more successful recruiter.

1. Build talent pools

Gone is the time when you could post your job opening on a job board and wait for a great candidate to come to you.

Why?

Because only active job seekers visit job boards.

The war for talent is raging on, so your best job candidates are passive job seekers. These passive job seekers are candidates who aren't actively looking for a new job, but would be willing to accept a better offer.

73% of candidates are passive job seekers who are not actively looking for new job opportunities.

In order to become a more successful recruiter, you need to go out there and proactively source and attract these passive job seekers. You need to become a talent sourcing pro.

You can’t afford to wait for the new positions to open to start recruiting.

You need to constantly build pools with great talent.

That way you will have the perfect candidates even before you have a new job opening!

2. Focus on candidates

When job market was employer-driven, it made sense to focus on the wishes, wants and needs of employers.

But things have changed.

Now the job market is candidate-driven, so you have to focus on your candidates.

In order to become a more successful recruiter, you have to focus on candidate's wants and needs, hopes and fears. You need to understand what candidates are looking for from employers.

Why is this important?

First, when you know what really motivates your candidates, you can use that knowledge to attract them. You can turn your company’s employee value proposition (EVP) into a real magnet for attracting candidates.

Second, getting to know your candidates on a deeper level can help you build and maintain relationships not only with current, but also past and potential future candidates.

You will excel at candidate relationship management and build better talent pools.

Finally, you can encourage candidate engagement and significantly improve candidate experience.

3. Utilize specialized recruiting software

Today’s technology offers a great variety of specialized recruiting software which can automate, streamline and improve different stages of your recruiting process.

There are modern HR tools that offer all-in-one solution for finding attracting, engaging, nurturing and converting candidates into job applicants.

Adopting these tools will give you a huge competitive advantage in the war for talent.

Before getting a recruiting tool, you should first identify your recruiting goals and challenges.

This way, you will be able to better understand if you need solutions offered by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) or solutions offered by Recruitment Marketing Software.

4. Use data-driven approach

To become a more successful recruiter, you need to make better and more informed recruiting decisions.

You can do that based on the data form your recruiting software.

By tracking and reviewing the most important recruiting metrics, such as time to hire, cost to hire and quality of hire, you can get a clear and precise, data-backed evaluation of your recruiting efforts.

Based on insights that you get form data, you can adjust your recruiting strategies to improve your ROI.

For example, if your data shows that your best job candidates come from referrals, you can stop wasting your money on job boards.

In other words, you can save your time and money by investing in the channels that bring the best results.

5. Use social recruiting

When we say social recruiting, you probably think of posting your job ads on Facebook. Everybody does that these days. If you want to stand out and attract top talent, you need to go a lot further.

In order to become a more successful recruiter, you need to become aware of the power that social media networks hold, and be quick to utilize it.

Social recruiting goes beyond posting current vacant jobs ads on your company’s social network profiles.

You can use social recruiting to proactively search for potential candidates, build relationships with them and encourage them to apply to your vacant job positions.

6. Use employee referrals

To become a more successful recruiter, you have to set up a structured employee referral program.

By using a structured employee referral program, you can find talented people with the help of existing employees. You ask existing employees to recommend candidates from their networks, and you offer them employee referral awards in return.

Employee referral program is your best bet for finding and hiring the ideal job candidate and improving the most important hiring metrics such as time and cost per hire, quality of hire and employee retention.

7. Use marketing tactics

In order to become a more successful recruiter, you need to start using marketing tactics to attract talent. This new trend of using marketing tactics in recruiting is called Recruitment Marketing.

The main goal of Recruitment Marketing is to drive talent to apply for the open positions. In other words, it makes talent come to you.

In order to achieve this goal, you need to develop inventive Employer Branding strategies to build a picture of your company as a desirable employer.

Another important method for attracting top talent is Inbound Recruiting. Inbound recruiting is a method of creating targeted, branded content to attract and engage talent.

This content needs to be informative and useful for talented professionals you want to attract. It can come in different forms, such as company’s career blog, team blogging about interesting projects, employer branding videos, interesting social media posts, employee stories and career advice.

If you’re looking for some inspiration and best practice examples, check out these great Employer Branding ideas.

Are you ready to become a more successful recruiter?