It’s no secret.  To be successful in your recruiting strategy, you will need to continually innovate and adapt your strategy to the resources and initiatives that enable you to bring in the best talent.  In order to do this, not only do you have to brainstorm and think of new recruiting initiatives internally but you need to analyze other successful recruiting organization initiatives within the industry.

Do some research.  Find companies that are considered the best in their industry for recruiting and see what they do.  By looking at their recruiting strategy, you may be able to provide ideas for initiatives that you can use in your recruiting strategy to reach more qualified candidates.

But be careful, it’s not just research & replicate.  What works for other companies and industries may not work for your recruitment marketing organization.  As your mother always said just because everyone else is doing something, doesn’t mean you should.

So what initiatives should your company possibly be wary of?  Here are a few:

Social Recruiting:  Yes, many pundits and organizations think that social recruiting is the next big thing in the recruiting space.  And yes, social recruiting can be done successfully to help you achieve great results in your recruiting strategy.  However, a successful social recruiting strategy is a lot more work than some think.

In order to be successful in social recruiting, you first need to be able to commit the necessary time resources for it to be successful.  Social recruiting is a time intensive strategy and not one where you can build it and leave it on auto-pilot.  If you can’t commit dedicated resources to this initiative on a daily basis, it may not be worth implementing a social recruiting initiative over other initiatives.  There is value in putting your jobs on social recruiting channels (especially with their increased use in search results) however, don’t expect the same results as a full social recruiting strategy would provide.

Employer Branding: While it’s important to have a Career Site with information on your company, it may not be as important to your company to provide other materials / media to bolster your employer brand in the minds of candidates.  Not every organization has the budget to create multi-media videos or presentations of employees or re-design their career site with all the new bells and whistles.  Sure it’s great to have these materials, however, they may be a much lower priority for your organization especially when you utilize mostly job boards.

If you had a choice in using your budget on employer branding videos or real-time recruitment metrics that let you know what recruiting channels work best for you, what do you choose?

Team Sourcing: Some organizations do a great job of creating and supporting a group of sourcers that help them fill all their open positions through resume databases, web sources and LinkedIn.  While this can be an effective way to find the right talent for certain positions, not every organization can afford, support and / or train their people to source all the places needed to have an effective sourcing strategy.

While a professional sourcing team internally is ideal, there are some other ways to do some web sourcing cost effectively.  Whether it’s through outsourcing this function to professional services or using resume sourcing technology, there are ways to get some of the functionality of these sourcing teams without as much of the capital expenditure.

Recruiting Channels:  For every recruiting channel, you will see case studies on how a company was able to recruit & hire top candidates using that channel.  The problem with using channels that have been successful for other companies is that the performance for many of these channels can vary a good deal based on the job type, location or other factors of the position you are trying to fill.

The key is to finding the recruiting channels that work best for the positions that YOUR company hires for.  Don’t blindly use channels because you hear they work best but track and figure out what channels do work best for the different positions that you recruit for.

All the initiatives above can be a successful and integral part of your recruiting strategy and I encourage you to continuously look for interesting initiatives to include your strategy.  The key is to not assume that new initiatives will work for your organization if they’ve been successful elsewhere.  Instead, continually measure its success of each initiative against itself and the other initiatives that are included in your recruitment marketing strategy.  By doing this, you can quickly and easily identify which initiatives work and which ones are a waste of your time & budget.