Top 15 Hacks and Tools for Better Hiring in 2020

It is better to retain your top performers rather than investing in finding them anew, the reason being that recruiting is not an easy process. It is, in fact, one of the most complex processes undertaken by businesses these days. Finding the best-fit both in skill-sets and qualifications is vital for the sustenance of the business as you need a capable team of employees to carry out essential tasks. All managers look for new, innovative approaches or hack to bag the top talent in their industry, irrespective of the company’s standing and size. Upping your hiring process in fast-changing times is all about understanding what works and what does not in the recruitment market.

But as you gear up for your hiring plan for 2020, here are some effective HR hacks you must know to accelerate your recruitment process:

Hiring boomerangs or rehiring ex-employees is a useful HR hack, which can help the organization reacquire lost talent and expertise. It must be made sure that highly skilled employees stay connected with the organization, even after leaving the job, to ensure that they feel welcome when rejoining the organization. What makes this approach even better is that getting further skilled and versatile employees back in the fold will benefit the organization in the longer run.

A key element often ignored by many organizations is the job description. While a dull job description does fulfill its purpose of describing the job responsibilities to the potential candidate, but it fails to attract them to the job role. A job description should be exciting and fun enough to sell the advantages of the job to the candidate. These days, organizations have gone a step further and introduced video job descriptions that enable shaping candidates’ perspectives of their job responsibilities.

In the social age, challenges faced by HR may have increased multifold, but so have the advantages. The reach of social media has increased manifold, making it the perfect platform for advertising job positions in your organization. A better reach means a bigger pool of candidates. This, in turn, increases an organization’s possibility of hiring the best talent, preventing it from staying restricted to a specific area or region.

One of the oldest and most commonly used HR tools has to be employee referrals. It has been a common practice to ask for recommendations from top employees of the organization to fill vacant job positions in the organization. Usually, if any employee comes through the recommendation of a top manager or employee, it comes at the sake of the employee’s reputation, thus lowering the chances of any bad additions to the organization. Other than contacting the senior employees for recommendations, companies can also expand their talent pool through various other referral programs.

A non-official and friendly event is an excellent way to gain a better perspective about a potential candidate beyond their curriculum vitae. Any social event, frequently attended by top professionals, could be the right place to find the ‘right’ candidate for the desired job positions.

It is not an easy task to attract talented candidates. It requires you to understand their expectations, pain points, and the key factors that could influence the employee’s preferences for a job. Having a clear idea about candidates’ expectations will help you better tailor your offer to secure the right candidate in no time.

Asking yourself this question will help you contemplate your USP, and what your organization provides and your competitors don’t? Developing a unique employment proposition can give you the reason as to why the candidate should choose you over your competitors. One way to do this could be to engage your existing employees and ask them to list down the reasons that make them love their office, work, and colleagues.

The Automated hiring process makes sifting through a high volume of aspirants and finding the best talent an easy task. Recruiters can make the most of automated recruitment software to find suitable candidates for every available position. These tools can ease the process considerably, particularly in such tasks like sourcing, communicating, placing the job ads, surveying candidates, and more. Your automated tool would ensure that you always have a pipeline of quality candidates. Moreover, an AI tool can also help speed up the process by providing a real-world test environment to look for core skills in an employee. Small HR teams can engage candidates in a much better way with effective use of automation and AI.

Recruitment aided by programmatic advertising is gaining ground nowadays. It’s an effective way of buying, placing, and improving job ads with the effective use of technology. There’s less human intervention as opposed to traditional advertising and more penetration in terms of communicating effectively with the target audience. You can approach the right candidates on the right websites at the opportune moment!  It includes the use of big data, targeted ads, campaign optimization, and real-time bidding for eliminating inefficient processes and unreasonable spending, which is what commonly happens in traditional recruitment advertising.

A job title is often sidelined while creating job advertisements, but this may have a severe impact on the recruitment process. When creating a job title, view it from a candidates’ perspective- what keywords would they type? What would most people anticipate in this job role? Refrain from using flashy jargon and complicated words as it may lower your search ranking when aspirants are on the lookout for a job. If you want to get the best candidates, focus on keeping the title more uncomplicated such as sales manager, accountant, and programmer, etc.

Some companies rush blindly into the interviewing process rather than waiting to conduct interviews in a structured and thoughtful manner. Interviews are just as difficult for the person interviewing as it’s for the candidate being interviewed. Considering a structured or semi-structured interview approach can help standardize your interviews and add value to your business. The structure need not be excessively detailed, but it should include a brief rundown of what are you most likely to ask and what you will discuss in an interview.

This step involves the CEO of the firm calling potential candidates to inform them about how the company would benefit from their contribution and how the company, in turn, will provide perks and privileges that matter most to the candidates. This is one of the least used tools and is more useful for small-scale organizations than corporate behemoths.

Using the leverage of time can help you enhance productivity rather than wasting a substantial amount of time on repetitive and standardized procedures that you need to follow each time you hire people. Now, routine tasks can be turned into a checklist to weed out last minute hassles. Take, for instance, steps in recruitment into account – creating job advert, building a candidate pool, scheduling interviews, and follow-ups, etc. Converting these steps into a checklist can limit the amount of manual time involved in going through each step individually, such as creating a separate checklist for recruitment and onboarding. Each time you hire a new candidate, this checklist will come in handy.

Templates make digital tasks less complicated and more effective than ever. Creating a unique recruitment ad every time you want to increase the headcount can be a time-consuming process. With a standardized template for specific processes, your efficiency as a recruitment manager will increase manifold. These HR templates can work for a variety of formats- interview invitations, job title and description templates, rejection letters, etc. You can personalize your template and add minute details as per your needs.

Tests assess a candidate’s skills and competency much better than anything else. Furthermore, you can gather crucial data to analyze important aspects of a candidate’s personality. These tests are available across various domains to ensure that you find the best fit for your organization.

These recruitment hacks will help you improve your hiring skills and identify ideal candidates with little to no effort. In a competitive market, if you want to bag the best talent, you should adopt creative recruitment strategies without a second thought. Furthermore, you have to stay ahead of the curve by continually reinventing your hiring strategies – this, in turn, will aid you in achieving organizational objectives faster than ever.

So why not use these suggestions and include them in your hiring strategy and keep your recruitment game strong?

You may also like to read: Road to Better Hiring in 2020: The Top 5 Talent Acquisition Strategies HR Teams Must Follow