Attract and Engage the Best Recruiters to Grow Your Business

Is hiring the best recruiters for your business a key goal this year? It is for most of the recruitment leaders that I talk to.  I was asked by APSCo to talk at their quarterly members meeting about how to attract and engage your own recruiters.  Below are some of the tips I shared from my Internal Recruitment Workshops.

Are You One of the 61% Of Recruitment Leaders?

Recruitment leaders know that the key to growth in turnover and profit is having the right recruiters – and that means hiring the best recruiters out there. There’s a few recruitment stats knocking about which have made me stop and think:

61% of recruitment leaders are worried about attracting their own talent this year

Every recruitment leader I speak to:

1. Wants their teams to be more effective, successful, inspired.

2. They want them to have more phone and face time (critical sales tasks).

3. They are all worried about the technology paralysis that is preventing this precious phone and face time.

What Do These Hiring Stats Say About the Recruitment Sector?

There are stats like80% of talent placed last year was already on your internal systems before you spent time (often 4 hours per day) sourcing from external systems such as LinkedIn.

The recruiter demographic is getting younger – we assume that this demographic gets tech, but are finding out the hard way that this is not always the case. So, skills like digital marketing, CRM processes are becoming critical to the average recruitment consultant.

What Do Deloitte and APSCo Say About the Recruitment Sector?

The stats from APSCo and Deloitte’s annual study say it all:

• 68% of leaders want access to new recruiters

• 63% cited staff training as critical

• 89% told APSCo that use of digital marketing was either very important or important

• 86% said that they needed new technology to grow

But still there is a lack of strategy around internal attraction. I run Internal Recruitment Digital Marketing Workshops to tackle attraction and engagement and focus on 4 areas.

• Attract (to Prevent Churn)

• Engage (to Increase Speed)

• Inspire (to Hire)

• Train (to Retain)

I’ll talk about the first two in this blog and give some practical tips.

1. Attract to Prevent Recruiter Churn

The goal is NOT to attract – it’s to KEEP! I often find that the recruitment process is too heavy on the face time and not geared up to benefit from online.

“70% of candidates come to your website before contacting you too – what does your website say?”

Stats tell us that talent can spend around 2 hours engaging with you online BEFORE contacting you – do you have 2 hours of decent content about your culture, values, life chances?

“72% of applicants want to know about your values and culture… what is it and where is it?”

Or do you simply have a benefits list which include childcare vouchers and holidays (neither are benefits… they are rights…)

Think about the online platforms that you are live on and use them to attract – yes an obvious statement, but recruiters are so keen to mend their clients’ shoes and recruit for them, that they are walking around bare-foot and ignoring their own recruiting strategies!

• Have a content plan aimed at attracting and hiring the best recruiters, not just a job advert and interview plan!

• Ensure managers’ LinkedIn profiles look like they are great to work for… Yes, innovate your adverts (we know a lot about this) but also create some engaging videos to help your ideal recruiters see and hear who and where they will be working (Health warning… dump the 2 minute talking heads, overly produced, serious, looking-like-you’re-going-to-a-wedding videos and get real).

• Pitch your business – don’t abdicate your employer brand to your marketing department and Rec2Rec firms – they are there to support you! Your goal in attracting is to attract people who won’t leave after 2 months as they made a mistake. You want them skipping into the interview, staring at their phone waiting for your call, being their best…

Can you honestly say that your attraction strategy attracts the best and most engaged?

Or does it attract recruiters who have you in a long list of prospects? If 61% of you are worried about your internal recruitment strategy, ask yourselves what % of your time you are spending proactively fixing the issue?

2. Not so Fluffy Recruiter Engagement

Now – this is a pretty fluffy word, which means many things to many recruiters. In my world, it’s pretty simple. What are you doing to get them to show their faces to you? They are unlikely to engage with you in a public place (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) – but Mailers?

• Mailers that you send to their private email address?

• Mailers that they can read on their mobile?

• Mailers that they can click on and if you have used a decent mailing system you can see who is clicking on what?

You’d be crazy not to try this! And your internal recruiters would love to see the resulting call list from your campaign! Do you have a database of talent (ie. Recruiters) that you can mail about how to be a great recruiter, include tips for hitting target, demonstrate your culture, show your successes, survey their likes and hates, advertise your jobs and how much your clients love you?

You should generate call lists from the ones who click onto your mailers. “Cold calls are great, warm calls are better! (Greg Savage told me this!)”

There are other ways that you can engage. The marketing puritans out there would frown at my suggestion, but hey… I’m trying to be practical and fix a pretty significant issue.

I’ll tackle my next 2 points: Inspire to Hire and Train to Retain in a later post.

How about you try and tackle the first two points above and see how you get on?

Is hiring the best recruiters to grow your recruitment business one of your goals?

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