Recruiting staff is not getting any easier, and with the demand for talent exceeding supply in many sectors, the problems will only get worse. The recruitment industry has grown up and prospered around staff shortages, because of the ability of recruitment agencies to identify and resource talented people.
Many companies have, historically relied on using recruitment agencies as their primary source of candidates. They will have supplemented this with some web applicants and some direct applicants, but when they need to be proactive (maybe replacing a leaver), they typically pick up the phone to their favourite agency. While this is certainly necessary for specialist and senior roles (although not always), it is also a very expensive option if you use this method every time.
We are passionate about encouraging companies to look at different ways of recruiting staff, themselves, directly. Some of the methods we advocate are really very simple and obvious, and can be implemented quite quickly. Some others needs a little more work. Here are some methods we use with our clients, to create a direct recruitment strategy for them.
- Recruitment Audit. We first assess and understand the effectiveness of your current recruitment strategy, to see where changes and improvements can be made.
- Your Corporate Website. This is an absolutely essential part of any direct recruiting strategy, as it acts as the hub of all the activities. You should have a careers section, and all your live vacancies advertised, as the very minimum. If you don't have either of these then look at our new product specifically designed for companies such as yours.
- Direct Advertising. Sounds obvious, but there are many online options to place your adverts on, from generic job boards to the specialist niche job boards. Drive your traffic back through your website or direct into your company.
- Direct Sourcing. Using online CV databases to source candidates yourself. Some training will be required initially, but this is a tremendous source of unlimited candidates for a fixed cost.
- Blog. The world has gone blog mad, and the job seekers of today expect to find them everywhere. Your company should be no different. They are a great way of publicising your company, to both customers and prospective employees. They allow you to use photographs, videos and appealing text to tell people everything about your company, and what it is like to work there.
- Your Staff. These are your best recruiters - but only if you get it right. If you trust in them and reward them accordingly, they will act as great recruiters for your company.
- Social Networking. Many companies are starting to realise that the likes of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn are a great source of potential candidates. Learn how to use these social networking sites to help you recruit staff.
There are of course more ways to recruit staff directly, which we can help you with.
If you would like to us to help you with:
- Reviewing your existing recruitment strategy
- Setting up your recruitment strategy
- Setting up a direct resourcing strategy
- Saving significant recruitment costs
- Any other recruitment strategy issues
Contact us today on 01903 206249 or email us, for an initial no obligation conversation. You can of course use our live chat function on this page to chat to us now online.
