Whether you’re a smaller business or agency that doesn’t always have live roles, or maybe your team tends to stick around for longer, recruitment may not always be a key priority in many organisations. But when the time comes to replace that person that has moved on, or when the workload needs to be divided, it can be hard to ramp up the advertising and find the right person in a manageable timeframe. Known as reactive recruitment, it’s often the hardest challenging in hiring; going from a standing start to an active recruitment phase with nothing but a job advert and maybe a salary.
With the average job seeker sending almost 30 applications before they’re hired, it’s easy to see how tough the competition is too. So to avoid the long wait for the right person if you aren’t actively posting new jobs each week, here are 5 actionable tips to keep the CVs coming.
Encourage speculative applications
Many organisations fall into the trap of having no option for candidates to share their information if they don’t have a live role. By only opening up application channels when you need someone, you’re keeping your net very small by only showing it for a small amount of time.
However, don’t fall into the trap of posting fake jobs. Getting a candidate’s hopes up and asking them to give their time just so you can see their skills / commitment / whatever else is a recipe for disaster. Read our latest article on fake jobs and why they’re not a good idea.
Be active on LinkedIn
This is very obvious, but you may not be as active as you could be on the world’s largest database of active candidates. Although strong organisations usually have strong networks built around tools like LinkedIn, you can go much further by opening dialogues with candidates in your region or industry and telling your story before you’ve got a job for them.
Although customising messages and building rapport takes time, it’s much easier to offer someone a role if you’ve already shared industry insights with them, attended a webinar or endorsed their skills on LinkedIn.
Alongside this, remember to manage your own posts and interactions away from the InMail function. Join relevant groups, post insights and news updates about your organisation and start building an audience. When you eventually do share a live job, you’ll see more success – and visibility – than if you post a job advert which just happens to be your first LinkedIn post in months.
Use a job board management agency
Job boards still have a very important function regardless of organisation size or frequency of recruiting. However, if you don’t use them often, or rarely at all, the packages and practices may need an initial time investment so you can ensure your adverts are working for you.
An easy and free way to get around this is to engage with a job board management agency, often called a media buying agency. Agencies like this will bring in their expertise and management skills, dealing with things like job board packages, credits, contracts and anything else that eats up time. Alongside this, they’re also adept at ensuring job adverts are performing and ensuring the spend is going in the right places. Sometimes, you’ll even see better results than you would if you were managing the job board posts yourself.
At Artfully, we specialise in niche, one-off roles alongside regular recruitment, so reach out to the team to see if we can help you get better value from your job board spend, no matter how infrequent that may be.
Get help with the job ad – and your employer brand
If you post a live role once in a while, it’s not unfair to say you may be a little out of practice! From language choice to tone and even gender, there’s a lot of science – and sales – behind a top-performing job advert.
If you aren’t up to scratch with job advert writing, or aren’t a natural writer, it’s very easy to fall into the traps of posting a reduced job description, writing something that’s too long / short / not detailed enough, or (the worst) getting ChatGPT to write one for you.
Your job advert is your front page, so take the time or hand it over to the experts. You’ll see an immediate uplift in responses if your job advert is a top-performer and it helps to set the tone for the onward candidates journey.
This journey, often called your employer brand, is equally important – and may not exist if your recruitment and HR are not defined. Having a consistent approach to recruitment and a candidate journey that is both professional and structured are great ways to make sure any offer you make is accepted. However, telling your brand story properly is a much more powerful way of getting results.
Before you hire, consider agreeing what your employer brand looks like by asking your current employees what drives them and why they keep coming back. This is then your ammunition when you start ‘selling’ your organisation and the role to a prospective candidate.
Recruit even if you aren’t recruiting
Our most powerful tip is also the most difficult to execute. Even if you have no active roles, no new work in the pipeline and you really believe your team won’t be changing anytime soon, don’t bury your head in the sand! Things can change in an instant and recruiting reactively can leave you high and dry if you suddenly need someone new.
The best recruiters don’t necessarily focus on the actual placement of candidates. They network, they follow up, then build a mailing list and they speak to candidates often even if they can’t offer anything right now. By creating a genuine, communication-focused network, it becomes very easy to reach out to the right people at the right time. Even if they aren’t available, if you’ve taken the time with them before you have a live job, they may recommend someone they know.
Even just grabbing a coffee or catching up at an industry event is enough, so stay visible and always available to chat, sharing what you can and asking the important questions. You may even tap into the ‘holy grail’ of infrequent recruitment, which is knowing which candidate you’re going to hire before you’ve even written the job advert.
Struggling to recruit reactively? No idea how to get results on LinkedIn? Job board underperforming? The Artfully team is ready and waiting to help your recruitment advertising do more for you. Reach out using the contact us page and we’ll take a look at your problem or opportunity and share our expert insights!
