The old saying, “diversify your portfolio”, is a critical message when it comes to recruitment in today’s challenging business climate. The explosion of technology can allow recruiters, hiring managers, HR practitioners, and the like to successfully diversify their recruiting strategies. Of course, this is easier said than done, but below, we provide our top recommendations on how you can start diversifying your recruitment strategy. 

It’s a long standing question of recruiters on how to be more successful and effective attracting and recruiting top talent. Back in the old days, we only had a couple of strategies at our disposal; posting an ad in the newspaper and in a “job shop room” where prospects would visit and browse through the new job postings. Today, there are more strategies than one can count, and the idea is not to make your head spin by trying to pull in as many of them as possible. The goals are to a) diversify and b) diversify with tactics that work, for you. 

Here are our recommendations for how you can get started with diversification. 

1. Optimize your career site—this is not earth-shattering but career sites need to maximize the benefits of SEO, branding, and user experience and engagement. HR and Recruiting should be partnering with in-house marketing and tech teams to build a career site that attracts visitors, traffic and inbound leads (i.e. applications and engagement). Monitor and measure it so you can determine what is working and what isn’t—do more of what is working and less of what is not. In the age of short attention spans it’s super important to create a career site that evokes a positive emotion in your organization. Amazing examples of a diverse group of career sites that we love include Adidas, Jobber, Valence, ApplyBoard, StackAdapt, Mejuri, PocketHealth, Coconut Software, HiMama, PolicyMe, and ZayZoon.  
2. Use the right mix of recruitment software—still using spreadsheets? You’re wasting a ton of time! Your “core hub” is your ATS, or a Recruitment CRM, that will allow you to keep everything organized but also to connect with, nurture and generate new leads and prospects, passively. You also need to think about how your tools integrate with your other HR-related software (e.g. HRIS). Seamless integrations are required. An excellent solution that we love is Teamtailor—amazing integrations, keep everything organized, awesome user experience and all of the CRM features that you need to be successful. Most ATS/Recruitment CRMs may not be awesome at doing everything a Recruiter needs, and if more horsepower is needed then take a look at Findem, a rapidly growing recruitment tech company that will turn your recruitment efforts into overdrive by unlocking the power of people data with AI. 
3. Boost your reach and brand awareness efforts with social media—social media tools help with having conversations and building brand awareness and relationships. It can also boost your efforts in attracting new prospects. It’s important to engage in what we call “push and pull”. Pull refers to engaging people on social media by having conversations and “pulling” them towards you. Push refers to “pushing” content out to your audience—e.g. Sharing a blog post, posting a new job posting, etc… It’s important to balance push and pull activities—if you are only pushing, as many social media accounts do, you lose the engagement with the absence of having conversations and dialogue. Typical platforms that Recruiters use include Instagram, LinkedIn and Tik Tok. However, the platforms of choice are dependent on who you are targeting. If you’re targeting an older demographic, for example, then Facebook may be a viable option. Whatever platforms you use, go “all in”. Use them to their fullest potential. 
4. Source and building a community—if you are only doing something reactively you will never differentiate yourself. Most Recruiters use new job postings as the beginning of their recruitment process. This is reactive and you’re going up against the clock to hire the right person. Think about what your favourite consumer brands are—Apple, Lululemon, Tesla, Adidas, whatever. How do you interact with them? Do you see social media content from these brands? You likely do because you follow them and they’re always creating and publishing content that you see. Now, we not advocating becoming a social media expert. All we’re saying is that you need to engage in proactive recruitment to build an engaged and warm-lead community of prospects so that when you do have a hiring need, you’re NOT going up agains the “hiring clock”. If you’re wondering how to build your sourcing skills, you need to check out our friends at Social Talent. They are simply awesome. 
5. Leverage your employees and connected networks—research indicates that the best source of hire is through employee referrals. They know your company better than anyone, and if they love working for you, they can be your most valuable and effective brand ambassadors. The same concept applies to connected networks (i.e. not necessarily your employees); customers, vendors, strategic partners, investors, employee alumni, etc… In this connected world, we can always “find someone who knows someone, and someone who knows someone who can refer someone”. It’s important to include this audience when you’re recruiting—building and nurturing relationships. 

You may be asking yourself, “how on earth can I do all of this”? The answer is simply, start somewhere and evolve your recruitment strategy. At the end of the day, when you get a place where you truly have a diversified recruitment strategy, you will reap the benefits of what it can offer you. Of course, if you’re curious to learn more about this, feel free to reach out to us at info@goscalehr.com and we can certainly help and advise you.