Sam O’Brien October 5, 2020 There comes a point in most business lifespans where you must hire more staff. Maybe your company is growing from strength to strength and you have decided to open a new office. It could be that you are looking for someone who can help develop your customer engagement strategies.
Or, perhaps that dreaded time in any CEO’s life has come, and you have had to give someone the chop. That means now you need a new replacement.
Whatever the reason for it, the process behind hiring new workers is never a fun one. As, for both the employers and employees, it can be an arduous task.
You can sit there for hours searching through the millions of CVs in your inbox, hoping that the perfect one will suddenly jump out at you. And that’s before you even begin the three-stage interview process.
Yet, the perfect candidate could be right under your nose. Think about it. Who knows the work and culture of your company better than your current employees?
In other words, why not hire new staff through your existing personnel? After all, they know your company inside out. They know the rules of the breakroom. They understand how to handle the workload. And, they will make the perfect teammate for someone they already get on with.
See it like this, their friends are your friends.
The following are five ways to attract new talent with your current employees.
Source: TalentLyft
Create a referral program
The best part about hiring through current employees is that new candidates already have someone who can vouch for them. As well as aiding the company, you could also reward the employee that found your new hire, and this can be done through a referral program.
Be creative with your incentives. You can go as big or small as you choose. Just make sure you do make it an actual enticement. An obvious choice is to offer a bonus for a team member who brings a skilled new colleague to the table. It may even be a win/win scenario, where both your employee and their referral get a money reward.
Or you may just decide to do something fun like giving first dibs on Friday donuts. You could even give a gift basket of their favorite treats to nibble on at work. Or how about giving a voucher for a cocktail making class…the list is endless.
Make any incentive something that people would like, and keep it engaging so that people want to introduce new candidates.
There may be the worry with friend referral programs that a person may be unqualified for the job. Remember, though, that friends tend to talk about work. This means that referrals will already have a rough idea about the job. They will have heard the good and bad points of the role and will know how they feel about it.
Your employee may even know this referral from a previous job or from the same college course. So, they’ll know they already have the right skills and are capable of adapting practices.
The staff member will also be conscious of how the candidate will reflect on them. That means they will be eager to bring in a good applicant.
Once your new employee starts at the company, you may want to offer a new hire onboarding scheme. This allows HR to see how the latest member is settling in.
Source: Invite Referrals
Boost Employee Generated Content
How much time do you tend to spend on social media?
Data from Statista suggests people spend around 144 minutes per day on social networks. The chances are, your potential candidates are spending that long on them, too.
This also means that more brands have caught on to the power of social media. From LinkedIn to Instagram, firms now use social media to promote their culture. Here is your chance to get ahead of the competition and be more transparent as a company.
Share the best parts of the office culture with the world. Do you have a virtual team building event coming up? A weekly employee happy hour? Maybe your sales team came up with a TikTok dance. Do you create digital handbooks to keep your team engaged? Post about it!
We may be living in a world where AI and machines are being used to improve work, but that doesn’t mean the fun people have to disappear. Get potential new hires excited about the kind of work environment they are getting into.
The aim here is to make people want to work at your company.
Source: 3BL Media
Encourage employee testimonials
As with social media, putting yourself out there on a review site shows your transparency as a firm. Potential buyers check out customer reviews, and potential applicants look for employee reviews.
One of the first things that new employees tend to do is look for reviews of the business. Companies are even sending out emails after interviews to invite reviews of how they went. So, you need to put yourself out there in this area, too.
Places like LinkedIn and Glassdoor have become a hub for workplace transparency. Granted, people are more likely to write a review about either a really good or a really bad experience. But a review is a review and this is what people will use as a reference.
Whether it’s a good or bad employee experience, it’s important to be clear and visible as a firm. Especially as sometimes, when things look a little too perfect, you start to wonder what the catch is.
This is also a great learning curve for you. Especially if you can show that you turned your bad reviews around.
For example, say you write work schedules for your staff. But a year ago, being pressed for time, you were getting these out a bit too last minute for people’s liking. Then you check Glassdoor. Lo and behold, a disgruntled employee has written a negative review about this.
So, you talk to employees to find out what works best for your employees. You also do some research and decide to follow an employee schedule template. Before you know it, you are writing rotas two weeks in advance. You then check Glassdoor again and notice that this is now something you are praised for.
Any potential new employees will see this and notice that you care about your employees. What’s more, if this is your only negative trait, your new worker might not see it as such a big deal.
Source: Host Papa
Spice Up Hiring Pages And Job Ads
Think about things from a potential employee’s point of view. Would you prefer to work for a company that barely provides any information about the job to applicants? Or for one that puts lots of information in?
People want to know as much as they can about any role. They want to know what the working hours are. What the culture is like. What is expected of them. What the role entails. If a hiring page doesn’t include such information, it may feel like you’re hiding something.
As machine learning changes the way we work, new hires may also want to know the kind of tech they’ll be working with. And yes, they will want to know they will be getting paid a decent wage, too.
When making your job ad, think about the benefits your company offers and also add these in.
Be inventive with design, too. You could add pictures, GIFS, videos. Even quotes, blogs, vlogs, illustrations, or cartoons can help your ads to stand out. Or even try vox pops, interviews, quizzes…the world is your oyster.
Basically, do what you can to get people talking about your brand and why they should work there. You want to get current employees to say why they love working there and why others will love it too.
There is also some fantastic hiring software out there. These will help you figure out the best places to post jobs. So, make sure to check them out.
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