Creative Recruiting “Hacks”
A successful recruiter works at honing their craft. And make no mistake, recruiting is indeed a craft, and often takes intricate efforts. For the past several years - pre-COVID economic upheaval - recruiters were immersed in a candidate’s market, characterized by low unemployment and fierce competition for any available talent. Finding talent and filling jobs ultimately became an art – with recruiters designing layered campaigns to unearth the right personnel, often for specialty positions, while focused on courting talented candidates that were highly sought after.
Today as we embark on reopening and recovery, high unemployment levels will fill an overflowing talent pool for recruiters. But a waterfall of candidates poses its own unique set of challenges in still finding the right candidates for open positions; positions which may have indeed been altered specific to requirements and offerings based on the unprecedented challenges organizations across the world have been experiencing. It will take a new mindset in the workforce from both employers and employees, especially as it pertains to flexibility and longevity, as well as considering skill-sets that may not traditionally apply to a role but could be valuable nonetheless. A recruiter’s job in the post-COVID employment landscape will take precision to deliver results.
Recruiters must always innovate
Recruiters have painstakingly developed their network, and they often leave no stone unturned to find the right professionals. They certainly need their databases (the ATS, the VMS, the CRM, et. al) and they reference these individual platforms frequently. But a quick search also shows that recruiting efforts often transcend the traditional methods that are promoted throughout the industry. Often called “hacks”, not to be mistaken with the conjured image of illegal, back-door entry into a data system, but more as innovative actions used to increase productivity and reach goals, and probably better described as “creative recruiting.”
QuantumWork’s experience with some of the best recruiters in the industry have unearthed some of the most creative ways in which they have reached an audience or uncovered talent. Through available idea-sharing and first-hand commentary, we’ve collected some ideas that have stood out over time below:
- Targeting the Customer Base for Talent
- Do you remember way-back when IKEA placed career assembly instructions in their packages? Or when Apple hid job ads on random pages throughout their web site? Targeting customer bases is a smart, cost-effective way to discover talent who already supports the brand.
- Time-Savers and Information Diggers
- Did you ever hear of a Sourcing Hackathon? There’s an entire culture dedicated to the nuances of sourcing. Global sourcing challenges and competitions exist for talent sourcing professionals and recruiters to demonstrate their skillsets, especially through remarkable data query and brilliant Boolean search technique.
- Industry Leaders
- Do you source conference attendee lists? It’s a great way to create contacts with leaders in any given industry.
- Creative Marketing Campaigns, synonymous with Creative Recruiting Campaigns.
You can find countless examples of ingenious recruitment marketing campaigns focused on finding talent, that simultaneously built brand recognition. Here are just a few:- To be a master Lego model builder is a child’s dream; Lego recruited their next top model maker who displayed #BrickFactor using an intense competition format
- Google landed talented engineers who could decipher a stand-out billboard message
- Solving puzzles as a first step to getting hired:
- Creating a crossword puzzle in 1942 to attract cryptologists and codebreakers
- Online Crack the code game finds top data minds to help the British intelligence agency combat cyberattacks
Recruiters are experts in creating productivity routines, and finding tools that will help them do their jobs well in order to keep the world working. Platforms like QuantumWork’s AI-driven talent solution, which allows visibility into an entire talent pool of past and present permanent, contingent, and freelance workers, is one such tool that augments the clever practices and procedures that recruiters are known for. Through a combination of their tried and true methods along with new solutions that can help increase productivity and recruiting efficiency, recruiters will continue to be the wizards behind the curtain of a well-defined and successful workforce.
What kind of recruiting wizardry have you employed to meet your goals? What’s your best recruiting success story? Share with us.