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8 Ideas for Talent Acquisition Success in 2023

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Every employer’s definition of talent acquisition success is different. But many employers have learned valuable lessons over the years. Recently, we decided to capture some of those lessons so other hiring organizations could benefit. That’s why we asked business and recruiting leaders to share tips for talent acquisition success in the year ahead.

Tips for Talent Acquisition Success

From using predictive analytics to cultivating a sense of community among team members, we received a collection of answers that reads like a practical “how to” playbook. Below, we share the top answers to our question, “What’s your best strategy to gain a competitive advantage in talent acquisition this year?”

  •   Re-Engineer Your Brand as a Recruiting Tool
  •   Share Engaging Video Content
  •   Be Flexible
  •   Use Predictive Analytics
  •   Deepen Your Diversity Initiatives
  •   Assess the Market and Develop Appropriate Goals
  •   Audit Your EVP and Culture from a Prospect’s Perspective
  •   Create a Sense of Community

To learn more about how you can make these ideas work for your organization, read the full responses below…

8 Ways to Achieve Talent Acquisition Success in 2023

1. Re-Engineer Your Brand as a Recruiting Tool

We all know how important employer branding has become in the age of social media. But we sometimes overlook it as a true recruiting channel in the overall talent acquisition strategy.

Often it’s used as a marketing tool for selling a company brand. But my best tip is to re-engineer your employer brand so it acts as a recruiting tool. For example:

  • Develop lead magnets that link to employee stories.
  • Conduct career-building webinars for industry newbies and collect emails or resumes from interested registrants.
  • Create quizzes or surveys targeting people who are open to job opportunities, and use these teasers outside your career page to gather more leads.

If you’re an HR or recruiting professional, employer branding challenges you to put on your marketing hat. This year, add a sales hat to that mix so you can attract more qualified candidate leads and close more job offers.

Kelly Loudermilk, Talent Innovator, BuildHR, Inc.

2. Share Engaging Video Content

How many of us would decide to buy a house or a car without knowing vital details? Yet most employers still expect candidates to settle for this kind of hiring experience.

The problem is that smart people don’t have the time or desire to jump through all the traditional job application hoops to find out what’s on the other side. That’s why savvy employers are including more detailed information about jobs on the front end of the recruiting process, so they can attract better talent.

But what about nuanced questions where the answers won’t fit into a tidy bullet point on a job description? Questions like, “What types of challenges does your team solve regularly?” or “What is it like to work with the manager?” This is where video can help.

By recording video answers to these critical questions, recruiters have an indispensable new set of assets that can make candidate outreach more effective. Video also helps employers seem more transparent, which helps them stand out in competitive hiring situations.

Justin Vajko, Principal & Chief Strategy Guy, Dialog

3. Be Flexible

If your company expects to attract and retain talent, you must offer employee experiences that support real flexibility and build your culture around this way of working.

Our new “Work Now” research report found that leaders view the workplace as flexible because of the freedom associated with their role and stature. However, employees don’t experience the same level of flexibility.

Leaders who expect to attract and retain great employees need to listen carefully, move past assumptions based on their personal experience with the organization, and design more connected, flexible experiences for other members of the workforce.

Also, if you’re tempted to rely on pulse surveys for feedback, here’s another tip. While these tools may be helpful, remember you may be viewing results through a biased lens that doesn’t tell a true story.

Instead, move beyond pulse surveys. Engage with employees, listen to their stories, invite them to the table, and co-create the future together. That’s how you can fundamentally improve the way you work.

Douglas Ferguson, President, Voltage Control

4. Use Predictive Analytics

I believe predictive analytics is key to talent acquisition success this year. Predictive analytics is the practice of using data to make predictions about future events. With these tools, you can identify potential candidates for open positions, before jobs are even posted. That means you can get a jump on the competition and hire the most qualified candidates before other organizations can snap them up.

In addition, you can use predictive analytics to assess an individual’s probability of success in a particular role. This means your recruiters can focus on candidates who are most likely to succeed. Ultimately, advanced analytics can help you hire the right people for the right roles, and that can lead to a significant advantage in the war for talent.

Antreas Koutis, Administrative Manager, Financer

5. Deepen Your Diversity Initiatives

The emphasis on workplace diversity has continued to gain momentum. It’s now essential to consider candidates you might otherwise overlook because of their race, gender, or other factors. This isn’t about fulfilling quotas. It’s about expanding recruiting reach by tapping into a more diverse talent pool. Ultimately, this adds depth and dimension to your culture.

Try reaching out proactively to attract candidates from diverse communities. Get out of the office and connect with groups that are underrepresented in the workforce. For example, you can host recruitment events in locations that are convenient for people in these groups.

Partnering with schools in these areas is another way to introduce students to your industry and educate them about related career paths. Internships can also help you connect with young people from diverse backgrounds and help them prepare for future roles in your organization.

Matthew Ramirez, CEO, Rephrasely

6. Assess the Market and Develop Appropriate Goals

Establishing a competitive advantage for talent acquisition success requires a laser focus on both short-term and long-term hiring needs.

Be prepared to investigate the current labor market and integrate leading-edge technologies into your recruitment processes. By investing in data-driven insights, you can develop innovative strategies that differentiate your company from the competition. For example, you can:

  • Evaluate the job market in real-time,
  • Leverage AI and machine learning to source talent more efficiently and proactively,
  • Create proactive employer branding campaigns to showcase your company culture
  • Engage with passive candidates through targeted outreach strategies.

In addition, focus on developing a comprehensive remote hiring strategy, because more companies are moving or expanding their operations away from traditional office locations.

Linda Shaffer, Chief People Operations Officer, Checkr

7. Audit Your EVP and Culture from a Prospect’s Perspective

In a highly competitive job market, standing out and showcasing your culture is the biggest competitive advantage you have in attracting new talent.

Now is a great time to be sure your EVP shows prospective employees why they should work for you, what you offer, and how they can contribute. An EVP is simply your shop window for people you want to attract, retain, and help you grow your business.

I recommend auditing your EVP to put fresh eyes on all your candidate touch points. Review your culture, identify your strengths, and analyze your exit survey data. What can you improve? Does your “careers” website accurately reflect your desired EVP?

Get your whole team involved in this assessment process – HR, Talent Acquisition, and Marketing should work together to showcase your organization in the right light across multiple channels.

Charlie Southwell, Marketing Director, Let’s Talk Talent

8. Create a Sense of Community for Talent Acquisition Success

If your company offers remote work, you have a substantial competitive advantage.

Research indicates that remote work opportunities influence candidates’ salary requirements. But remote work structure isn’t the whole package. Candidates are also interested in knowing how employers create an environment that fosters connection among team members who may not work onsite. For instance, it’s critical to create a sense of community in a remote-based organization with practices like these:

  • Quarterly strategic team meetings
  • In-person team training
  • Regular video lunch and learns
  • Video town halls
  • Hackathons
  • Employee resource groups (ERGs)

Research indicates that people with at least 7 work friends are 35% more likely to stay with their employer. In recent interviews with employees who’ve been at our company for more than 2 years, most told us that interacting with their team is a key reason they enjoy coming to work.

Remote is a terrific way to attract new employees, but creating a sense of community is what keeps employees engaged.

Pat Mulvey, Director of Talent Acquisition, Saatva

 

EDITOR’S NOTE:  These talent acquisition success ideas were submitted via Terkel, a knowledge platform that shares community-driven content based on expert insights. To see questions and get published, sign up at terkel.io.

#WorkTrends: The Future of HR Tech

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Technology is disrupting everything, and HR is no exception. The tools and platforms available for today’s HR teams are light-years ahead of what we worked with 10 years ago. What does this new tech mean for recruitment, talent management and other HR functions? I talked to one of the smartest people in the HR tech world to get her take.

This week on #WorkTrends, we’re talking to Anna Ott about what’s next in HR tech. Anna is head of HR tech startups for UNLEASH. Last week at UNLEASH America in Las Vegas, I joined hundreds of other HR tech analysts, practitioners and vendors to think about how work and HR are changing.

You can listen to the full episode below, or keep reading for this week’s topic. Share your thoughts with us using the hashtag #WorkTrends.

HR Problems Technology Can Solve

Anna has spent the past 18 years working at digital companies — especially startups — and has held various HR-related roles. “I believe we are in a renaissance of HR as it has regained its strategic value of shaping organizations in the Fourth Revolution,” she says. “I am driven by enabling HR practitioners to be a stronger partner, feel more tech-savvy and enabled to shape the future of work.”

No one goes into HR because they love the repetition of filling out forms and going through the same processes over and over again. Most people sign up to work in HR because they want to work with people. “I think anything that automates processes and reduces the administrative work of HR is definitely something that we all appreciate,” she says.

Anna also acknowledges that, as humans, we struggle with unconscious bias during the recruitment process, and she believes that technology can remove human factors that tend toward partiality — and even create new ways to approach problems.

In March of this year at UNLEASH London, she met the team at Vault Platform that is working on a project that never would have been on the radar even a year ago. “They are trying to face the #MeToo debate by building a counter-harassment platform on blockchain,“ Anna says.

HR Issues Technology May Create

While she’s passionate about the possibilities that new technology brings, Anna is keenly aware of the risks and uncertainties involved.

Some solutions are helpful, but she says they could also be hurtful at a certain point. “It’s always two-sided. For example, when you look at security detection and skill-matching, at which point do we become too transparent?”

There’s a chance that people will reveal too much of themselves for the sake of developing in their careers and learning new things and trying to be a match to great jobs, she cautions. At the same time, she says, “At what point does it feel scary if a company monitors everything I do and everything I write, or the chats that I do within my company, or all the documents I create on Google?”

Another issue is just trying to manage all of the point solutions in the HR tech market. “HR people and practitioners can’t orchestrate a solution landscape of 100 different small things,” she says. There needs to be a more holistic approach.

Taking the HR Technology Plunge

For HR people who want to understand what HR tech can do for them and their organization, Anna recommends starting with one particular problem in need of a solution. “Try to find people who either have tackled this before,” she says. “Find peers, or look at those people who actually observe the market as I do, or analysts or thought leaders.”

She also recommends going to HR tech startups, talking to them, looking at their solutions, watching demos and meeting with them at conferences or HR tech competitions.

“When I was in my corporate payroll employment job, previous to UNLEASH, I wanted to eliminate the CV in the hiring process, but I didn’t know where to start,” she says. She spoke with a lot of startups that she thought might have a solution, and found one company that used video interviews instead of CVs.

“We actually sat down, created a new candidate experience and process, and then we eliminated the CV in my hiring process with their tool.” But she says it was a trial-and-error process — an experiment.

A year later, she switched from video interviews to chatbots, so she needed to speak with a chatbot startup about recruitment. Again, she labelled it as an experiment so it would be OK to fail, learn from that mistake, then pivot.

Anna is now a big advocate of chatbots. “Most of people looking actively for jobs want instant information,” she says. They want to have an instant response on the salary, location and other core details of a job. “In fact, in our chatbot at my previous company, people wouldn’t even write whole sentences,” she says. They would write “dog to work” to find out if they could bring their dog to work. She says candidates were comfortable doing that because they knew they were talking to a machine. Another benefit of that automation? “Chatbots also help us to get back to candidates and re-engage with those people that probably haven’t applied yet, allowing us to tap into a new pool of potential candidates.”

Continue the conversation. Join us on Twitter (#WorkTrends) for our weekly chat on Wednesdays at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, 10:30 a.m. Pacific, or anywhere in the world you are joining from to discuss this topic and more.