How to Recruit the Top Talent in 2020

We often miss out on evaluating the attitude, aptitude, interests, and psychological perspective of the potential applicant in the bid to hire the best talent. The standard practice of every recruiter is to shortlist the candidate on the basis of experience, powerful CV, skill-set, and the number of projects worked upon.

However, the recruitment strategies adopted by organizations have seen a remarkable change. Talent Acquisition agencies are moving beyond screening employees based on strong resumes or competitive skill-sets. Now, HR organizations are leaning towards assessment tests as they feel, if the candidate has the zeal to learn, he/she can be trained upon and be prepared for a suitable job role.

Once we have a pool of talent available, conducting assessments before the interviews help to filter the best out of the rest.

Assessments such as behavioral, cognitive, and skill-based help to understand the prospects much better without spending long hours of resume evaluation. These assessments are time effective and spare you from the hit and trial way to get the best employee.

Source: https://www.lever.co/recruiting-resources/articles/recruitment-process

Organizations like Mettl has come up with interesting key assessment tools that can be used by recruiters to evaluate the proficiency and attitude of the potential candidate and whether they are fit for the suitable job role.

Some of the best assessment metrics that are offered by Mettl is listed below:

• Psychometric Test
• Aptitude Test

The Psychometric test measures the essential immeasurable through which recruiters can get insights into the candidate’s personality traits and work behaviors.

There are four main Human Personality traits that a hiring manager may consider before hiring a suitable candidate:

Positive Personality Traits

This human personality trait assesses and identifies the candidate’s behavioral traits that can influence trainability, cultural fitment, and job performance.

Dark Personality Traits

This is a personality trait that identifies and measures the critical negative traits that impacts the overall safety of employees, customers, and work culture.

Motivation, Value, and Preferences

These three elements of human personality help the recruiter in understanding what drives and motivate a person at work by measuring motivation, value, and preferences.

Cognitive Ability

Its a personality check parameter that evaluates individual’s capacity to think logically and their ability to analyze any given situation and derive logical conclusions.

Aptitude test is a measurement tool that helps recruiters in finding people that are most likely to perform and are better at achieving desired outcomes. This aptitude assessment generally gives a candidate’s holistic cognitive evaluation.

Fluid Reasoning:

It’s a reasoning ability test where candidate’s fluid reasoning skills are verified and their ability to perceive, absorb new information, and solve problems in novel situations.

This type of reasoning test is further divided into three categories:

• Abstract
• Spatial
• Visual Reasoning
• Abstract Reasoning evaluates the lateral thinking skills of a candidate to swiftly identify logical patterns, rules and trends, and the ability to formulate meaningful information for solving problems.
• Spatial Reasoning measures the candidate’s ability to visualize and manipulate 2D and 3D shapes and patterns.
• Visual Reasoning evaluates the applicant’s ability to analyze visual information and being able to solve problems based on it.

Crystallized Reasoning:

It’s a mental ability test that measures the candidate’s capacity to retrieve and use information acquired over a lifetime to perform the desired tasks.

This type of reasoning test is further divided into four categories:

• Language and Comprehension
• Logical and Critical Reasoning
• Problem Solving
• Decision Making and Judgement

• Language and Comprehension: This parameter assesses the candidate’s verbal ability and how good he/she is at the expression of ideas/thoughts by using proper words, sentence structuring and has a good grasp of English grammar.

• Critical and Logical Reasoning: It checks the ability of the applicant to analyze and perceive the given information from different perspectives and whether he/she can break down the information into manageable components and structure the information in a logical order.
• Problem Solving: This test checks whether a candidate has proper reasoning skills and if they can contemplate between positive and negative solutions to a problem.

The job market has become an overcrowded business world where each one is competing to get noticed. In the world of digitalization, where the barriers have been broken down with the power of machines, tools, and the internet, most of the high potential talent you are looking for won’t be found in the traditional job board.

The new workforce is more active online than their offline presence. Hence, finding the best fit would need to search for them where they belong (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter).

Social Media recruitment platforms such as LinkedIn and Naukri.com helps the candidate to apply for the job as per their skill set, domain, and industry. The hiring managers are nowadays highly reliant on Linkdin/Naukri.com to find out the best fit for the organization.

A right keyword concerning the job opening and the required skill set helps the recruiters in identifying the suitable candidate for the job role.

“HR magazine in October 2018 found out that integrating social networking sites into the traditional recruitment process will not only help the hiring managers in reaching out to the potential candidates but will also help in building relationships and communities in the coming years. It will also help in enhancing the candidate’s experience and would provide a window into the company’s culture.”

In a nutshell, not only does the company benefit through the initial recruitment process from social media platforms, but the job seekers can get an insight as to how the company operates and of course, the employee reviews that play a pivotal role in choosing the right company.

Recruiters are still very much reliant on Social Media platforms to pool in the best talent for the required job openings in the organizations. However, in the era of advanced Digital Technology, Talent Acquisition trends have seen a vast improvement, and recruiters are leaving no stone unturned to hire the best workforce and stay competitive in the recruitment world.

Recruiters are heading to an Inbound bound marketing technique where customers are drawn to products and services through recruiting content marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing. This recruitment methodology is touted to be the best hiring strategy in 2020. The objective is to engage qualified candidates and convert them into job applicants to expand the talent pools.

Here is the blueprint of Inbound Methodology:

The graph above exhibits four stages of inbound recruitment marketing that is attracting, engaging, converting, and delighting the customer and growing the business that provides values and builds trust.

Under this methodology, the HR needs to think from the candidate’s point of view as to how the job seekers will find the company at first. You should be ready with a career blog that will eventually pull your audience and persuade them to apply for the job, social media content, that will get your hands-on passive candidate’s radar or updated Glassdoor page.

Once the candidate visits your job site for the first time, you need to think if you have any job opportunities for them to engage and attract? If a potential applicant subscribes to a careers blog or signs up for your talent network, it means you have converted that interest into action.

It’s a big decision if a candidate applies for a job. Hence, it becomes essential for the recruiter to nurture relationships with the leads who have shown interest in your company.

Some of the ways through which you can provide value in the decision-making process are:

• Emailing helpful content about your organizational culture and application process to your potential leads
• Inviting them to recruiting events/seminars/workshops
• Giving leads the opportunity to talk to someone at your company through live chat

Last but not least, you need to find out the ways to turn candidates into promoters. Here they are listed below:

• Create a remarkable interview and application experience
• Asking for customer feedback via surveys
• Giving candidates the opportunity to stay in touch if they don’t receive an offer

Data is something that we can’t live without it because we work in the world of recruitment marketing, where the sheer goal of every recruiter is to help companies in employing the best talent for the company.

With the help of data analytics, recruitment companies can understand the candidate behaviors and make decisions that will help in optimizing what companies are investing. Also, it’ll provide them insights on hiring the prospective talent, assist in attracting and enhancing the quality of hire.

Let’s discuss the new recruitment marketing strategies that talent acquisition team can opt for in 2020:

Use of Google Analytics to Understand the Source of Candidates

Recruitment Agencies can use Google Analytics to understand better which outlets are bringing in potential candidates to your website or career site. This medium is beneficial as you can find out if prospective visitors are coming from either paid ads or organic traffic (candidates searched for your company or job online ).

Here’s an example of Google Analytics Dashboard:

Source:(https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/talent-analytics/2018/recruitment-marketing-tools-and-how-to-use-them )

This crucial data that is derived from Google Analytics will be of utmost importance to Talent recruitment agencies as it will guide them in identifying which job boards or job ads are serving the best. It will also help them in making informed decisions about the allocation of budget and if there is a need to invest in Search Engine Optimization.

With Google Analytics, Recruiters can set up cross-domain tracking between ATS, career site, and CRM. All of them can be tracked at the same time to give a full line of sight from initial candidate entry to a completed application. It will help them in profoundly understanding the candidate behaviors and optimizing marketing activities if needed.

Use of Programmatic Job Ads with Your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns to Save Money

A programmatic job ad is a new technology that uses real-time click and application conversion data to optimize and control the job campaigns.

Whenever a potential applicant applies for a job with PPC, it will be recorded, and the data can be used to optimize that campaign.

For example, if you plan a budget for ten job ads and want to shell out $100 for each ad and once it touches the budget for one of the advertisements, it will be shut off, and other job ads will remain active.

Here is a picture of Traditional Vs. Programmatic Approach in Pay-per-click campaign:

There are various other recruitment strategies that Talent Acquisition firms are eyeing at in 2020. The ones listed above are some of them. As industries are evolving to a great extent, there is a growing need for skilled and qualified candidates in the corporate space.

We are entering what experts call The Fourth Revolution. Our jobs are being handballed to applications and artificial intelligence, forcing organizations to adopt new recruitment strategies to filter the best talent.

Attracting top talent in 2020 is a crucial element in our talent equation, but what’s more important is to balance the equation. This balance cannot be reached without an equally important aspect-retention. It is only when organizations work towards this equation, they reach where they aim at.

Make sure you use the best hiring and learning and development tools, and once you do, no one can take you away from the best fit you desired to get.