Attracting Top Talent in a Tough Market

What are you doing to attract the right applicants in a tough market?
Hiring right in a tough market isn’t anything new but we are experiencing a particularly challenging period for attracting great applicants to roles across the board.

If you’ve hired in recent years, or are in the process of hiring in certain industries or locations right now, you’ll know what we’re talking about.

For some roles, gone are the days where you would be inundated with applications, right now it’s looking more like a dried-up oasis. Even the bad applications aren’t coming through.

You don’t always want to hire anyone as a stop-gap because they could create more damage to your business and team in the long-run. It’s still incredibly important to be considered and strategic with your recruitment processes.

Business owners and managers alike are frustrated, desperate for help and uncertain about how to continue without finding the right staff (or any staff) for their under-resourced teams. Maybe you’re

one of them?

Are you down in the trenches again?

Turning away work because you don’t have enough resources?

Working ridiculous hours with burnout on the horizon for you and your team?

You’re not alone.

What worked before isn’t working anymore. When we’re recruiting and trying to attract the right applicants to our role, we have to do things differently in tight markets like what we’re experiencing now.

Gone are the days of writing a professional job ad, sending it out and waiting for the applications to roll in. It’s time to pull up our socks and get a little creative.

What can I do to attract the right applicants in a tight market?

The first thing to understand about attracting the right applicants is understanding that applicants are in the driver’s seat. They are no longer taking the first job that comes along. In fact, many have deliberately resigned from roles that were unfulfilling or exploitative. And no, throwing more money at them is unlikely to attract them by doing that alone.

Applicants are looking for something more than just a job these days. They want a work arrangement, as well as compensation, that will afford them the lifestyle they want with better work/life balance and flexibility.

Applicants know what they want and they’re less willing to compromise.

Knowing this, the first thing you need to do is approach your recruitment campaign like a marketing campaign.

In order to attract quality applicants right now you need to cut through the noise, you need to stand out from the crowd and you need to give applicants a compelling reason to read your ad, and the actually apply.

Because we’re recruiting largely in digital spaces, your applicants are being bombarded with all kinds of messaging promising them bigger and better opportunities. This could range from self-employment opportunities to working with larger companies that can afford to offer bells and whistles (think Google and Atlassian) which small to medium business simply can’t compete with.

What this does give you is an opportunity to redefine your unique selling point as an employer:

• What is about your company that would make it the perfect place to work for the right applicant?
• How can you make the role more appealing to applicants looking for something greater than a 9-5 (or perhaps for applicants looking for a much more straightforward 9-5)?
• What can you offer that will set you apart from competitors in your industry also vying for the exact same applicants?

Once you’ve defined a great job description, it’s time to craft your advertisement:

• Where are you going to share this opportunity? What kind of tone works best in these spaces?
• What are your competitors already doing to attract the same applicants?
• What can you do differently with your marketing?
• How can you show them what it’s like to work with your team (instead of just telling them)?
• How are you making applicants sit up and pay attention when they see your job ad in their feed?
• How are you demonstrating the benefits to the prospective applicant?

If you’re not receiving the right applicants, or any applicants, it might be time to review your recruitment strategy and refine your messaging.

Should I use video in my recruitment strategy?

Absolutely. Video is such an underutilised medium in recruitment strategies but is one that packs a great punch in a difficult market.

Video allows your applicant to get a much better feel for you, and your business or organisation than a written job ad could every convey, no matter how fun or witty.

It’s easy to tell prospective applicants how great your business or organisation is, how fabulous your culture is, the range of benefits they can experience and how much fun they’ll have – but what if you could show them?

If video isn’t an option, ensure that you are using great visuals that reflect the opportunity accurately. We’re not talking about the formal, corporate headshots either. Make sure there are some in-situ photos of what it looks like to work a day in your organisation.

What does the office look like?

What does it look like when the team does a morning tea?

Are there team events?

Take photos and share them.

This should be an integral aspect of your overall marketing strategy as prospective applicants will be doing their own research on you.

The more social proof you have that your job ad is true all year-round, the happy team you’ve cultivated is real, the outcomes you deliver for clients and customer are positive, the quicker you can build the critical relationship-building like, know, trust factors with prospective applicants.

Connect them to outcomes and purpose

Don’t forget about sharing the work your business actually does.

Seeing what they’ll be contributing to can create motivation, inspiration and be a deciding factor about whether or not they apply. This might be sharing client portfolios, the worksite, a finished product, or even just photos of satisfied clients. The idea is to evoke emotion from your prospective applicants to encourage them to take the next step – to apply for your job!

What do I do once I’ve found the right applicants?

Once you’ve found the right applicants, especially if you’re hiring in a tough market, ensure that your interview and onboarding processes are seamlessly set up – especially that high-risk pre-start date zone.

Don’t leave it too late between applications closing and interviewing. In fact, if you receive a standout application and you haven’t finished recruiting yet, reach out to them for a first interview.

It can be tempting to sit back and wait till you’ve got all your applications in but remember that if they’ve applied for your role, they’ve probably applied for a dozen others as well. If you leave it too long, you might miss them.

Once you’ve gone through the interview process and decided on the applicant you want, you want to ensure that they turn up on their first day and keep them around long-term if it’s a good fit.

So, when marketing your job opportunity, ensure that you’re standing out from the crowd, speaking to what applicants in your industry are looking for and giving them a compelling reason to stop scrolling and read your job ad.

An invitation to join a thriving business community

If you have questions about how to attract and hire the right applicants in a tough job market, I’d love for you to join us inside our free Facebook Group where you can connect with other like-minded business owners, leaders and managers to discuss all things HR: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hrsupportaustralia