attracting top talent

Talent attraction is at the core of any expanding business. It’s crucial to attract the most skilled, like-minded employees to help your business thrive. This takes a clear-cut strategy to get right – making it an ongoing challenge for many HR professionals. Here we discuss our top five tips for attracting top talent to your business.

How can I attract top talent?

Attracting strong talent comes down to promoting your business as an ‘employer of choice’. This means setting yourself ahead of the competition in all aspects of staff engagement, recruitment, and onboarding strategies. Here are five key points to consider when seeking to hire top talent:

1. Define your employer brand

Your employer brand is the driving force behind the success of your hiring strategy. It’s how you communicate your unique values and qualities to the talent community.

To get the most out of this, it’s important to define your employer brand to showcase the very best of your business. This means reviewing the reasons why your colleagues choose you as their employer – the key values, incentives, and qualities that make your brand unique.

Ensure these values are communicated across your branded media. This means bringing your website, social media, careers page, and job ads in line with your defined employer brand strategy.

This will help you to attract strong, like-minded candidates to your business – promoting your brand as an ‘employer of choice’ for top talent.

2. Analyse and adapt your EVP

Your employee value proposition (EVP) is the list of incentives and benefits that your employees receive in return for their hard work. This may include bonus schemes, staff socials, flexible working initiatives, or employee discounts.

The wants and needs of your employees are a changing force; it’s crucial to keep on top of these, and adapt your EVP accordingly. Survey your employees on a regular basis to identify your most/least important EVP factors, as well as any additional wants/needs that may appear.

By adapting your engagement strategy to suit these changes, you strengthen your employer brand in its pursuit of strong, like-minded talent. Simply put – if your brand strategy meets the needs of your employees, it’s likely that your EVP will appeal to more key talent.

3. Optimise your hiring process for D&I

Diversity and inclusion (D&I) has an enormous influence on your ability to attract strong talent. The more diverse range of candidates your brand appeals to, the more diversely talented your workforce will become.

Focus on your D&I strategy to improve your hiring potential. Promote inclusivity within your workplace culture, backing this up with clear policy and brand action.

Optimise your recruitment process for D&I; introduce anonymised hiring to reduce the risk of unconscious bias, and avoid exclusive language in job advertisements/descriptions. This will help you to attract a more diverse range of talent, skills, and backgrounds to your business.

For an in-depth look at improving your D&I strategy, check out this diversity and inclusion guide.

4. Deliver a high-quality candidate journey

The quality of your candidate journey is often what encourages applicants to choose your business over the competition. The more enjoyable this experience is for candidates, the more chance you have of bringing top talent to your workforce.

Make the candidate journey your focus when building your recruitment strategy. Promote regular communication, ease in application, and engagement with your employer brand from start to finish. This not only helps to attract more applicants to your vacancies, but ensures new employees get off to the best start possible with your business.

Utilising software such as an applicant tracking system (ATS) can improve your hiring journey enormously. These platforms allow for automated contact, straightforward application progression, and faster hiring – promoting a smooth experience for your recruitment candidates.

5. Focus your recruitment advertising strategy

Your recruitment advertising strategy is what ensures your vacancies are showcased to the most relevant talent. This must be correctly focused to reach and resonate with the kind of applicants you want to attract.

Make sure adverts are promoted across multiple platforms, including social media, online job boards, careers sites, and employee networks. Ensure ad copy and imagery truly reflects your employer brand values – the kind of things budding employees want to see and hear.

Most importantly – reflect, analyse, and adapt your campaigns over time. Assess analytics regularly to identify your successes/areas for improvement across your job ads. This will help you to cut unnecessary advertising costs, while ensuring campaigns are focused on attracting the strongest talent.

In summary

Strong talent is the driving force behind any successful business. In order to attract top talent, it’s important to focus on various aspects of your brand/hiring strategy to appeal to their needs. This includes:

  • Defining your employer brand to attract talent
  • Analysing and adapting your employee value proposition (EVP)
  • Improving diversity and inclusion (D&I) in your hiring process
  • Delivering a high-quality candidate experience
  • Correctly focusing/managing recruitment advertising campaigns

Sell your company to your ideal employees – focus on the unique qualities and benefits that your company has to offer. It is by promoting these that you attract a strong, diverse pool of new talent.

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