Hiring Top Talent | Try These 5 Proven Recruitment Best Practices

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What has been the rallying cry of hiring managers everywhere in the U.S. and beyond? Despite implementing good recruitment practices and tweaking hiring processes, there is a continued shortage of skilled talent. Companies are competing for shrinking talent pools and struggling to hire experienced professionals due to rising hiring and retention costs. Even though the quits rate was 2.1% this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, why do hiring managers face recruitment challenges? Let’s look at the 5 hiring and recruiting strategies that are a winning recipe to bag top talent and retain it.

Cultural Fit

Many hiring managers use this word in interviews and in their hiring philosophy. Still, few commit to finding a candidate who fits the company culture during recruitment.

It seems odd that a company should focus more on what kind of person joins them rather than what skills they bring to the table, right? Not at all. Skills can be taught. Someone who is not the right cultural fit for your company and doesn’t share the same values or work ethic will create rifts in your organization and eventually impact productivity, teamwork, and collective success.

There are proven results behind this recruiting strategy. The case study of Zappos has shown why their commitment to finding the cultural fit has enabled better retention and successful hiring.

The Social Test is a strategy where potential candidates meet existing Zappos employees in addition to their interviewees and spend the day interacting with various company stakeholders. This ensures that the candidate gets along with people they will potentially work with by comparing their values to the team.
The Ultimate test is the final stage, where a new hire is offered $3000 to leave the company if they feel they don’t align with the company values. Surprisingly, only 3% of people take this offer, while 97% choose the job. This makes the hiring process easier because bad hires leave the organization at a lower cost than it would take to replace them in the future. Learn to recruit by clearly stating your business needs.

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Candidate Experience

Hiring and recruiting strategies are more successful if they focus on the candidate as much as they do on job requirements, i.e., candidate experience. Many companies get ghosted by candidates or lose great candidates to competitors because they don’t put enough thought into their candidate experience, starting with the job description until a new person is offered. The result is often losing a suitable candidate because you dilly-dallied on the offer, and they get tired of waiting. Airbnb also faced one such issue in recruiting top candidates. The CEO realized that the turnaround time and meeting schedules were scattered, and people were losing interest.

In the case study about Airbnb’s recruiting strategy revamp, the CEO focused on improving the candidate experience.

Once an applicant was recruited, strict orders were given to ensure no one took longer than two to three days to make final decisions.
Additionally, they upgraded their follow-up and connection strategy by pairing each candidate with a recruiting coordinator who focused on enhancing the small interaction, such as being greeted with a glass of water and a swift but friendly heads-up email about parking instructions.
They achieved the most significant impact by providing quick and thorough feedback after each interview, which boosted the candidate’s interest and reduced the turnaround time on offer letters.
The result was so promising that the acceptance rate for candidates shot up immediately.

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Behavioral Assessments

At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies, says Lawrence Bossidy, the CEO of AlliedSignal. This statement is more than just about how many people you hire and what skills they have. When you adopt recruitment best practices, you must be mindful of the kind of people you are hiring in your organization and the impact they will have. The recruitment process is often too focused on skills and less on the type of person you invite into your team. One toxic hire can increase your team’s productivity and create a hostile environment that hinders growth.

Watch How One Toxic Hire Can Affect Your Company

Take a leaf out of Netflix’s “No Brilliant Jerks” policy, which outlines how a giant company like Netflix values cordial and collaborative behavior over credit-hogging, brilliant but abrasive employees to maintain a positive work culture.

The article indicates that such people are “cultural terrorists” who have no regard for other people in the company and can rip the organization apart from the inside if they don’t align with its values.
It suggests that the first action plan should be to sand off the rough edges of such an employee and give them a chance to better themselves. But if that doesn’t seem viable, the company is better off without them.
So, how can recruiters ensure they hire someone with a can-do attitude and positive energy to boost productivity? Conduct behavioral assessments.
Often seen as an afterthought in a recruiting strategy, behavioral tests can give you an insight into how people conduct themselves and how they respond to different scenarios like time-sensitive projects, team-focused activities, and their general behavior in a workplace.

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Internal Hiring

Why is it that despite your best efforts in evolving your hiring and recruitment strategies, you are still losing valuable employees to competitors, even those with you the longest? The answer is a lack of upward mobility within your company. Good recruitment practices should ensure ample appreciation of existing employees and chances of moving up in the organization, with career development opportunities and internal job switches. Why is this important? Recruiters focus much of their energy on employee acquisition and not enough on retention, causing seasoned employees to feel unappreciated and quit to find more lucrative and growth-oriented opportunities.

This approach has been successful in retaining top employees in Buffer’s hiring process. As a rule of thumb, every time a new position opens at Buffer, it is first offered to internal employees with matching credentials. This helps foster trust in the company and ensures employee loyalty and engagement.

Employees who receive career development opportunities at their companies are more likely to contribute sincerely to the organization and refer more people to grow their talent pool.
When you are looking for a new position to fill, first move your lens inward and see which of your existing employees would be a better fit for a more senior role.
Encourage employees to refer their favorable candidates from inside the organization before posting on job boards and looking for new people.
Incentivizing referrals and encouraging internal hiring ensures you face fewer hiring and firing struggles in the future and save costs on hiring and replacement.

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Diversity and Inclusion

Companies end up with the same candidates that don’t match their skills requirements because they drill in the same place expecting to strike oil. Hiring and recruiting strategies must evolve to attract top talent and move beyond locations and proximity to find the most promising candidate. But it’s not just a game of probability. There is a growing focus on hiring diverse candidates from different backgrounds and cultures with various capabilities to access new ideas and adopt a fresh approach to your work.

According to a McKinsey report, companies that focus on diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above industry standards.

Why is this important? When you hire from the same talent pool, you will eventually exhaust the list of ideal candidates, and your organization will suffer due to mediocre talent hindering growth.
The ultimate cost is starting the hiring cycle all over again, bearing overhead costs, and delaying productivity for your team when unsuitable hires quit.
You must utilize the full potential of a diverse workforce, bringing in perspectives of different genders, ethnicities, locations, and religions to add more varied experiences to your company’s work culture.
There’s no complicated math here; diversity ensures a more collaborative, tolerant, and inclusive workplace for all employees and increases the chances of your organization expanding into new markets, exploring untapped potential, and fostering exceptional growth.

How to Leverage The Recruiting Strategy of a Remote Staffing Agency

Some companies will find it hard to recruit top talent because their internal resources restrict them from expanding their search or they are managing multiple HR functions on their own. What’s the answer for firms looking for top talent but struggling to make it happen? Turn to the expertise of a remote staffing agency like Remote Scouts.

Our Employer of Record (EOR) services, coupled with our extended talent pool, ensure that we find diverse, skilled, and high-performing talent that caters to your business needs.

Here is how we do it:

We are backed by 13 years of staffing experience, which we have distilled into tailored solutions to resolve your hiring needs.
Our expertise spans onshore, offshore, and nearshore staffing, so we can hire experts who align with your company culture and reduce your hiring and replacement costs by 40%.
We will place your chosen candidate in a secure offshore but on-site facility to boost productivity and reduce overhead costs such as office placement, equipment, IT support, and onboarding.
When hiring for top talent, we tap inaccessible talent pools with innovative, critically sound professionals to address your skills shortage.
As your Employer of Record, we go beyond hiring to provide HR functions, payroll, and compliance services to integrate and manage your chosen candidate within your company.
We help you secure passive but high-performing talent that your competitors don’t know about so you can boost your productivity and achieve business goals faster.