How to find the right talent for your company in 2020

Nowadays, there’s more to recruiting than just writing job ads and reading CVs, and top talents rarely stay available for long. What can you do to attract and hopefully also hire the right people? In this blog post, we share valuable tips to use for the future of recruiting.

To find the right talent for your company, you will still need to work your day-to-day magic on LinkedIn and attend job fairs. But to succeed long-term, you need to be more creative than that. Here are five strategies and concepts we believe are important for recruiting in 2020 – and beyond!

1. The candidate experience

The candidate experience – i.e., how current, previous, and future candidates perceive your recruiting process – will be even more important in the future. It's crucial to make sure that you are considerate of the candidates’ feelings during this process – from the first contact until onboarding.

It is more likely that a candidate that had a positive experience and felt seen and appreciated during the process, will have an overall positive feeling of your company. If they had a negative experience – you might not only lose a great candidate, you can get a bad reputation as well.

2. Social recruiting

Social recruiting grows more popular by the day, and it will probably continue to expand even more in the coming years. Since people spend so much time on social media, it has become easier to both find and attract new talent there.

Not only can you use this strategy to post ads for vacant positions, but you can also use it to search for potential candidates and build a relationship with them. Even if they aren’t available there and then, it’s always smart to build a relationship with interesting people. They might be available the next time you’re looking to fill a new position.

3. Inbound recruiting

In recent years we’ve seen a shift from outbound to inbound recruiting. Many companies have shifted strategies and now relies on attracting candidates, and making them come to you instead of the other (traditional) way around.

This strategy involves attracting potential candidates with valuable content. The most common way is to publish content on your career site and spread the message of your company and employees in forums such as LinkedIn.

4. Employer branding

The reputation of your company and brand has great importance for recruiting. Furthermore, this also includes how you’re being viewed as an employer – your employer brand. This is something all companies need to work on if they want to attract the right candidates today.

Candidates can and will research your company – since everything is made available to everyone online. Top candidates today will look for companies that match their values and thoughts on work-life balance. They also look for companies with a culture that attracts them. If they get a sense of a bad reputation, they will probably not even apply for a job at that company.

You must work on your employer brand and try to bring forward the best sides to your company and its values. The purpose is to paint an attractive picture of your company culture and present it as a place where people enjoy going to work. Benefits like flexible hours and remote working should also be mentioned. Make sure that these qualities are presented on employee review sites and your ”About Us” page.

5. Data-driven recruiting / HR Analytics

Regardless of what business, it’s all about data these days. You can collect a lot of data of prospects and employees – but the challenge isn’t to collect it, it’s how you analyze and use it. If you manage to master the art of data, you can get great insights into how your hiring strategy is working.

Data-driven recruiting or HR Analytics are recruiting methods where planning and decisions are in some capacity being based on data acquired through HR technology. Some methods to find top talents include using data to evaluate where they come from, like in what forums they found you. You then need to use this information to focus on suitable networking sites or academic programs.

With data analysis, you can also find out if certain questions are causing some candidates to stop filling in a job application. If so, you can rephrase the question or simply exclude it. It can also help you find the best suitable description for a job ad. It will help you figure out which specific words are appealing to candidates – and which aren’t.