Filling a vacancy should be simple. Your business needs specific skills, and someone with those skills is looking for a new role. Match the two together and everyone is happy. So, why is it so hard? Really, it’s down to nuance. It’s about looking in the right places, offering the right benefits, and asking the right questions. It’s about understanding the very specific organisation needs and cultures for a specific vacancy. These things can’t be reconciled with simple box ticking. So we look at top techniques for getting it right.
Recruitment Challenges
Vacancy filling can be time consuming and costly. Especially if you get it wrong. There are actually a huge number of obstacles preventing a job match from happening. The pool of potential candidates can be vast, and yet you’re not receiving applications. There are candidates who you love, but are out of reach with what you’re offering. Or you simply can’t locate where potential candidates with specific skills are hiding. These are challenges that most organisations have experienced so may feel familiar.
Recruitment Strategy
The first part of any process is to plan. In this case to create a recruitment strategy. Work out who you’re trying to find and lay out how you will reach them. Your strategy should include considerations such as hiring goals, company mission and growth. It should be evaluated after each recruitment so that your process can be refined and improved.
Recruitment Channels
Casting the net as wide as possible isn’t always the best strategy. Targeting your vacancy towards specific recruitment channels ensures that you will be choosing interview candidates from a smaller, more appropriate pool. Industry specific publications or specialist recruitment services are the best ways to reach candidates within the right field. Don’t forget that sharing on socials is a helpful addition to your channels, but shouldn’t be the only channel to utilise.
Employer Brand
This can’t be achieved overnight. An employer brand should aim to create awareness of your organisation as a sought after employer. It’s tied into the overall branding of the business and should convey the company values that a potential candidate should be aligned with. If your organisation isn’t a global brand, this doesn’t mean that you can’t create an employer brand. Keep consistency in your public channels that highlight your company values, and employee experience. This allows a candidate to quickly identify if they feel they are a good fit for your vacancy, which does part of your job for you.
Job Description
Getting a job description right can be tricky. More information is not always better, indeed it can become overwhelming. So your specification should be clear, without becoming bogged down in detail. Include both imperative and desirable skills, remembering that the right person for your organisation might not already have experience in every element of that job.
Personal Growth
Your recruitment strategy should ensure that opportunities for growth are laid out clearly to potential candidates. This can include potential paths for promotion within the organisation, and training schemes available. For increasing numbers of candidates, growth is an important part of their decision to apply for a role.
Benefits and Pay
Take the time to benchmark roles within your recruitment strategy process. In order to attract good quality candidates, the salary and benefits package must be in line with other organisations. This varies across industries and locations so it’s important to be accurate with your benchmarking process. Accountancy industry specialists can help you to navigate the nuances that can exist here.
Interview Process
Of course, attracting applications is only part of the overall recruitment process; as important are your interviews. It’s often pretty straightforward to identify if a person could manage a role on paper. Interviews are when both the organisation and the candidate work out if you are the right fit together.
Streamlined Experience
Many good candidates have been lost because of lengthy lulls in the interview process. This is why it’s important to timetable and streamline each interview activity, and stick to deadlines. Utilise remote interviewing technology if needed, and have a clear scoring and decision making system.
Honesty
Within an interview, it’s as important for a candidate to decide that your organisation is right for them as it is for you to identify them as the right person for the job. If someone starts a role and finds that either the role requirements or working environment is not what they expected, it can lead to a quick turnover. This isn’t in anyone’s best interests.
Company Culture
Demonstrate your company culture within your interview set up. If flexibility is key to the organisation’s values, make sure that this is reflected in the interview. An informal interview will demonstrate a casual working environment, whereas a more formal set up will indicate that your workplace is more traditionally structured.
Communication
Keep lines of communication clear throughout the interview process. For higher level roles, your strategy may be set up for several interviews. It’s important to keep candidates and team members informed of where the process is, and what the next steps are. This side of things can be efficiently managed by recruitment specialists who manage ongoing relationships with both candidates and organisations.
Retention
As we touched on earlier, meticulous recruiting can be costly. This is why it makes financial sense to put as much effort into on-boarding and retaining your staff as you do in the recruitment process. You’ll not only save on spend, but will benefit from the added value that your team brings with their knowledge of your organisation. Staff retention is a whole new topic for another day, but it’s worth remembering that this is an issue that follows directly on from the recruitment process.
Naturally, all organisations want to source the best accounting professionals for their team. However, a skillset that’s ideal for one business may not be right for another. This is why consulting recruitment specialists who are already connected to potential candidates can be so effective. Clients can benefit from a more targeted range of candidates and at the same time access recruitment expertise that will ensure that they successfully fill their vacancy.