What is Talent Acquisition?
Finding the right person with the right skills at the right time – that’s talent acquisition. Typically, hiring managers or recruiters handle most, if not all, aspects of talent acquisition. This spans from sourcing, assessing, interviewing, and hiring candidates – all while creating a well-oiled, positive candidate journey. And, as many hiring managers aren’t solely focused on recruiting, creating an easy-to-use, automated talent acquisition system or process can make or break your talent management strategy.
The Candidate Journey
A lot goes into talent acquisition. Hiring managers and recruiters need to be able to use recruitment marketing strategies and tools to interest job seekers, provide a positive interviewing and assessment experience, and onboard new talent with ease. Keep in mind, this journey needs to be a well-oiled machine to keep job seekers interested; a whopping 57% of job seekers abandon an opportunity if they feel a hiring process is too lengthy.
There are 6 steps in the candidate journey: Awareness, Attraction, Consideration, Application, Selection, Hire. The first three – Awareness, Attraction, and Consideration – are primarily recruitment marketing steps. But, once you have candidates interested in your open positions and filling in applications, your talent acquisition strategies come in handy.
Talent Acquisition Strategies to make Application, Selection, and Hiring Processes a Breeze
Application
Conversions, conversions, conversions. Making your application process extremely quick and easy for candidates is essential for a winning talent acquisition strategy. According to CareerBuilder and SilkRoad, 20% of candidates won’t complete an application that takes them 10 minutes or more to complete.
With over 58% of job seekers using their phones to search for jobs, it’s important to make sure your application process is mobile friendly. If your mobile experience isn’t responsive, you could be getting 53% less applications – and your application process will likely take 80% longer to complete than it would on a computer.
If you’re looking to select any hiring tech such as an applicant tracking system (ATS), it’s important to look for a platform that can help you streamline the application process. Some ATSs are integrated with top job boards such as Indeed to create a quick and easy (and in some cases, one-click) application process. Text-to-apply is also a great way to capture interested candidates.
Selection
During the selection process, you’ll likely be conducting interviews and comparing candidates based off application assessments and position-fit information. A strong applicant tracking system will collect data from the application process, enabling hiring managers to easily sort through and identify which candidates are the most promising for the role – quickly.
But there’s more ways to save time with an ATS – you’ll be able to automate emails, schedule interviews, automate disqualification of unqualified candidates, and rely on data to track and measure your time-to-hire so you can remedy bottlenecks and find long-term solutions. In fact, 86% of recruiting professionals say that using an ATS helps them hire faster.
From here, the interview process kicks off. It’s important to have a standardized interviewing process to remove any unconscious bias and provide a positive hiring experience.
Hiring
With two people – the employer and the candidate – making two decisions, hiring can be a dance. For hiring managers, maintaining consistent, positive communication with candidates before and after the interview can keep a candidate interested and ready to say yes. And, time is of the essence – the quicker a manager can select, interview, and extend an offer letter to a candidate the better. A quick time to hire reduces candidate bidding and can reduce cost of higher quality talent. If your hiring process is too long, the candidate could get a better offer from your competition.
At TalentReef, our platform is equipped with personalized, automated offer letters, allowing a hiring manager to extend an offer as soon as a hiring decision is made. This cuts out back-and-forth communication and saves time for all involved.
There are a ton of essential steps in a winning talent acquisition strategy. At the center of it all, a winning applicant tracking system will enable you to rely on data when making decisions and push candidates through the hiring process more quickly. ATSs also provide important recruitment marketing and application features, such as text-to-apply, job board integrations, and more.