Alternative Recruitment Strategies to Scale your Business

New ways of recruiting keep transforming the traditional hiring process. Especially after the pandemic, automation software and job platforms became popular strategies to find and vet candidates. However, it’s hard to understand when alternative recruitment strategies are the best option for your business.  

Recruitment methods in the digital age have challenges and potential. In this article, we will go over the most popular alternative recruitment methods to help you find the best option to scale your team with skilled employees.

What Is a Recruitment Strategy?

A recruitment strategy is a set of methodologies to vet and hire skilled employees in your company. 

Recruitment becomes a strategy when it optimise your effort and resources to find the best candidates in a short time. For example, for your next project, you want to improve user experience and front-end development. In this case, an effective strategy is to set your company goals to isolate your hiring criteria. If you want to implement user interaction and design, your goal is to find a front-end developer with experience in UX design. Instead of going though thousands of CVs, your team can focus only on candidates with this specific experience – saving their time and your resources. 

The point of recruitment strategies is to target the hiring process based on the specific needs of your project and team members.

Why consider alternative recruitment strategies?

After the pandemic, new ways of recruiting appeared to cope with the increasing demand for IT talent. You should consider alternative recruitment strategies for two main reasons: 

• Cost-saving: A solid strategy means targeting your resources to optimize your time and quickly onboard a new candidate to speed up your team workflow. 
• Better talent: An innovative strategy can help you attract candidates who aren’t actively looking for a job – they form 70% of the global workforce. 

If you find the right recruitment method for your company, you can ensure skilled professionals for your team saving on your company’s budget. 

What Are the Most Suitable Alternatives for Recruitment?

As a recruitment agency with more than 10 years in the field, we’ve experienced how the world of work is changing. New ways of recruiting keep changing, as well as work trends. Employees don’t share the same interests as a few years ago, and overall, the office environment has and still keeps transforming as time passes by.

One of the things that have changed the most, without a doubt, is the way companies attract their employees. Recruiting strategies have also evolved because of all these changes! 

Here are the 5 types of alternative recruitment strategies that all companies should implement sooner or later:

Change How They Write Job Descriptions 

They say actions mean more than words, but in job adverts, words are everything.

Job descriptions are the beginning of your recruitment process. Most of them, depending on the places they are published, are viewed by hundreds of people. But if you choose the wrong words, likely you’ll end up scaring many talented potential candidates.

What do we mean by ‘wrong words’? – A study conducted by the University of Waterloo and Duke University analysed how gender wording in job advertisements promoted gender inequality. One of their findings was that most job descriptions are written with masculine words – such as dominant, leader, competitive, among others – that made women less likely to apply to the job.

If your company is trying to promote diversity and gender equality, it’s time to take a deeper look into the best practices for writing job descriptions and applying them to your own.

Remote Hiring 

How is hiring remote employees an alternative recruitment strategy?

Remote recruiting is on the rise. There are many reasons why companies benefit from hiring remote employees. Remote hiring brings benefits to employers and employees alike.

For a more in-depth overview of remote recruitment, have a look here!

Employees who have children can spend quality time with them plus working full time in the comfort of their homes. The young force who seeks adventure and living in different places, with a flexible job, they can pay their travelling bills and work full time at cafés or work-spaces.

According to Gallup, 54% of office workers say they’d leave their job for one that offers flexible work time.

When candidates analyse job descriptions and overall job opportunities, they consider aspects such as job position, compensation, and career growth. And nowadays, flexibility is a significant factor that leads candidates to apply for or reject a job. So, offering flexibility and remote work is a major advantage that your company will have when competing with other companies to attract and recruit the best talent worldwide.

Think about this: One lesson companies have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that remote work works. And most employees who faced this transition don’t want to go back to the office. They want freedom and flexibility.  

Look Beyond The Resume 

CV’s are the golden ticket to getting a job most times. Suppose you went to an excellent college, got good grades, and achieved a great professional career. In that case, you’ll have more opportunities than those who went to a medium-range college and had few job opportunities.

This is not entirely wrong because you need a certain level of education, experience, and the necessary skills to obtain a job.

But, what is wrong is disqualifying applicants because they didn’t attend ivy league colleges or have minimal working experience.

One of the best recruitment strategies we’ve learned as tech recruiters is to go beyond CVs. Personality and soft skills are equally important.

Picture this hypothetical situation: You have two candidates. John and Bob. John went to an Ivy League university and has built a great professional trajectory. On the other hand, Bob went to a regular college and only had one job before applying to this one. You hire John because of its amazing CV, to later find out he can’t take feedback and he hates teamwork. 

Sounds familiar? – If you haven’t experienced this type of situation, you’re lucky. Many companies prioritise the CV, and the so-called ‘hard skills’, and forget about the soft skills and personality traits.  

Social Platforms 

Social media is the modern way of recruiting talent. Why? Because there are approximately 4.57 billion internet users! One of the most effective strategies for modern recruitment is posting job ads over social media. If your company uses LinkedIn, one of the recruitment most common hotpots, there’s a good chance many candidates postulate for the job. LinkedIn is a great way to recruit candidates but is not the only option.

Using social media as an alternative recruitment strategy is all about being wise and knowing where to post your job ads. For instance, if you are looking for juniors or people that might not have so much professional experience, LinkedIn might not be the place for you. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter might be the platforms that will help you reach out to this type of audience.

It’s important to know your key audience and what social media platforms they use the most. For example, McDonald’s changed their recruiting game, and they use ‘snaplications’ to reach out to a young audience. For example, Snaplications, are applications over Snapchat, one of the most popular social media platforms for teenagers.  

Offer the Chance to be Part of Something Bigger

When people, especially young people, are offered the opportunity of working at big companies such as Google or Facebook, they do not think twice. Why? Because these types of companies are known to have a good culture, besides offering good compensation. 

Be the company that whenever someone hears the name, they say, “I would do anything to have a job there’’. Obviously, this is more of a long-term strategy because it doesn’t happen overnight, but one thing is for sure if you foster a great culture, your employees and the people close to you will do the job for you. You can’t go wrong with this recruitment strategy.

You can record a video showing what it’s like to work at your company. If it’s a remote company like ours, you can explain how exciting it’s to have virtual happy hours or celebrate remote birthdays. 

Consider Past Candidates 

If you have been running your company for a while, you have a pool of candidates from previous open positions. Screening past applications is an optimal strategy to target your search. For example, a few months ago you hired a front-end developer to manage your team. Back then, you rejected a few candidates because they had more experience with UX design than web development. Now, you need to improve your user interaction features. Instead of opening a new position for UX designers, you can direct contact past candidates offering an interview for this new position. In this case, considering past candidates is one of the best alternative recruitment strategies to save your time and resources. 

Share Your Ad On Specific Websites

Most open-source software and programming languages have dedicated forums and websites for developers. When hiring a developer, it’s always a good strategy to share the job position on dedicated websites and tech centers. Often, local tech centers organize meet-ups and workshops on specific tools or coding languages. So, you can also check these types of events and forums based on the specific skills you need. And share your job ad directly to the community of developers you want to reach. In this case, you can check references in the community and speed up the hiring process.  

The Best Alternative Recruitment Strategy Is To Let Professionals Do The Work for You

Implementing employee recruitment techniques can be a long process. It requires writing a good job description, looking for candidates in the right places, interviewing, and many other aspects that take a lot of time and energy. But seeking alternative recruitment strategies is part of your job as a team leader to grow your team and company with unique talent.

We live in the era of working remotely, and therefore, hiring remote employees is getting more common than ever. But, if you think it’s too much work, we could give you a hand. As a remote recruitment agency, we have helped many companies hire the tech talent they were looking for. 

We have our formula based on looking for talented candidates who also understand a company’s processes and culture besides having excellent tech abilities. All of this in less than two weeks. Sounds good as an alternative recruitment strategy? Contact us!