Talent acquisition: How to attract and retain talent

Define your talents

Before you start developing your talent acquisition strategy, you need to clearly define your recruitment needs. To be more accurate, you need to define the roles and types of candidates you want to hire. This will help you formulate your ideal candidate personas. The next step is to determine the content your target audience may be interested in. Ask yourself the following questions: In what topics are my talents interested in? Which social networks do they use? Where do they obtain their information? The key objective here is to tailor your marketing initiatives to your candidate personas. By doing so, you will be able to deliver the right information to the right person in the right place. 

Attract your future candidates

In order to attract new talent, it is essential to work on your employer brand. As a company, you need to be visible and attractive. To do so, you need to demonstrate your expertise and increase your visibility in your sector or industry. For instance, inform your candidates by regularly publishing value-adding content on your website and share it across your social media accounts. 
Think of: 

• Creating a blog post with pertinent information such as industry-specific content that will catch your audience’s attention. For instance, if you are a digital company based in Manchester in the UK, you could publish an article on “What is the average annual salary of engineers in the digital sector in Manchester?”
• Creating a career site with content that reinforces your employer brand. Next to your job offers, include employee testimonials. Make your career site interactive with video content highlighting your company’s values and culture. 

Stimulate their interest

You have defined your candidate personas and have managed to attract them to your website thanks to a well-thought content strategy. Very good — but now you need to move on to the next step. That is: convert website visitors into candidates. The tricky question here is: how do you convince people to join your company? 

To acquire new talent, it is no longer enough to solely rely on the job’s tasks and salary to motivate a potential candidate. Your company must be desirable. Mention and highlight everything that makes up life at work. Talk about company events, training opportunities, career development perspectives, employee well-being and so forth. Your publications, articles, blog posts and job offers must be appealing and showcase your employer brand. 

Recruit faster and better

More and more marketing techniques are being applied to the talent acquisition process. Inbound recruiting is one of them and consists of accelerating the recruitment of high-performing employees through innovative and diversified channels. Once you’ve created a strong employer brand, published tailored content and set up a career site that generates a decent volume of qualified CVs, it is now time to prioritise the different job applications and create a talent pool. 

Because timing is critical when recruiting new talents, there are different tools you can implement to recruit faster and better. Below are some ideas: 

1. Pre-select candidates by using personality traits-based questionnaires 
2. Create a candidate scoring matrix that will help you identify who to call first in order to gain a competitive advantage 
3. Automate the hiring process using an HR email workflow. This will help you follow up on candidates more easily and rapidly

Create true brand ambassadors

The recruitment process does not end once you have hired your candidate. Now comes the most important part: nurturing and retaining talented employees. This is why talent management is an important business strategy. Effective talent management is key to driving business growth and creating happier, more engaged employees. Satisfied employees are more inclined to speak positively about your company on social media and become true brand ambassadors for your organisation.

Indeed, a company can gain a significant competitive advantage by pursuing an employee advocacy strategy. Employee advocacy is related to a company’s online reputation. In short, it is the practice of inviting your employees to advocate your brand on their social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). Hence, you need to create an engaged community where your current employees take part in the recruitment process and can share their overall experience with potential new hires. 

To recap, you should create a continuous talent pool of candidates that matches your candidate personas. Then, implement a multi-channel employer branding strategy to attract the best talents through appropriate content marketing. By doing that successfully, you will be able to speed up your recruitment process and decrease your hiring costs.