Going beyond traditional methods of recruiting

Talent sourcing is often considered a key factor for organizations to find great people. While this is a fundamental recruiting approach generally, given the “Great Resignation,” talent shortage, and now “quiet quitting,” recruiting has become even more challenging in today’s job market. As a result, it’s extremely important to rethink and reinvigorate talent acquisition strategies in order to find success in this highly competitive marketplace.

One way to approach navigating this new era of recruiting is to create a positive, candidate-first experience that translates to shortening the time to source, recruit, and ultimately hire employees. These unique efforts around where organizations look, how they look and who is involved in the hiring process has helped to deliver a more inclusive workforce. According to Glassdoor, a diverse workforce is especially important to underrepresented groups; 32% of employees and prospective employees would not apply to a job at a company with a lack of diversity among its workforce. This percentage is even higher for Black job seekers (41%), and prospective LGBTQIA+ employees (41%).

A successful sourcing strategy starts with where you look. In addition to the larger, traditional recruiting platforms, companies can take advantage of various partnerships to find new candidate pools and underrepresented talent. Recognizing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as a concrete business imperative will help foster and leverage a diverse workforce, partners, and vendors. For example, establish unique partnerships that provide candidates in local business markets such as Building Pathways in Boston, Ad Clubs of New York or Philadelphia, or technical colleges and vocational schools in New Jersey and Los Angeles.

For early career, drivers or warehouse roles, companies can create ongoing partnerships with community and governmental organizations, which have large resource pools of candidates who have entered job-readiness programs. In New York, organizations like Workforce 1 and GOSO (Getting Out and Staying Out), one of the most effective reentry programs in the New York City area for 16 to 24 year-old justice-involved men, are options to not only find good candidates, but also support your communities. It is crucial to create an environment where these candidates can share their experiences and development in an authentic and meaningful discussion. For candidates who are specifically interested in early career roles, establishing ongoing relationships and connecting with alumni career centers is another way to attract recent graduates.

The recruiting focus to improve how organizations look for talent is also a priority. The days of candidates coming into offices with a paper resume in hand are long gone. In fact, the days of candidates coming into offices at all are seemingly gone. With virtual interviewing platforms, recruitment teams are able to cast a much wider net, which levels the playing field for candidates in different time zones, or for prospective talent currently working non-traditional work schedules. In this way, recruiters are willing to meet candidates where they are by scheduling interviews around their personal work/life needs. Hybrid work schedules or “work from anywhere” policies allow the hiring teams to create their own flexible work routine and attracts prospective employees.

To ensure you are reaching the widest applicant pool of all genders, investing in inclusive language tools, like pronouns and gender neutral language, for job descriptions and job postings is key. Maintaining an ongoing effort to identify any barriers and language that might create candidate fallout, particularly for gender, non-binary, and people of color helps organizations with talent acquisition as well as retention.

Another non-traditional approach to find candidates is to market digital out-of-home ads, like at bus stops and in subway stations, to reach people who may or may not be actively seeking jobs as they view screens on their daily commute. Identifying these passive candidates is an opportunity to nearly double the candidate pool. Recruiters should also proactively build a heat map of candidates for professional roles. While these candidates may be employed currently, keeping them in the purview to become an active candidate for the right role can help with opportunistic hiring. Many recruiters find that calling candidates to establish a rapport provides a competitive edge over just sending the traditional emails and LinkedIn DM’s.

To increase candidate flow, employers can also encourage employees to refer candidates offering monetary bonuses and in some cases, even doubling the amount for hard-to-fill roles.

Increasing the team who helps you look for talent can also improve sourcing efforts. Outside of HR, adding a structured interview approach to include diverse employee hiring panels that reflect a company’s demographics will help find talent through a fair and equitable recruiting process. Adding to the scope of race, age, gender, LGBTQIA+, and other dimensions of diversity, ensuring that business groups, career levels, members of employee resource groups and employee tenure is important and should be represented on hiring panels. A University of Colorado at Boulder study has shown that when half a candidate pool is non-white or female, the hiring committee has a 50-50 chance of choosing one of those applicants. When only one person in the finalist pool is non-white or female, that person is never chosen.

Today’s candidates are very savvy and recognize that the interview process is a two-way process. Candidates want to understand the company culture, ask questions, and hear first-hand from various employees before making a decision to accept an offer. To help facilitate those conversations with candidates, recruiters and hiring managers should attend diversity interview training and anti-bias training to expand sourcing and hiring from a broad range of experiences. Employees’ diversity helps organizations better understand the needs of their communities and discover new solutions to better serve them.

Read more: An overlooked component of recruitment and retention

Today’s hiring challenge is also a time for hiring managers to challenge the status quo and rethink job responsibilities and required skill sets given 58% of Americans have the opportunity to work from home part-time, according to a recent McKinsey study.

Understanding that candidates’ expectations have significantly changed over the last couple of years, it’s imperative for companies to pivot and identify non-traditional sources to expand hiring strategies. Not only will this lead to successfully filling roles quicker, it shows that companies are forward-thinking and evolving roles to meet current business and employee needs. Beyond that, it’s vital to engage hiring managers as collaborative partners to provide the most inclusive, transparent and authentic candidate experience possible.

Ci Ci Holloway, Chief People and Diversity Officer, Intersection