Up Your Hiring Game in 2023 with These Best Practices

The fear of a looming recession and mass layoffs by tech giants notwithstanding, the hiring battlefield is as fiercely competitive as it was in 2022. Employers are scouting for qualified candidates to fill the skill gap and employees are looking for better options after the Great Resignation. 

In these challenging times, how can your company ensure a steady supply of talent? What good practices should you hold onto from the past and what should you do differently? Dive in for some strategies that are working for recruiters worldwide. 

Optimize Your Career Pages

First, make sure that the job openings in your organization are visible to candidates. Your organization’s career page is the first place a potential candidate checks for suitable openings.  Use SEO techniques, such as creating backlinks and strategic keywords, so that your career page is displayed to potential candidates. 

The meta tags and URLs should have a primary keyword in them. Use strategic keywords, i.e. the keywords that drive high traffic to your website, in your job descriptions. SEO best practices advise that you should have around 1500 words on a page. While you cannot make each job ad so long, aim for optimal length on your career page.  

Your job ads should have all the information Google needs to display in a snippet and they should be linked to the career page. Use location as a keyword for localization and primary keywords in the job description and title.

Strengthen Remote Hiring

Remote hiring is the new normal. Use “remote” as a keyword in job ads and descriptions to attract remote candidates. Schedule interviews with remote candidates using scheduling apps and conduct assessments using an online tool to make them more efficient, fair, and accurate.

Use a customized video interview tool and brush up on the interview skills required for video format. Having a collaborative interview, including not just the manager but a few members of the team as well, will help in identifying if the candidate is a good fit for the team. 

At times like now, when talented candidates hold more than one offer letter, investing in good onboarding software, preferably one that can keep the candidate engaged between the job offer and the first day of work is advantageous.

Automate the Hiring Process

Automated assessments help you screen many candidates simultaneously, making hiring more efficient and cost-effective. Automation improves the quality of hires by shortlisting candidates strictly based on test performance, eliminating unconscious human bias. This allows HR extra time to focus on more important things. 

Use automated job posting software that posts your job ads across job boards and social media. NLP-based parsing software can automate resume parsing and uploading of candidate information, helping you speed up the screening process. 

RPA-powered recruitment chatbots can engage candidates, and answer standard queries, lowering response time, and improving candidate experience. For high-volume hiring, a good quality AI-based recruitment software can streamline the hiring workflow and shorten the time to fill. 

Find the Right Fit for the Job

Hiring is a costly affair and finding a suitable candidate ensures that your efforts are rewarded. To find the ideal candidate, you will have to look beyond resumes and standard interview responses. Your hiring should be informed by a clear-cut hiring strategy and proper evaluation of the positions to be filled. 

Avoid mis-hires by using effective hiring techniques. First and foremost, find the right requirements for the vacant position. Use it to draft a clear job description to attract the right talent. Once you have an idea of the job roles and role expectations, you can design assessments to identify candidates who would best fit those roles. Avoid standard interview questions which can give you scripted answers. Instead, go for offbeat questions that help you probe the candidate’s true strengths and interests.

Be Data-Driven 

Monitoring data on crucial hiring parameters, such as cost per hire, quality of hire, quality of the source, and candidate experience, gives you useful insights into your hiring process. You can then make changes that will benefit the business by identifying what is working and what can be improved.

High early attrition is a matter of concern and needs to be addressed at the earliest. To calculate attrition, divide the number of new employees who left in less than a year by the total number of employees who joined that year and multiply it by 100. If this figure is high, probe the root cause. Have you exaggerated the benefits in your job description? Have you overlooked an important requirement or have your requirements changed? Have you provided ample training for the job?

You can also use past performance data to analyze performance patterns to know who to hire in order to guarantee top performance and productivity in your company and lower turnover rates and recruitment costs.

Have a Robust Strategy for Contractors/Freelancers

Post-pandemic, many organizations are filling the talent gap caused by employee scarcity with contingent workers. The advantage of this is that organizations can hire people on a project basis. This way candidates with specific skills can be hired in the required numbers. 

In 2023, HR needs to consider contingent workers as vital employees and draft policies with them in mind. Document the hiring process for contingent workers. Make sure hiring managers are aware of differences, if any, in the hiring practices to be followed for contingent workers and the documentation required. 

You can also outsource securing and management of contingent workers to external agencies. Once outsourced, it is the agency’s responsibility to ensure a steady supply of talent in the required skill sets. This is especially beneficial for niche skills or tech stacks with a limited talent pool. Everything from payroll to retaining employees is handled by the agency. 

Conclusion

So dear HRs, you will have to basically reinvent the wheel. Automate every possible task, market your jobs as much as your services, and make informed decisions. Keep abreast with the latest hiring technologies and keep refining your hiring practices in tune with the times.