Industry Research: 5 Simple Ways to Make Your Talent Acquisition Strategy Stand Out

In a crowded hiring environment, you have to get your message out in order to attract great talent. And that means there’s only one thing to do: up your talent acquisition game. But we all know the talent pool can be finicky. To appeal to top talent, you’ve got to stand out in a positive way, without over-promising on your organization’s open positions and culture. To promote your organization and its talent acquisition practices, five key strategies come to mind, leveraging your authenticity, connection, transparency, efficiency, and recognition. Together, these elements encourage potential applicants to buy in, not only to your hiring process, but to your organization and its core values.

Authenticity is best defined as walking the walk and talking the talk. How does this translate to business? Being and embracing your employer brand. To uncover what your organization is really like, use the voice of your employees. How do you do this? By asking them, of course! A quick survey asking employees why they enjoy working for their team, the department, and the organization as a whole is the best method to describe your employer and organization brand. Use your survey responses, and if possible, in-person conversations with current employees, to create profiles of a few. 

Posting these profiles as blogs, sharing them on your organization’s social media, and linking to them in job descriptions give candidates a more complete idea of if they’ll enjoy working with current team members. Compared to hiring managers, HR pros, and organizational leadership, candidates are more likely to believe current employees. All of these employee-voiced elements allow you to build your employer brand, and demonstrate you’re an organization potential applicants and candidates can trust.

A great way to make your talent acquisition strategy appeal to candidates is to foster personal connections with them. This means presenting yourself with the mission of genuinely wanting to get to know candidates and support them on their career goals. Notice I said “career goals” not “future at your organization”. This difference is key, because not every applicant or candidate is going to work well within your particular team. Demonstrating to candidates your investment in them may sound intimidating, but there’s one super easy trick to helping candidates feel valued, even with a generic message. Want to know what it is?

Insert the word “you” when writing job ads, sending out phone screen invitations, or inviting candidates to in-person interviews. This verbiage makes candidates and potential applicants feel you’re talking directly to them, and nobody else, even if you send the same message to one hundred applicants!

You can even take creating a connection one step further by producing one-to-many video messages. By using video messages, applicants and candidates are immediately comforted knowing there’s a real person on the other side of the process.

Sending video messages that feel personalized to applicants or candidates is easy to create using your ideal candidate profile. The ideal candidate profile is everything you could ever want in a candidate: their motivations, education, personality, and even salary needs. These attributes should harmonize with the rest of the team and the direction of the team is headed. 

One example of a powerful video message would thank talent for submitting their application. Personalize the message by including callouts to the attributes that are high-priority for success in the role. Doing this helps candidates self-select further into your hiring process based on the attributes you emphasize. That means, you guessed it, top talent better understands what you’re looking for, believes they fit the role, and stays in your process longer.

A transparent talent acquisition process may feel like you’re revealing the recipe of your secret hiring sauce to candidates, but it’s something they really crave and won’t hurt the hiring process. You might not realize you see evidence of it a mysterious hiring process all the time. How often do you get emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn messages from candidates checking on the “status of their application”? Many more times than anyone would like, I’m sure. 

Prevent this by giving candidates answers to the question before they ask by outlining your hiring process on your careers page and in an auto-responder email thanking candidates for their application. This answers candidates’ immediate question of “What’s next?” and allows them to take initiative and prepare themselves for the next steps of your process without any prompting from you.

In an environment where top talent is in high demand, the talent acquisition and hiring process has to move at lightning speed before another organization submits offers to your top picks. But with hiring managers who feel like reviewing candidate interviews takes them away from their already short staffed team, getting feedback is an uphill climb. 

There are two techniques you can use to make getting feedback on candidates easy and accessible for hiring managers: candidate scorecards and one-way video interviews. Candidate scorecards allow interview reviewers to give each candidate a rating based on the key attributes of your ideal candidate. This gives reviewers more structure to base their feedback on, rather than gut instinct. 

Another efficient way to get candidates in front of hiring managers is one-way video interviews. These allow you to set interview questions for candidates to respond to in their own time. Their responses are recorded, and after your review, you can shortlist the best candidates for hiring managers. The hiring managers can then review the one-way interviews when they have time, and get information straight from candidates, rather than secondhand with your phone screen notes. 

These two techniques provide you with more useful and higher-quality feedback, faster. By streamlining your process, you’ll reach top talent faster than other organizations and quickly give candidates the answers they seek.

Sure, recognition tends to be associated with internal workings of your organization, and it is, but when you use internal recognition to promote your organization’s values, all the sudden it becomes a talent acquisition strategy. Showing you value your employees and their hard work makes your organization attractive to candidates who want an organization that believes in them, has a strong, positive culture, and actively recognizes great work. To ensure proper recognition occurs every time, develop your set of core values. Make them memorable by using an easy-to-remember acronym, if at all possible. For instance, Spark Hire’s core values spell out Sparky, the name of our mascot. So every month, we nominate team members and award one with the Sparky award.

It’s best to hone your talent acquisition strategy in simple, methodical ways to attract the best talent. Using an authentic brand, creating personal connections even at scale, being transparent, working efficiently, and promoting employee recognition are great ways to kick your process up a notch and get ideal candidates into your talent pool.

Additional Resources
The Ultimate Guide to Video Interviewing
4 Ways Video Interviewing Goes Beyond Long-Distance Hiring
How to Create Distinct Employer Branding with the Voice of Your Employees
How to Go from Application to Offer in 7 Days

Hannah Goldenberg is part of the marketing team at Spark Hire, the world's leading video interviewing platform with 5,000+ customers. Joining Spark Hire on the Sales team in 2017, Hannah quickly shifted into her role with the Marketing team, capitalizing on her long-standing passion for writing. When she's not working on content marketing efforts for Spark Hire, she spends her time baking, watching her favorite sports teams, and listening to true crime, cooking, and history podcasts. Visit www.hr.sparkhire.com   Connect Hannah Goldenberg Follow @sparkhire