How to get more qualified candidates: The most simple and effective tips

Are you hoping to find a smooth and straightforward guide on how to get more qualified candidates and fill a vacancy in record time? Well, you’re in the right place. Even those hard-to-fill positions will seem like child’s play once you start to follow the steps we’ll describe in this article. So get ready to recruit, retain, and crush all obstacles that stood in your way toward a successful recruitment experience. 

It’s the perfect time to learn how to attract qualified employees!

Grabbing the attention of the right audience is every company’s goal. Then, getting these skilled and experienced people to join (and stay) is the next big step. And both of these aims feel more and more tricky nowadays, don’t you agree? In a continually competing and hyper-heated job market, becoming an employer of choice seems like a castle in the air. But is it really? Luckily, there still are quite a few secure and efficient schemes and methods. Learn how to get more qualified job applicants and dependable hires by putting these smooth and simple tips into practice:

• Know precisely who you want and need on your team, and be very clear regarding your expectations, scope of work, objectives, and more.
• Choose quality over quantity whenever there’s a vacancy, and ensure long-term success by doing so.
• Try out referrals and explore them in multiple ways, which includes testing brand new tools, recruitment platforms, channels that will help you promote referral links, etc.
• Make every step of your hiring process easily understandable, manageable, and straightforward.
• Pay more attention to your website, career pages, social media, and every other aspect of your online presence that shapes up your brand and helps job seekers understand and appreciate your firm.

Now, let’s have a closer look at each of these steps. We’ll fill in the blanks for you and help your company recruit and retain more talented and knowledgeable individuals more easily. 

Start from the basic ground: Discover your true hiring need

Who to hire, how to hire them, and why do you pursue that exact type of candidate are the top questions that demand a well-thought-out answer. And all of these key variables have a whole lot to do with identifying a hiring need. 

So first, be sure to define and align your requirements and targets. Come up with a clear list of absolutely needed hard skills and soft skills. After that, you will have to write them down and compose a clear-cut job description with a specific title, valuable info regarding your firm, key roles and responsibilities, and a few other crucial details like perks, benefits, and salary range. Here’s another tip that will help you determine your hiring needs more accurately – assess your team from the inside. Analyze their strengths and spot the gaps. Then, source new people accordingly to patch the cracks and nail your marks. Because, ultimately, learning how to get more qualified candidates starts with knowing what you lack and call for.

Get more qualified candidates by taking a key step: Find your candidate persona 

Now that you’ve identified an actual need when hiring new people, it’s essential to cover a few more details and elements. So creating a candidate persona is your next big assignment. In simple terms, it refers to a template profile of your absolutely perfect hire. This persona is based on the data you’ve collected internally and combined with the results of meticulous market research. It encompasses all those personality traits and skills that will help your team shift your business to the next level. 

Now, the steps you must take include:

• Evaluating your current employees and listening to what they have to say about their perception of your company (culture, mission, values, and more); Plus, it’s paramount to find out about their aspirations, wishes, motivators, and careers.
• Determining EVP (Employer Value Proposition) by analyzing which benefits are the most significant for your team, what’s your unique advantage, and what else can you offer to candidates; In other words: why should your candidate persona be joining your squad and staying happy and motivated.
• Imagining a resume or LinkedIn profile of your perfect candidate and making sure to know exactly what sets of skills are must-haves from your point of view; Years of experience, background, and tech stack are the necessary elements of this segment.

These three steps are positively the main ingredients needed to create a candidate persona and ensure that you’re on the right path to get more qualified candidates. 

Shoot for the stars: Always focus on quality over quantity 

Attracting skillful experts was always tough. And now, throughout the era of the great resignation, the situation seems even more hopeless for employers. So how will you attract and retain skilled employees? Aside from knowing your aims and objectives, there are a few other standards to meet. And once you establish your ideals and principles, it’s imperative to stick with them through and through. 

Focusing on quality instead of quantity is the norm you must meet entirely. Sure, having fewer candidates in your pool may feel frustrating. But did you know that talking to just a few interested job seekers with those decisive skills and traits actually shortens the whole process? While it could seem like you’re hardly getting any engagement, these applicants are far more likely to be a good match. So yes, improved recruiting metrics like time to hire are among the reasons to redirect your attention to quality over any other factor. By doing so, you will truly save time, effort, and money – not to mention those other perks that will follow and have a lasting effect on your business. Positive experiences and a better reputation will certainly come after you embrace this vital approach. 

Try new techniques: Set up a referral program

An employee referral program is a carefully organized strategy many companies use for sourcing and hiring skilled candidates. This hiring practice keeps on becoming more and more popular because it is highly efficient and fast. And here’s how it works: employees recommend their friends and former colleagues who have the required mastery and background. There’s another reason why referred talents do great after joining a new team. They are often deeply familiar with the company’s culture and share its core values. And those are just some of the key points in favor of hiring through employees’ recommendations. 

Set up a successful employee referral program to get more qualified candidates

Aside from enhancing and speeding up your hiring process, saving money, and getting you closer to a superb candidate experience, referrals come with several other benefits. In fact, they offer the easiest way to find out how to find qualified candidates and attract them effortlessly. 

But how will you set up a system that works and truly encourages employees to recommend their peers? Well, first, you must follow the necessary steps and guidelines:

• Evaluate your goals and necessities,
• Assess your budget and capacities,
• Share important information with employees and keep them briefed through and through,
• Learn who your most reliable and proactive referrers are,
• Build a system to reward your crew according to their needs and preferences,
• Ensure that everything is running smoothly by using the right tools. 

Learning how to ask for employee referrals is actually pretty simple. Just make sure that the timing is right, and be very clear whether you’ll use their networks and reach out to their acquaintances for specific roles or every time you’re searching for a new hire. Then, take a few extra moments to come up with a precise process for submitting referrals & make sure to inform everyone about the specifics. 

Expand your search & give external referrals a go

So, what is the best recruitment strategy? Obviously, it has to be the one that drives the best results in terms of getting more knowledgeable applicants and hires easily. Now, what could be the formula to nail your targets really fast and get all sorts of perks in the long run? 

The answer is easy. Since referrals save money and time + bring the most favorable outcomes swiftly, it’s only logical to base your recruiting tactic on them. But you can boost it and take it a few steps further. Why wouldn’t you rely on top industry professionals to source on your behalf? That way, you’ll enjoy all those advantages on internal recommendations, only on a much higher level. With countless dedicated specialists who will recruit their most trusted and skillful peers, you’re bound to win big time. Just make sure to come up with an adequate reward system and choose the right recruitment affiliate software.  

Go for simplicity: Make your entire hiring process as smooth as possible

Making the entire process painless is probably one of the most important ingredients you must take into account. And cracking the code on how to get more qualified candidates absolutely requires smoothness and simplicity. Start with the application process. Most job seekers just hate to waste their time on lengthy and unnecessarily complicated applications. So make sure to crush repetitive patterns and only ask for the info you actually need from the start. Here’s how to test will your procedures make the potential hires roll their eyes hard and abandon the process: answer the questions from the form yourself. If applying to a job takes more than 5 or 10 minutes tops, you’re in for a serious lack of quality resumes. 

Create a painless interview process (that candidates won’t hate) 

And now we get to the part of the hiring process that has the most potential to go wrong. How will you set up an interview process your candidates won’t find dreadful at best? Try out these remedies:

• Be sure regarding the steps your perspectives should take and cut out all of the rounds that feel boring, obsolete, or way too recurrent.
• Know whether you need a personality test and be clear about the role of HR, as well as each participant’s actual part in the process.
• Use interview scheduling tools to get rid of back-and-forth emails that can only waste everyone’s time and don’t make applicants come for a chit-chat if conducting an online interview makes perfect sense.

The bottom line is: your process can be quite efficient with only two to four rounds of interviews. So don’t make it difficult and time-consuming. Be flexible and show understanding and respect. 

Boost your site & social media: Use all tools to promote your company

When it comes to this particular step, there are tons of useful tactics you can rely on. However, these key points are unconditional must-haves for every company and hiring manager that looks forward to learning how to get more qualified candidates:

• First, use search engine optimization (SEO) to optimize your job postings, become more visible and easily recognized, and build up your talent pool.
• Then, post your jobs where candidates are actually spending their time; Find various places that could drive more clicks, engagement, and applications, and make sure to track your success and ensure to use the best sourcing channels in the future.
• Also, consider pay-per-click (PPC) ads to reach further and gain more audience that is likely to match your needs and candidate persona (or know someone who falls under this category & recommends them). 

Finally, if you neglect social media, you’re probably in for a free trial in a cloak of invisibility. It is estimated that 4.41 billion people worldwide will be active social media users by 2025. So, according to studies, if you can’t promote your firm there, you’re doomed. Final thought: it’s not only about LinkedIn. Look further and reach out through different channels and groups. 

Learn how to get more job applicants with the right skills through your career pages

This should go without saying, but let’s just get it out of the way: paying some extra attention to career pages is pivotal. Start by making them easy to spot & entirely accessible. So, be sure to place your career page just one click away from the home page. Then, take another moment to make an outstanding hero, include an FAQ section that truly helps visitors find what they want, and don’t be afraid to mix your content. And lastly, keep mobile users in mind. In fact, studies show that more than 50% of Millennials and Gen Z candidates use their phones to browse job openings and apply. Make it easy and neat for them. 

Get more qualified candidates by following this simple guide

So how do you attract qualified applicants? The tested formula is to start from the basic things. Your hiring needs and candidate persona have to be at the very top of the to-do list. Then, move gradually through the next steps and stick to our guidelines. And all the way through – make sure to give some new tools a chance. Always mix things up and dig into the approaches, practices, and gizmos that can help you source, hire, and retain the best people. 
Ready to give referrals another look & smash your recruitment aims? Now’s the time!