Working for an SMB is an attractive option for many candidates. A national survey found that 65 percent of all job seekers and 58 percent of millennial job seekers want to work for a small or medium-sized company. Despite this, it can be a struggle to develop the right mix of talent acquisition strategies that will help you compete for talent effectively.
In a 2018 Indeed survey of small business owners, 56 percent reported difficulty in finding the right employees for their business, and 24 percent said it’s even harder to attract talent than it was five years ago. Attracting top talent can be challenging for any business, but SMBs often experience constraints related to budget and bandwidth that ultimately require a creative approach to finding and retaining talent. Here are four talent acquisition strategies you can use to achieve recruiting success for your SMB:
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Leverage Data to Attract the Best-Fit Candidates
In small and medium-sized businesses, every hire makes a big impact, and employees are expected to be flexible. As a result, it’s important to identify candidates who possess a mindset and skill set that are in line with your company’s mission, values, and goals. Simply posting positions online doesn’t guarantee you’ll attract the individuals who will fit your culture.
Instead of taking a blind stab in the dark, it’s more effective to use a dynamic recruiting platform that identifies and targets candidates who possess the experience, achievements, and career outlook that fit your culture.
Nurture Your Candidate Pipeline
Job candidates in today’s digital age have access to a lot of information, and they want to learn everything they can about prospective employers and what it’s really like to work for them. But let’s be honest: SMBs don’t have a limitless recruiting budget or a cadre of recruiters and marketers to create and post a steady stream of recruiting content.
However, engaging with the right candidates doesn’t have to be a costly or time-consuming undertaking. By using a talent acquisition strategy such as a career-oriented social network, you can connect and engage with the best talent by leveraging existing resources to highlight your culture, employee success stories, open positions, and internships on an ongoing basis.
Broaden Your Pool of Candidates
Instead of going to the same career fairs or college campuses, you want to adopt talent acquisition strategies that allow you to consider a broad range of candidates from a variety of universities, companies, and even industries. You’re likely to have a higher rate of success when you’re in a position to attract qualified candidates with a diverse selection of work experience and achievements.
It’s also important to have an eye for racial, gender, and other types of diversity. Research has found that a diverse workforce is an important factor for job seekers when they evaluate companies and job offers. A talent acquisition strategy that helps you attract women, minorities, and individuals from a broad range of geographies, for example, can help you develop a workforce that is attractive to today’s job seekers.
Showcase Your Employer Brand
Recruiting effectively for your SMB requires highlighting the aspects of your company that will appeal most to your ideal candidates. The younger generations—millennials and Generation Z—enjoy watching video tutorials and engaging with a variety of brands on social media. To attract them, you can benefit from doing the same. Employee testimonials, chat, and online Q&A sessions are ways to harness the power of digital communication to tell engaging stories and educate prospective candidates about your employer brand.
Talent acquisition strategies that work well for SMBs are the ones that help them effectively identify and hire the best candidates while also supporting a modest recruiting budget. A platform that helps you source more of the candidates you need and make better hiring decisions extends the capabilities of your recruiting efforts and allows you to do more. Recruiting today’s talent can be easy, seamless, and efficient. Schedule a demo of Goodwall’s platform and explore the possibilities.
This post was originally published by Tammy Aversa on March 18, 2019. Tammy is a Director of Inside Sales at Goodwall and has vast experience in the recruitment field. Prior to joining Goodwall, Tammy worked at Monster, Amazon and at another HR tech start up, HiringSolved. Tammy is a founding member of Goodwall’s Inside Sales team and focuses on fostering relationships with small and medium business.
