Recruitment Best Practices

7 Recruitment Best Practices to Source Top Talent in 2023

Helping companies hire their perfect fit and candidates find their dream jobs is fulfilling but exhausting. 

Since many workplaces went hybrid lately, hiring has become complex. Managing a massive influx of candidates, conducting positive recruiting and onboarding experiences, and maintaining a human touch throughout the process are just a few of the daunting challenges recruiters face today.

However, it all gets easier when you follow a systematic approach to streamline recruitment. We’ve compiled 7 recruitment best practices you should follow to source top talent for your clients quickly and easily!

The top 7 recruitment practices

Top 1. Know Your Ideal Candidate

When you get a new requirement from a client, gather the complete job details first. This helps source candidates that fit the job profile better.

Look out for these details:

  • Name of the position
  • Seniority level
  • What the job entails
  • Salary range
  • Skills required for the role
  • Educational qualifications
  • Past experiences

Other than these prerequisites, understand what attributes they’re looking for in a candidate. 

Ask these questions to get the complete picture:

  • Will the new hire be involved in decision-making? How will the new candidate affect the company’s revenue?
  • What level of proficiency in verbal communication does this role demand? Does it involve a lot of client and stakeholder communication?
  • How essential are critical-thinking skills for the role?
  • How would the client like to assess their candidates? What are the values they’re looking for in them?

Top 2. Reach out to Passive CandidatesTop

Passive candidates may not be actively looking for a job, but when a good opportunity presents itself, they might be open to it. Sometimes, those who perfectly fit the job profile turn out to be passive candidates. 

A professional networking platform such as LinkedIn might be the best place to start sourcing them. Join talent communities, attend networking events and look in your current database. 

Encourage your clients to build an employer brand online, showcasing their company culture, success stories, and employee-employer relationships to impress these potential candidates.

Top 3. Conduct Inclusive RecruitmentTop

An inclusive recruitment approach demands conducting recruiting best practices that are fair and discrimination-free, following compliance laws, and diversifying a workplace. 

It mainly translates to happier and more satisfied candidates, which results in a lower attrition rate. 

What Are Inclusive Recruitment Best Practices?

  • Prepare the job posting carefully. Never mention a preference for a certain race, gender, or age. Also, explicitly say that you follow best practices for recruiting diverse candidates.
  • Use gender-neutral language in your hiring post.
  • Include transcripts and closed captions in your videos to make your hiring posts accessible to everyone.
  • Use multiple platforms (both online and offline) to source diverse candidates for the role.
  • Conduct a bias-free interview process and prepare beforehand to avoid any slips of the tongue during the interview.
  • Encourage your client to showcase inclusion in their branding—website, social media, and marketing communications.
  • Protect candidates’ data by processing their resumes in-house and standardising them to avoid bias. (A resume reformatting tool like AllSorter helps remove bias and remove the focus from sensitive information.)

Top 4. Conduct Skill Assessment Tests to Streamline Your Shortlisting Proces4. Top

girl using technology for recruitment best practices

A large portion of the global workforce has lost jobs since the pandemic, causing a spike in the number of candidates applying for jobs. Screening, sourcing, and interviewing these candidates individually can be very exhausting and time-consuming, especially when done remotely. 

Save yourself some time and shortlist candidates faster by conducting skill assessment tests that asses their hard and soft skills. 

Make sure to include questions that aren’t easy to Google and require a lot of analytical thinking. For example, ask a client to provide a sample everyday scenario that the candidate would have to resolve if accepted for the position.

Top 5. Level up Your Recruitment Marketing Strategies

Cover all marketing avenues to consistently source candidates (even when you’re not actively looking for a specific position): 

  • Branding: When scanning a job posting, candidates first ensure the source’s legitimacy. They’ll check the job poster’s (the recruitment agency) website, reviews, and processes. 

Make sure you have a good presence online, including social media, websites, and reputable job portals. 

  • Network: Actively participate in networking events and leave a mark. Establish yourself as a thought leader in the recruiting industry and present trends and opinions.
  • Niche down: Once you’ve figured out the kind of roles you excel at sourcing candidates for, position yourself as the niche expert. It’ll help you attract quality clients and increase your credibility with candidates.  
  • Leverage content marketing: Pick areas where you’ve developed expertise—topics that can offer immense value to your clients and candidates—and create content around them. Publish blogs and social media posts or start a newsletter and build an audience online. 

Top 6. Vital Recruitment Best Practice: Speed up Your Recruitment and Onboarding Processes

Allsorter platform

On average, it takes about 42 days to go through the complete recruitment process, and during this time, candidates can very quickly change their minds about the job. A slow recruitment process may be the reason, or there’s always a chance of candidates finding better opportunities.

Whatever the reason is, you can still stay in their good books by reducing the friction between each recruitment round and providing an excellent onboarding experience: 

  • Use a resume reformatting tool like AllSorter to reformat multiple resumes in no time 
  • Provide regular updates—good or bad 
  • Once hired, make sure to offer the candidate a detailed walkthrough
  • Personalise your communication
  • Set expectations from the beginning

Top 7. Consider the Candidates’ Values and Ensure They Align with the Client’s

When applying to your job posting, candidates consider many other factors besides money and job description. They’re in it for the company’s culture, diversity, benefits, values, beliefs, and work environment. 

How do you ensure their values align with your client’s?

Use the Best Recruitment Practices to Find the Right Candidates Faster

  • Lead with value-centric questions in the interview and ask about their goals and expectations with the company.
  • Encourage your clients to discuss their values, work culture, and style on social media. This will fast-track decision-making out for the candidate before they think about applying. 
  • Give them situation-based scenarios in interviews and observe their attitude and problem-solving potential.
  • Discuss your client’s visions and goals with the candidate.
  • Encourage them to ask questions about the company.
  • How to reduce time to hire
  • Guide to high volume recruiting
  • How to address biases in recruitment
  • Top 5 high-volume hiring strategies

We Reformat.
You Recruit.

Speed up Resume formatting, Reduce bias, Supercharge your agency’s brand and maintain the security of the Resume data within your organisation. 

Recruitment is expensive and time-consuming when you hire the wrong people. However, the best practices for recruitment we just shared with you will help you organise your processes, systematise them, and easily discover how your recruitment agency can shine.

Start with automating routine tasks like resume reformatting (Allsorter can help), and then focus on strengthening your recruitment process by leading with value, reducing the time it takes to hire the right people and fortifying your pipeline so you always have the right candidate for the job.

Soon enough, you’ll be getting referrals from both clients and happy candidates!

Did you enjoy this post? Here are some more recruitment topics you might be interested in:

Author Details

Zara Lou McGrath

Zara Lou McGrath is a Marketing Executive at Allsorter.com with over two years of experience in the field. She is an ambitious, creative individual who works diligently to shape the company’s marketing approach and ensure all campaigns are successful. Zara is highly knowledgeable in the use of AI-powered solutions for the HR industry and is passionate about driving high performing digital transformation to create a strong customer base. In her role, she is committed to developing and executing innovative marketing strategies that will help the company reach its goals.