You know the standard recruitment techniques by heart — posting on job boards, screening resumes, scheduling interviews. While these methods have their place, it's time to think outside the box. The conventional job board is fading, and cookie-cutter hiring approaches just don't cut it anymore. You need to implement innovative recruitment strategies that go above and beyond to find and attract top talent.
This article explores new and unconventional techniques you can leverage to take your recruitment efforts to the next level. By the time you're done reading, you'll have a toolkit of innovative methods you can use right away to gain a competitive advantage and recruit the candidates you really want. Let's dive in.
1. Programmatic Job Advertising
Instead of posting a generic job ad, why not target potential candidates based on their online behavior and interests? This practice, known as programmatic job advertising, can reduce your cost per applicant by over 30 percent.
Here's an example of how programmatic job advertising works: imagine you're hiring an accountant. You can target ads at people who frequently visit accounting websites or follow accounting influencers on social media. Reaching candidates already interested in the field means a higher chance of getting qualified applicants.
To implement this approach, you need good programmatic job advertising software. These tools let you set a budget and choose where your ads appear, like on Google, Facebook, or industry-specific sites. They use data to determine the best times and places to show your ads for the biggest impact.
2. Video Recruiting
Video recruiting lets you connect with candidates through short video messages. As an innovative way to pre-screen applicants beyond the traditional resume, it gives you a sense of a candidate’s soft skills, enthusiasm, and how well they'll fit your open role and company culture.
Here's how it works: candidates record a 30- to 60-second video answering a few questions you provide about their experience, skills, and interests in the role. You review the videos to evaluate how well they communicate and whether their personality is a good match before deciding who moves on to initial phone screens.
This approach gives you an authentic view of a candidate's strengths and fit that you just can't get from a resume alone. You'll gain insight into their confidence, energy level, and ability to think on their feet. And by including a question on company culture, you'll see their enthusiasm for your mission and values.
3. Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) allows candidates to experience what it's like to work at a company without stepping foot in the office. As an innovative recruitment technique, VR helps give applicants a realistic job preview and helps set the right expectations of the culture and workspace. 70 percent of talent professionals agree virtual recruiting will become the standard, and it's not hard to see why.
VR can be used to:
- Give virtual tours of the work environment
- Showcase a day in the life of an employee at your organization
- Test job skills for roles requiring specialized skills
- Enable two-way interaction
While still an emerging technology, VR has significant potential to transform how companies source and evaluate talent. Big companies such as Deloitte, Toyota, and Walmart already use VR to hire and train new talent. This innovative recruitment technique will become mainstream as tools become more advanced and cost-effective.
4. Collaborative Hiring
Collaborative hiring allows multiple stakeholders in your company to weigh in on a candidate's strengths and weaknesses based on their specific needs. This approach can yield a more holistic view of fit that considers both hard and soft skills relevant to different roles and departments.
Collaborative hiring exposes candidates to potential future colleagues during the hiring process, building relationships that ease future collaboration and integration into the company.
For collaborative hiring to work well, companies must define clear processes to structure input from all participants. All stakeholders should be trained on what to evaluate and how to provide constructive feedback. With these elements in place, collaborative hiring can nurture a culture of teamwork and transparency that extends beyond the recruitment stage.
5. Employee Referral Programs
Okay, you got us. This isn't a new and innovative program...but managing it with an automated system is. Your employees likely have connections with talented people in their field and know who might be a great fit for your open roles. And, offering a bonus or reward for successful referrals is a great way to motivate your team to get involved in the hiring process. When an employee referral leads to a hire, it’s a win-win-win — the new employee gets a job, the existing employee receives a bonus, and you get a top-tier new hire.
A platform like Bountiful can help you supercharge your employee referral program from bounty creation to communications and payments. And with our easy-to-use analytic dashboards, you can track the success of your program over time. The best part? Bountiful helps you extend our referral program past employees — allowing our community of "network scouts," to help you scout top talent for your open roles. Interested in learning more? Book a call with our team today.
In Summary
You now have some innovative techniques to source and find the best talent. Target potential candidates based on their online behavior and interests, use videos to evaluate their skills and enthusiasm, involve multiple stakeholders in the hiring process, and tap into the power of employee referrals. We hope that this helps you jumpstart filling any open roles you have!
And, if you're looking to scale your employee referral program, we can help. Our platform streamlines the process for employees to refer candidates and recruiters to process top referrals. Our seamless integrations make it easy for your employees to share open roles, track key metrics, and extend your referral program to our network of community scouts. Ready for a demo? Fill out this form, and we'll be in touch.
