How to Remain Competitive in the New Normal Recruitment Market
In creative jobs and technical jobs, the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything, and continues to do so. To remain competitive and attract the highest-quality talent into vacant roles in 2023, companies must navigate a ‘new normal’ recruitment market.
If your company is going to remain competitive in the war for talent throughout 2023, it is critical to overcome hiring challenges. You’ll need to understand how the recruitment market has shifted, and what trends are becoming entrenched in the range of employees’ needs and desires.
The workplace has transitioned rapidly. The economic environment has evolved, and attracting, hiring, and retaining top-quality employees has never been more challenging.
These 10 hiring and retention tactics are crucial to your competitiveness in the new normal recruitment market in creative and technical jobs.
1. Learn What Your Current Employees Want
An organization’s success depends on the performance of its employees, and employee satisfaction is a key factor that affects productivity. When employees are satisfied, they are more productive and have higher levels of engagement. It is important to find out what your employees want to improve their satisfaction and productivity.
The best way to learn what your employees want is to ask them.
Ask them what they like about their job, what they don’t like about their job, and what they would change about their job if given the chance. The feedback you receive will help you know what changes need to be made for your employees’ happiness levels to increase ─ and your retention rates to follow.
2. Improve Employee Experience
It is important to have a good relationship with your employees by listening to them when they need something or if they have an idea for improvement. You should also ensure that your employees are given the opportunity to grow and learn new skillsets.
Don’t underestimate the part that your company culture plays in the employee experience. A good company culture can help attract and retain talent, and helps you become an employer of choice.
How do your managers treat their team members? What job and career-crafting opportunities do you provide? How do you connect the work that your people do to your company’s purpose, values, and mission?
3. Offer Remote Work to Candidates
The pandemic accelerated the shift to remote work. Many jobs that were previously considered unsuitable to be done remotely are now accepted as work-from-home roles.
Remote work allows people to have more flexibility in their schedules and can allow them to be closer to family or friends. Additionally, many people are drawn to remote work because they can live in an area that they prefer.
The benefits are not restricted to employees, though. There are many benefits for employers as well. It can help companies save money on office space, employees with a better work/life balance tend to perform more effectively, and happier employees are more likely to remain loyal to their employer.
4. Create a Hybrid Work Policy
A hybrid work policy usually refers to the idea of employees working from home or on the go, and in the office. This means that they can do their jobs from any location, but they still have designated time slots for working in the office.
You get the benefit of having employees in the office when you need them, as well as reducing office costs. Employees gain from greater flexibility and the advantage of working from home, while also maintaining in-person contact with colleagues and managers.
5. Prepare Your Technology for New Ways of Working
To enable employees to maximize their productivity and continue to feel part of the bigger picture, it will be crucial to keep pace with technological developments that enable this. You’ll need to provide the tools that people need, while maintaining control of access to your network and ensuring security across your digital infrastructure.
6. Train Managers and Supervisors for Remote Environments
For managers and supervisors to be effective in remote working environments, they should be trained in how best to communicate with their team members who are not physically present at the workplace. They must understand how to support their team members, make decisions, and resolve conflict in the virtual world of work ─ as well as how to manage and monitor tasks in an environment that naturally delegates greater degrees of autonomy to those working from home.
7. Gain Insight Into Competition
To attract the most talented candidates, it’s crucial for your company to be competitive in the labor market.
Knowing where you stand in the market helps recruiters better prepare for an outbound recruiting approach. By understanding how you compare in the types of jobs you are hiring for, and in your industry, you can develop more effective recruitment campaigns.
You should seek to gain insight into pay and benefits, employee development and career advancement opportunities, company cultures, and best hiring practices. Such insight will help you leverage your comparative strengths.
8. Develop a Strategy to Attract Passive Candidates
The best candidates are often those who are not actively seeking a new position. Understanding how and why such candidates might be tempted to move will help you to engage with them. This might include gaining insight into the companies for whom candidates have worked, where they have worked, motivations for changing jobs, etc.
Such information will help you to pitch more effectively to passive candidates, and develop a database of potential candidates for the future.
9. Improve Your DEI
In a 2021 study conducted by CNBC/Survey Monkey, almost 80% of workers said they wish to work for an employer who values diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In a more recent study, 89% of adults in the United States agree that DEI in the workplace is important.
The bottom line? Your company culture, hiring processes, and workplace must reflect a commitment to DEI. You can’t simply talk the talk, you must walk the walk.
10. Re-Engineer Your Hiring Strategy
In Gartner’s study titled Top 5 Priorities for HR Leaders in 2023, Gartner found that almost four-in-ten HR leaders believe their sourcing strategies are inadequate to recruit the skills and talent they require.
To pull ahead of your competition and hire more effectively, it’s crucial that you find new recruiting paths and new sources of talent. For example, look wider than your own industry to recruit the transferable skills you need, and locate people who can quickly onboard other, more technical skills required in the job.
Recruitment will certainly prove challenging over the next 12 months, but embracing change and adopting a flexible hiring approach will see prepared organizations flourish under these unique pressures. Companies should prepare for multiple future scenarios and consider the business’s long-term skill requirements, which could hinder performance.
Will Your Hiring Strategy Win the Race for Talent in 2023?
2023 could be a turning point in the labor market. The talent shortage in creative and technical jobs is likely to increase. Hiring companies must be on top of their game to attract and retain the best talent.
When we partner with clients to help them locate the talent they need, we take an integrated approach. We bring expert knowledge and up-to-date market insight to the table, as well as an unrivalled client/candidate matching methodology.
We’ll help you to hire more effectively with a data and database approach to recruitment. We’ll help you understand what will attract individual candidates, function as your brand ambassador, and share our market knowledge with you to help you shape a winning formula in your search for talent in a candidate-driven market.
To learn more about how we help our clients obtain the best talent and future-proof their high-performing teams, contact TECHEAD today.