Attracting the best talent to join your company is the ultimate goal for the Talent Acquisition team in any organization. Finding such talent requires a good leadership team and some serious creative ideas in their recruiting efforts.
Usually the best or strongest talent is easily employed somewhere else. So now the challenge is in finding those people who are not out looking for a job or out just browsing classified or job sites. Then, once you find them, how do you compel them to apply with your company?
During my time working as a recruiter in a Multi-National Company, I found myself constantly dealing with these questions. I needed to find new people, and I needed them fast – but what I wanted most was to get the attention of employees who were currently employed elsewhere.
To come up with a solution, I sat down with my team to brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas that we could use to get those people’s attention. These brainstorming sessions resulted in amazing ideas that produced incredible results.
Here are 5 of the most unique recruiting ideas that truly paid off:
- Wacky Commercials or Online Ads
- Digital / Social Media Recruiting – Facebook , LinkedIn , Twitter
- Hand out Recruiting Cards
- Employee Referrals
- Web Site with games & Interactive sessions for Recruiting Candidates
1.Wacky Commercials or Online Ads
Every time I switch on the television I see that every TV program has a break and in that break there are many commercial’s shown. Some of them are funny, some are thought provoking and some really grab your attention. In terms of spending budgets you don’t need to spend a lot of money on them, rather than hiring a professional studio, you could instead reach out to your current employees and ask them to get involved. Create something funny or unique and this ad could be displayed on air. You would end up making a commercials that were absolutely hilarious and entertaining, but left people scratching their heads, thinking, “What the heck does that company do?” That curiosity would drove them to check on the internet and check out your recruiting website to read about our available positions.
2.Digital / Social Media Recruiting – Facebook , LinkedIn , Twitter
I mentioned before that we wanted to target new hires that already had a job. Additionally, there were certain companies we admired in our area that we felt were most likely to have a culture that would produce great people with good experience. To reach these people, we decided to take a new approach we used the social media sites and created a virtual online hiring center. We had the company profiles pages with the words “Now Hiring” in big letters along with recruitment Ad images. It was a fantastic way to really do some targeted recruiting from great companies.
3.Handout recruiting cards:
We had special business size cards printed for each and every employee in the company. These cards had our company name, phone number and website printed on them with the words “Now Hiring” stamped across the front in bold letters. We then had a place on the back that read “Tell them _______ said you are awesome!” Every employee in the company was asked to keep these cards with them wherever they went. They were told that whenever they came across someone who was doing a great job at whatever job they were doing, to give that person a hiring card and to write their own name in the blank line on the back. It didn’t matter if it was a person in the fast food restaurant or the cashier at the shoe department in the mall, or the waitress that went the extra mile. We wanted to hire anyone who went out of their way to provide good service and who really made an impression. We had learned long before that you can teach skills but you can’t teach personality, so if someone had the right attitude, we were willing to teach them the skills. You would be amazed at the type of great employees we were able to find from very diverse backgrounds using this program.
4.Employee Referral Rewards:
It is always better to hire someone who was referred by a current employee. A current employee understands your company culture and can give a sense of whether a new person will be a good fit for the organization. To give incentives to employees to refer others, we offered different items, such as cash rewards, free electronic devices and Flip cameras, etc. to employees who referred people to join our company that we ultimately hired. We staged their reward so that they received the smaller prizes upon hiring and the bigger cash rewards came after the employee had been on board for a stated period of time. By staging it, we provided incentives to our employees to refer long-term hires, rather than people that were only planning to stay with us for a short period of time. Watching employees compete to find new creative ways to recruit others was as rewarding as the recruiting results themselves.
5.Company website with games and interactive sessions with candidates.
We wanted to target the fresher hiring candidates and we need a fun, young & innovative way to help hire the college graduates. We came up with a micro site for the campus hires. This site would consist of games, Interactive sessions related to programming, case-studies, quiz contest, referral contests. The site visitors were captivated with visual display such as a virtual tour of the office, a video about the company and its founders. We even had a referral form to get leads of potential candidates and their friends.
Recruitment is an evolving process and companies need to adapt to change in technology and be ahead with the times. These were a few of the unique recruiting ideas that change the face of recruitment.