Is Your Recruitment Strategy Growing Up with Your Talent?

Every HR department and recruitment team has heard for years now how they need to be using social media or upgrading their process to include technology to stay competitive.

When it comes down to it, staying competitive isn’t just about showing up your competitors with new bells and whistles in your recruitment cycle and making things faster and more efficient.  What it really comes down to is growing and adapting with your talent pool to continue to attract the best and brightest.

Utilizing new tools and strategies has internal benefits for your hiring process like saving time, money, improving candidate quality and the selection process, but one of the reasons these effects occur is because you are changing your strategy to meet the expectations (or create new, better expectations) of the candidate audiences you are trying to attract.

But updating your strategy isn’t just about incorporating a new technology such as video or getting a company twitter account–it’s about getting creative with the process and understanding how it adjusts your thinking towards job seekers and your company’s needs.

Understanding how people are using technology and social media today and imagining how they might be using it tomorrow could just be the key to learning how to make it work for you and incorporating it into your recruitment process.

Recruiters and hiring managers can learn a lot from how technology is infiltrating education and borrow and build upon ideas to improve their methods of talent attraction.

According to the infographic below from LearnStuff.com, students who use twitter receive a higher GPA by an average of .5 points.  So if your company has been shy to jump into the twitterverse, you may have good reason to change your mind in thinking how to engage the talent you seek out.

Additionally, 84% of schools used twitter to send up-to-date announcements to students.  If you’re an organization who partners heavily with colleges and universities on student recruitment, have you leveraged your relationships to have the schools help you spread your recruitment message to their student body?

Still thinking you can get by with the same recruitment process you’ve had for years?  Get this: 70% of children ages 2-5 can use a computer mouse while only 11% can tie their shoes.  On top of that 3/4 of students prefer tablets over textbooks.  The tools of the times are changing, are you still behind?

Your talent pool of tomorrow is growing up with the technologies of today and if you’re not adapting, at a certain point, your recruitment process might hit a wall because you’re not reaching out to talent where they expect and have come accustom to being found.

In today’s highly competitive workforce, companies no longer set the standards for jobseekers–the standards are just as flexible as the market demands.

What can you learn from how students are growing up with technology?  Is your recruitment strategy adapting and growing with your talent?  How can you get creative and utilize or adapt some of the same tools in education to improve your talent attraction process?  Please post your thoughts in the comments below.