Recruiting Best Practices: Methods to Fill Your Talent Pool with Leading Candidates

The recruitment process is essential to any company. Ensuring you’re using recruiting best practices to fill your open positions can help you attract and keep the top talent your industry has to offer.

Whether you’re looking for a C-level executive or a summer college intern, your recruitment practices are essential. This is especially true when you’re considering global candidates. Recruitment practices can be the difference between finding a qualified hire to settle into a role smoothly, and a position left empty while your team struggles to pick up the slack. 

Our team at Intrax Global Internships has decades of experience in recruiting and placing top tier interns from around the world. As leaders in the global internship space, we’re well-versed in the methods that work for attracting top talent to a variety of open positions.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the long-term impacts that a quality approach to recruitment can have on your organization. We’ll also break down some best practices for hiring top talent, including:

1. Diversifying your hiring process
2. Revamping your job descriptions
3. Recruiting and working flexibly
4. Considering internal recruitment
5. Improving your onboarding methods

Why Your Recruiting Practices Matter

Have you struggled to find the right candidate to fill a role with your company, or hired someone that didn’t wind up being the right fit? These situations and many others like them illustrate why recruiting methods matter. Utilizing recruiting best practices in the hiring process can help you find and keep talent that will align with your company’s goals in the long term.

Dedicating time and attention to adopting the best practices for recruiting employees can benefit your team in unexpected ways, like:

• Saving you time
• Making it easier to onboard new hires
• Getting new hires up to speed faster
• Building your teams at a rate that keeps pace with your growth

With the trends of the Great Resignation shaping the job market, using the best practices for recruiting is more essential than ever. The post-pandemic job hunting landscape is different than in years past for both employers and job seekers.

Interns and tenured professionals alike are now holding their employers to different standards. They’re looking for positions with companies that value them from their first days together. Recruitment is no longer only about acquiring talent, but about selling your open positions to the top talent in your field. Your recruiting methods define the way you approach this novel task.

The recruiting practices you use don’t end once you’ve hired a candidate, either. They continue as part of the way you handle welcoming new hires onto your team. Your process for onboarding, training, and preparing new hires are an essential part of your recruitment practices, and a key part of your company’s culture.

In fact, these onboarding practices are a key element of retaining employees during the Great Resignation. Honing the full scope of your recruitment practices reduces the stress your new hires may feel when starting a new position, allowing them to get up to speed faster. It also shows your team that you value their long-term success, which is a critical piece of company culture for many job seekers.

So, what are the best practices that can help a company find and keep top talent in their industry? We’ll take a look at key recruitment operations that can help companies achieve their hiring goals.

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Diversify Your Hiring Process

Think about the people who make up your team. Are they representative of the diversity of the market, of the clients you serve, or of the people in your local community? Dedicating attention to the diversity of the team you’re building is a key step to forming quality recruitment practices.

Every hire represents a series of decisions made in the recruitment process. For example, most candidates who submit a resume don’t make it to the interview stage. When you have a pool of qualified applicants, be transparent and specific about what factors are deciding who does and does not get a call back.

About twenty years ago, an infamous study showed that applicants with distinctively Black names were significantly less likely to land an interview than their white colleagues, despite identical resumes. This study was revisited in 2021 by researchers at the University of California. Their examination revealed that, despite decades of discussions surrounding workplace equity, this trend had not actually changed.

Subconscious bias is to blame for why many well-qualified candidates often don’t make it to the interview phase of recruitment. And even when companies do hire a candidate with a different background than previous hires, that doesn’t make a workforce diverse. A pattern of equal hiring opportunities does. That’s part of what makes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) in hiring so essential. Hiring decisions can help companies work to improve decades of inequity.

Focusing on building a diverse workforce through DE&I has a number of benefits for companies, such as:

• Fostering innovation through a broad range of viewpoints and experiences
• Providing insights into the unique needs and priorities of diverse clients and customers
• Increasing your company’s cultural responsiveness
• Creating new opportunities to connect with your clients and customers

In the post-pandemic recruiting landscape, the value of emphasizing DE&I in hiring is clearer than ever. COVID-19 dealt a blow to many, but it impacted marginalized communities at a disproportionate rate. Equitable recruiting practices can help these communities thrive, in return bolstering our collective economic recovery.

The move towards digital collaboration and remote work is also making it seamless to champion diversity in the workplace through global hiring. The widespread adoption of video conferencing and collaborative technology is making hiring a diverse workforce more attainable than ever. Utilizing these 21st century methods to source worldwide talent is becoming a central element of best practices in recruiting.

These technological advances mean that global candidates are an option for essentially every position throughout an organization’s structure. From executives to interns, recruiting for any role benefits from an emphasis on global talent. Focusing on recruiting international candidates for any position can help you strive towards building a diverse team.

Revamp Your Job Descriptions

Your job postings and descriptions are often your first impression on potential hires. What are they communicating to talent about: 

• Your team? 
• Your values? 
• Your company culture? 

Recruiting best practices for hiring managers include approaching job descriptions with a close attention to detail. Think about them like any other written copy that your company sends out. Ensure that the writing is high quality and provides clarity on the details of the job.

This might seem obvious, but it’s commonly overlooked, which has significant impacts on the recruiting process. Interestingly, the majority of job applications that are opened online are abandoned midway through. Are your applications falling into this pattern? If so, rethink how you present your open roles.

Potential talent may abandon an application midway through if they discover that the job title doesn’t match the job requirements. To revamp your job postings, start with the title of the position itself. Clear job titles make your postings more searchable and more likely to attract qualified applicants.

Application attrition can also happen because a job description is convoluted or vague. To get the highest number of qualified applicants, ensure your job descriptions are clear about:

1. Non-negotiable requirements for the position
2. Workplace requirements, such as physical demands or hybrid scheduling
3. Duties and responsibilities of the position
4. Compensation and benefits

Being clear about factors like these can help you connect with a higher number of applicants that are qualified to meet your team’s needs. Plus, thinking through these details up front can help you ensure that you’re attracting applications from candidates that will be a good fit for the position.

Before posting a job description, think through what kind of candidates you’re trying to attract. Be sure to consider if a position is open to remote work or international candidates. Additionally, decide if the position would be a good opportunity for interns. No matter what kind of position you’re recruiting for, being clear about these details will help boost the quality of the applications you receive. 

Recruit Flexibly, Work Flexibly

An important part of clarifying the positions you’re recruiting for is deciding what is and isn’t negotiable in a candidate. How flexible are you on requirements like experience, skills, and education? Are you willing to train candidates who meet most of the requirements, but are lacking a few others? One of the best practices in recruiting quality candidates is to remain flexible and open minded.

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Keeping your recruitment process flexible can help you find amazing talent. This is especially true for both career change candidates and early career professionals such as interns. While both may lack multiple years of experience in your industry, they can often make up for it with experience in other fields, relevant education, and passion for the work you do. Removing these candidates from the running based on stringent requirements can cause you to miss out on promising talent that could develop into a stellar team member.

Over 40% of applicants don’t meet all of the requirements for the jobs they apply to. However, many companies are willing to train their new hires to make up for skill differentials. This can actually be beneficial as it gives you the opportunity to train a new hire in the specific methods and procedures that your team uses. Keeping an open mind about requirements also helps expose you to a broader range of excellent candidates.

Best practices concerning flexibility go beyond recruitment and into your long term plans for how the position will operate, too. Across all industries, work is increasingly trending towards remote, hybrid, and flexible setups. Consider which of these schedules will be the best fit for the position, but also decide if you’re willing to be flexible for an excellent candidate.

Many candidates are leaving full time in person jobs and only considering positions that are open to remote work. It is forecasted that at least 22% of the global workforce will be working remotely by 2025. Keeping pace with this trend can be indispensable for attracting top tier candidates in your field. 

Considering remote and hybrid work setups can broaden your talent pool, making it clear why flexibility is a best practice for recruiters. These alternatives work modalities can allow you to collaborate with the top talent in your field regardless of their geographic location or time zone. Now it’s easier than ever to add global talent to your team.

Thinking global through flexible recruiting gives you more options to staff any position. In particular, hiring flexibly can make it easier to staff short term projects with part time employees or interns. Staying open to this global business trend can help you engage with countless candidates around the world to fill your open positions.

Consider Internal Recruitment

Sometimes, the best fit for a position doesn’t come from an application submitted online. Your next amazing department leader or project manager may already be part of your team. In the recruiting process, best practices are often those that are both time effective and cost effective. Internal recruiting checks both of these boxes.

Internal recruiting offers many benefits to your company. For example:

1. It boosts team morale by demonstrate the potential for mobility
2. It makes the transitional phase easier because the candidate already knows your company and culture
3. It saves time during both the recruitment and training processes

In many situations, internal recruitment results in lateral moves as managers are reassigned or high-performing team members are transferred to boost other departments. Of course, you can also promote an employee or intern into a higher-ranking position. In fact, planning for future upward mobility within your company can be a powerful piece of your recruiting policies and practices.

‍To set yourself up for success in future recruitment efforts, consider creating a global talent pipeline now. Whether your company is a startup or an established corporation, you can successfully achieve this by starting an internship program. You can even consider starting a remote internship offering, especially if you’re aiming to attract global talent for a short-term role.

Bringing interns into the fold at your company achieves a few things. First, it spreads the word that your team is willing to guide and mentor interns. Especially if you recruit interns on a global scale, this can have massive, far-reaching impacts. Once you’ve successfully worked with interns and they have spread the word, more interns will be eager to fill similar positions with you in the future. This is a surefire way to create a global talent acquisition funnel, which can benefit your company and your recruitment efforts for years to come.

This can help you fill your talent pool with your field’s top-tier entry level professionals on an ongoing basis. During their internships, these rising candidates will be immersed in your company culture and have a chance to experience the way you interact with the industry. Then, as you work with them during their internship, you’ll be able to vet the candidates you’d like to bring on for permanent roles.

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Improve Your Onboarding Methods

The best practices for recruiting employees don’t end once your candidate has started in their new role. Think of your onboarding methods as an extension of the recruitment process. In the long term, they can keep you from prematurely returning to the recruitment process as proper onboarding can make your candidates more likely to stay with your team.

It’s essential to provide continual support to your new hires as they get up to speed. Improving the way your company approaches onboarding can yield many benefits, like:

• Reducing turnover
• Helping new employees get up to speed quicker
• Fostering positive team dynamics and morale

Creating strong relationships and a supportive work environment during onboarding will help make sure your new hires feel welcome. It will also go a long way in ensuring that they understand their role and ask for any support they need at first. All of these pieces work together to prevent early attrition.

Interns, entry-level candidates, and top-tier professionals alike will all need time to learn and adjust. Improving your onboarding methods is a way of ensuring they get this time. Prioritizing training and onboarding up front will make any new hire more successful in the long-term. 

This is especially pertinent for global candidates and interns. International hires may need some guidance in adjusting to cultural norms, or help mastering industry-specific terms in their second or third language. For interns who are just beginning their career, the guidance they receive at the onset of their position can define their entire trajectory. Positive guidance and support could inspire an intern to fully commit to a role. Conversely, feeling isolated could result in promising talent abandoning a field altogether to try something else. For all candidates, successful onboarding is the key to propelling them into an amazing tenure with your company.

Keep Your Talent Pool Full by Fine-Tuning Your Recruiting Practices

Finding the right recruitment strategies for adding world-class talent to your team is essential. At Intrax Global Internships, we aim to make the recruitment process effortless by connecting our clients with top intern candidates in their field. Our customers find success by welcoming high achieving interns from around the world into key roles with their companies. 

For example, Robinhood’s Global Mobility program is powered by technical, hands-on work from their international interns. Their intern recruitment efforts have been such a resounding success that they’re anticipating 100% growth in the next fiscal year. Omnium’s global interns are also involved in essential roles, working directly with data science and other high-demand technology. They’ve discovered how a talent funnel of interns can transform a company’s recruitment efforts.

If you’re looking for innovative and effective recruitment ideas, contact us any time to request information about adding global interns to your hiring pipeline.

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