Workplaces are changing. Decades ago, the culture surrounding work often encouraged employees to stick with an employer for their entire career. Now, employees are more likely to change jobs every few years, as they seek new challenges and opportunities to climb the professional ladder. In the ever-changing hiring landscape, your company’s recruitment strategies are more important than ever. We’ll break down ten effective recruitment strategies that can help you add diverse, top-tier global talent to your team.
With the massive trend towards online work, employees are no longer limited by job openings in their area. They can search for positions across the world just as easily as they can focus on jobs down the street.
These changes mean the process of recruiting your team is evolving, too. The move to remote work means companies can find international talent and recruit candidates from all over the world. It also means you aren’t only competing against the companies in your area for these hires, but also against your entire industry.
Without geographic limitations, recruiting is becoming more competitive than ever, as companies race to add world-class candidates to their teams. Therefore, the approach your company takes to recruiting is essential.
In a competitive hiring market, recruitment strategies can be the deciding factor in which job offer a candidate accepts. They can also help ensure you find the right talent to fill open roles in your organization, whether you’re looking for an intern or a long-term employee.
Recruitment strategies can help your company:
- Retain employees
- Find top-tier global talent
- Define your focus as you seek candidates
Effective recruitment strategies and practices can elevate a company’s team resources. However, a successful team needs more than skilled employees alone. It also needs diverse viewpoints, creative mindsets, and new perspectives.
Intrax Global Internships can help your organization find candidates from a global pool of talent. We partner with companies to make the process of adding international team members easy, fast, and successful.
In this article, we’ll explore ten recruitment strategies that work. We’ll also share resources on how we can help you build a diverse and world-class team.
Why Do Recruitment Strategies Matter?
Imagine these two scenarios:
- A company with a huge pool of qualified applicants, all engaged with the company culture and eager for a chance to join the team
- A company struggling to find quality candidates, and consistently losing potential hires to competitors
Both situations may sound familiar, and both are realistic in our current competitive hiring market. So, what is the factor creating such a stark difference between the hiring process at these two companies? It’s simple: Recruitment strategies.
But, what is a recruitment strategy? Simply put, recruitment strategies are the methods your company uses to find the best candidates for your open roles.
Some parts of your company’s talent recruitment strategy are passive, ongoing elements you maintain all the time. These could include creating company culture or fostering engagement with your brand. Other employee recruitment strategies are active steps you take when trying to fill a role.
All recruitment strategies have a few things in common. They should be:
- Realistically attainable by your company
- Aligned with your hiring goals, like finding quality candidates, ensuring a fit with the company’s culture, or improving diversity and inclusion initiatives
Recruitment strategies help you find the best talent to round out your team. Plus, they can keep you from losing potential candidates to competitors. They can even reduce turnover by making it more appealing for your current employees to stay with your company.
The hiring market is competitive right now. Employees have been leaving their jobs at the highest rates since at least 2000. This shows a high level of optimism of the workforce, indicating the widespread desire to seek new challenges and opportunities.
Effective recruitment strategies can help bring the top talent in your industry to your team — and keep them there.
Recruitment in a Global Marketplace
Remote work is becoming the norm in many companies and industries. Geography no longer limits the hiring pool. The advent of remote work means you can hire qualified candidates all over the world — but it can also mean you’re competing with other companies around the globe to find them.
Remote team members create many unique benefits for a company. Remote work allows a company’s business hours to span time zones. This can mean round-the-clock progress on projects, or always-available support for your clients.
Other benefits of adding remote members to your teams are:
- Including more people in your team than possible in a colocated office setting
- Gaining diverse perspectives from team members around the world
- Breaking down language barriers with potential clients and team members alike
- Increasing your team’s cultural inclusiveness
Working remotely is increasingly preferred among the workforce. Most employees find working from home less stressful than working in the office. That isn’t because they’re getting less done, though — in fact, working from home was found to increase productivity by 13%. This was attributed to the remote work environment having fewer distractions and more convenience compared to traditional offices.
Recruit Global Talent With Remote Internships
If you’re considering adding remote members to your team, remember this doesn’t only mean employees. Remote internships are also growing in popularity.
These opportunities aren’t just great for young professionals looking to gain international experience. They also help your company create a global talent acquisition funnel, directing qualified candidates who have already proven themselves at your company towards future permanent job openings.
Opening the recruitment process to remote internships can help companies of all sizes find top talent. Whether you’re a startup or a Fortune 500 megacorporation, broadening your talent pool to include international internship candidates can help your company compete for these up-and-comers as they aim to stand out in their fields.
More companies than you may think are eager to hire international interns, especially for remote internship positions. Companies that hire international students include Google, Capital One, Adobe, Microsoft, and plenty of other giants in fields ranging from tech to finance.
Adding your company to this list can be a huge boon for your employee recruitment strategy. Our team at Intrax Global Internships can help you find the perfect intern to grow with your organization.
We’re experts in the international internship space, and we can help you improve your recruitment strategies by adding diverse, qualified candidates to your talent pool.
Recruitment Strategies That Work
So, how can you compete in a global marketplace to find the right talent to add to your team? These HR recruitment strategies can help you bring world-class expertise to your company:
- Make diversity and inclusion a priority
- Hire internationally
- Use your brand to stand out
- Spruce up your job descriptions
- Expand your social media presence
- Take employee referrals
- Attract emerging talent
- Attend networking events
- Reach out to past candidates or employees
- Make a good first impression
Our team at Intrax Global Internships can help solve your recruitment needs while gaining a global perspective. Let’s break down what each of these successful recruitment strategies looks like in action.
Make Diversity and Inclusion a Priority
Your company can champion diversity in the workplace by prioritizing inclusive and equitable hiring practices. When seeing new candidates, consider the diversity of your current teams in all aspects, like gender, race, ethnicity, abilities/disabilities, and age.
Increasing your team’s diversity will improve your business by allowing you to access broader ideas, viewpoints, and problem-solving strategies. Plus, businesses with diverse workforces tend to perform better fiscally.
Diversity in the times of COVID-19 is even more critical, as the innovation and economic gains it creates are essential for our society to recover economically.
Focusing on diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives can help minimize potential bias in your company’s selection processes. It also shows potential candidates that the culture of your company is to put people first.
Our customer, fin-tech company Robinhood, constantly strives to draw on diverse talent. Robinhood relies on collegiate-level candidates from around the world to power key projects at their company. Our team at Intrax Global Internships is proud to play a vital role in emphasizing the importance of diversity and inclusion in recruiting their team.
Find out more about how we help thousands of companies prioritize diversity in their employer recruiting strategies.
Hire Internationally
Only considering local candidates immensely limits the candidates you’ll find for your team. To exponentially expand your talent pool, broaden your hiring efforts to include international candidates.
The increasing popularity of remote work makes it easier than ever to add international candidates to your team. Digital collaboration platforms are becoming as ubiquitous as e-mail, so integrating a remote team member is often effortless.
Hiring internationally can also help diversify your team. These candidates can help you gain unique insights into the perspectives of potential clients around the world, while also bringing innovative solutions to your projects.
Request information to find out how Intrax Global Internships can help you develop new recruitment strategies that will expand your talent pool to a global scale.
Use Your Brand to Stand Out
An essential question to answer while you develop your HR recruitment strategy is: Why should candidates want to join this company? The answers will be numerous and complex, but they all come down to defining your company’s brand.
Your unique brand is as important to your candidates as it is to your clients. It can help them understand your culture and what it’s like to work for your company.
Building your brand as an employer will help you stand out to the talent in your field. It reflects your company’s:
- Mission
- Vision
- Priorities
- Values
- Goals
A well-defined brand can make potential candidates eager to join your team. It makes it clear to them what defines the organization they’re joining, and why it’s the right place for them to grow.
Spruce Up Your Job Descriptions
Take a closer look at the job descriptions you’re publishing. These are one of the most common job recruitment strategies, and one of the easiest to use.
However, they are also one of the key tools your company has to funnel qualified applications towards open roles. Do your job descriptions have all the information a candidate needs to convince them to apply?
Job descriptions should include specific information about the role's daily responsibilities. They should also be up-front about the qualifications you’re looking for in an applicant, as well as information like salary, benefits, and expected hours. Transparency can help you find candidates who will be the right fit in the long term.
In addition to describing the role, these postings also give you the perfect platform to sell your company’s culture to potential applicants. Think about adding a discussion of what makes your company special, and why your current team members love it.
Expand Your Social Media Presence
No matter what sector you’re in, social media matters for businesses. LinkedIn, Facebook, Indeed, and more social platforms can help you connect directly with interested potential applicants.
They are also an important part of passive recruiting. Social media can give you a platform to showcase your company’s brand and culture. It can also let you highlight what it’s like to work with your team. These tools can make your company interesting to qualified, talented people in your field, even if they aren’t actively looking for a job.
Use social media as one of your recruitment strategies to show off what’s going on in your company, talk about industry trends, and establish your foothold in your industry. These steps can help you foster engagement with your brand, which can quickly turn interested readers into eager candidates.
Take Employee Referrals
Your employees know better than anyone what it takes to succeed in your company. Consider giving them a say in finding the right candidate by welcoming — and incentivizing — employee referrals.
Your team is made of tenured experts. They have access to contacts all over the industry that they’ve worked alongside in the past. Employee referrals are a vote of confidence from someone you already trust.
Plus, by incentivizing referrals, you can turn your entire staff into a recruitment team. In turn, hiring employee referrals can also lead to great team dynamics, as they can work alongside talent they believe in.
Attract Emerging Talent
Consider including an effort to attract emerging talent in your strategy for recruitment. Giving entry-level candidates a place to start their career can foster their loyalty to your company. You can create a student recruitment strategy specifically to this end.
Fresh minds at the start of their career have an immense amount of cutting-edge knowledge to add to your team. These young professionals often have innovative skills that experienced job seekers may not.
International students participating in an internship often come to the United States on a J-1 visa. Our team is a U.S. Department of State designated J-1 visa sponsor. We have been sponsoring J-1 interns and guiding them through this process since 2003. We make it easy to set up internships that can help your business thrive. Students from Canada and countries across the world have joined hyper-growth companies that hire software engineers, designers, and business interns.
Attend Networking Events
Industry meet-ups and conventions are a great time to network with talent in your industry. Connections with passive candidates who aren’t in the process of seeking a new job are also valuable, as they may be interested in joining your team before long.
Many of these events are going digital, allowing you to join industry meet-ups around the world without leaving home. These networking opportunities allow you to meet talent from overseas who might be interested in joining your team as an employee or an international intern.
Whether in-person or online, these events can help you get to the core of your industry’s talent. They showcase devoted professionals who are committed to your field — and who are interested in moving up. These events can become impactful recruitment strategies for companies that are focused on attracting top talent.
Reach Out to Past Interns, Candidates or Employees
You’ve likely worked with some incredible people in the past, and even had to pass up on candidates who you’d love on your team, but weren’t the perfect fit at the time. Think about reaching out to these candidates to fill open roles.
Previous candidates and employees already know about your company, especially if they worked with you in the past. Plus, in the time that has passed, they’ve likely gained new skills and experience. What could they add to your team if they joined it now?
Make a Good First Impression
We often think of interviews as a chance to get a first impression of a potential candidate, but remember: they’re getting a first impression of your company, too! Think of the interview process as a sales pitch for your company.
During interviews, strive to make your candidates feel welcomed. Showcase your company’s culture, and make it clear why your company is a good place to work.
Many of the best recruitment strategies focus on prioritizing your human resources, and this is no exception. Include your team in the interview process. After all, they are the ones directly working alongside the new talent you bring on. Involving your staff in the recruitment and interviewing processes can help ensure a candidate is the right fit to join the team.
Improve Recruitment Strategies to Elevate Your Team
The way you attract talent to your team matters. In a competitive hiring market, company recruitment strategies can make the difference between having a surplus of amazing candidates to choose from, or hoping a candidate picks you over a competitor.
So: what are the most successful recruitment strategies? The most effective recruitment strategies prioritize the people that power your organization while best enabling your team to pursue their vision. Employment recruitment strategies that emphasize diversity, equity, culture, and, and engagement will boost your team’s efforts to attract top talent.
Looking for ways to include interns from around the world in your hiring efforts? Global Internships can help. We can help you start an internship program to gain international perspectives from interns in your organization.
Our customers include companies like Robinhood, memSQL, and Omnium. We also partner with higher education institutions, including the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo, to bring engineering talent to tech companies.
Contact us today to learn how we help our partners bring global talent to their teams.
“I would recommend this program because of the variety of opportunities and experiences it opens you up to for your field. As an aspiring software engineer, there is no place better than Silicon Valley for learning about the job and the industry. It's awesome to have the opportunity to try this out for a few months with the support of a program like the Intrax internship program.” -Global Internships J-1 Intern
“While the visa process seems daunting, Intrax made it easy to acquire a visa and work temporarily in the US. There were only a few hurdles, all of which were solved with prompt responses.” -Global Internships J-1 Intern
“I think the J1 program is amazing to experience American culture and expand your network beyond people in an individual's home country.” -Global Internships J-1 Intern
Featured Image: Adomas Aleno