H E A LT H W E A LT H C A R E E R

THE RECRUITER’S
GUIDE TO GRAB
T O P TA L E N T
H I R E T O P TA L E N T T H AT S TAY S
AND DELIVERS, WITHOUT
B R E A K I N G A S W E AT
T H E R E C R U I T E R ’ S G U I D E T O G R A B T O P TA L E N T

CONTENT
1. Introduction

2. The War for Top Talent Gone Fiercer in 2019

3. How Top Talent Slips Through the Cracks: Explained By Experts

4. How HR Teams Can Claim Top Talent: From Industry Insiders

5. Conclusion

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INTRODUCTION
In a world where technology changes in the blink of an eye and
innovation lie at the core of everything, hiring has become a
different ball game altogether. Finding candidates who are hungry
to innovate is tough, let alone convincing them to join and stay to
propel business growth. Pass the buck to the gig economy, low
unemployment rates or other factors, you can’t expect top-notch
candidates to join, only through a better compensation.

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T H E WA R F O R T O P TA L E N T G O N E F I E R C E R I N 2 0 1 9
HR teams and recruiters across the world have already started struggling to attract top talent. And, it’s not because they are not serious
about hiring or unable to entice the candidates. Ask a recruiter and they would come up with a ready checklist to hire top quality talent:

Crafting personalized ATS-Proofing JDs Timely Interviews Employee Engagement Benefits Packages
job descriptions Programs

Even after burning midnight oil and leaving no stone unturned, top quality candidates either don’t turn up for the job or worse, slip-off after
attending the entire hiring process, probably sensing the place isn’t suited to their needs. Quite Frustrating, Right?

At Mettl, we surveyed more than 2000+ small to large businesses and even to our surprise:

67% of large sized organizations admitted that acquiring top talent is one of their biggest challenges.

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And, if you factor the results drawn after including the inputs of all organizations
in the survey, the results are even more shocking and suggest:

Organizations agreed that attracting quality

>74% talent remains their biggest challenge, de-

spite their best known efforts and industry
wide best practices.

You must be wondering, what areas are you faltering that are probably dragging
away the candidates from your organization. Let’s take a look at the detailed
reasons in the next chapter

C L I C K H E R E T O A C C E S S F U L L R E P O R T O N S TAT E
O F TA L E N T A C Q U I S I T I O N 2 0 1 9

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H O W T O P TA L E N T S L I P S T H R O U G H T H E C R A C K S
1 . H I G H E M P L O Y E E S AT I S FA C T I O N R AT E S
Sounds crazy, Right? But, as much as you want to retain top talent;
so does your competitors thriving on the handful of quality talent
available. From offering the best working environment, avenues for
growth via training to offering industry best benefits; they do it all.
All too often, they are not “active” job seekers, unless they feel a
strong enough reason to switch places.
Lois A. Krause, Practice Leader at Kardas Larson, LLC who holds 25+
experience in HR industry comments, “ Most high-quality candidates
are currently working, so the number one challenge is sourcing
candidates that are currently working, and possibly not looking to
move.” She also suggests a failsafe way to attract such candidates
without sounding pushy. She adds-on,
I usually develop marketing techniques to entice candidates that
working for my clients is worthwhile and what they really need for
their career. I try to demonstrate that this is their next, best, ca-
reer move. I do not try to sell it, I only try to entice the ones who will
actually benefit from the match. Sometimes that may be the orga-
nization’s work, their industry, or their values. If they are compatible
with the candidate, it is much easier to match them.
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2. TEDIOUS RECRUITMENT CYCLES
Attracting quality talent is already a tiresome process as it involves
scanning resumes, conducting interviews, assessing culture fit and
all-alike. However, this is also the aspect that causes quality talent
to get disinterested and withdraw from the interview process. In
an era of instant gratification and multiple job offers per candidate,
even top notch candidates want the interview process to get over
as soon as possible. And when HR teams are unable to cut down the
average time to hire; fearing of hiring incompetent people, even
quality candidates shy away. That stretches the recruitment process
and results in high turnover rates later. Attesting to the fact, Mettl’s
internal research has also found the fact to be true:
Organizations agreed that managing
34% hiring drives is one of their biggest
roadblocks in attracting top talent.
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Adapting a structured interview process and using video interviews Now, it’s time to leverage recruitment technology to source better,
can greatly help in shortening interview cycles. so that the quality talent can filter down to screening and finally, the
selection.
3 . L O C AT I O N P R E F E R E N C E S

Even when you are willing to pay handsomely and all other factors
are in place; location can often play spoilsport. Candidates can In 2019 and beyond, you must focus on in-
turn down good offers, if their location preferences aren’t in line
as the cost of relocation and the stress that comes along doesn’t vesting in recruitment tools that can manage
look worthwhile. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t convince top-tier
candidates to consider a relocation. You can assure candidates that end to end recruitment for you, all under a
their overall life post relocation will only change for the good, and
not worse. Quoting an example, Matthew Ross, Co-owner and COO single dashboard.
of RizKnows comments, “We stress to potential candidates that
Nevada has 0% state income tax. This also helps with the pay dis-
crepancy between us and larger firms. We can clearly explain that
living and working in Nevada actually ends up to be about the same Just imagine, how much time you can save if you can manage all can-
as working in a large city like Los Angeles after factoring in living didates, send them interview invites, conduct interview assessments
costs, state taxes.” and roll out offers; all from one single place.

4 . O V E R - R E L I A N C E O N T R A D I T I O N A L AV E N U E S

If you are still looking for candidates on career sites, your recruit-
ment strategy sure needs a makeover. Although you can still find top
notch candidates, it’s not a failsafe strategy for the long term.

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Nevertheless, it’s time to look harder at talent that isn’t on career
sites, and can only be found through social channels, employee re-
ferrals and even hackathons. Talking about innovative recruitment
ideas, Matthew Ross, co-owner and COO at deals site RizKnows,
explains an out of the box tactic to hire top talent. He comments, “In
short, rather than relying on sites, we seek out professors at our lo-
cal college and let them do the recruiting for us. Basically, we form
tight bonds with professors and ask them to find top-tier candi-
dates for us. So far, this strategy has worked great. In 2018, we end-
ed up hiring four new employees using this method. Ultimately, we
feel like this is a beneficial relationship for all parties involved. We
get outstanding candidates, the professors feel like they’re making
an impact with their students and obviously, the students get an
awesome job at a growing tech company. “
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5 . VA L U E & I N T E R E S T S O V E R L A P
The moment a candidate walks-in for an interview, they start fram-
ing a perception about your organization. From how you walk them
through the position, the people and the company culture; it’s going
to decide whether they would join or not. Even if they do, you can
never be sure if they are going to stick or not. Lynette Campbell,
founder of Zoomers Employment Services, “One challenge is under-
standing the values of the candidate in order to match them with
the company culture. This is because I believe that people apply for
jobs out of need but they leave due to mismatched values. Conduct-
ing a simple interest assessment or a Skills and Values assessment
will help recruiters identify an applicant’s motivations.”
Even HR Expert Lois A. Krause says a little bit marketing can also
fetch you quality talent in no time. She says, “I usually develop mar-
keting techniques to entice candidates that working for my clients
is worthwhile and what they really need for their career. I try to
demonstrate that this is their next, best, career move. I do not try to
sell it, I only try to entice the ones who will actually benefit from the
match. Sometimes that may be the organization’s work, their indus-
try, or their values. If they are compatible with the candidate, it is
much easier to match them.”
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6 . N O T B U I L D I N G TA L E N T P O O L S
Most HR teams across the globe rely on “Just in Time” hiring and
float requisitions only when it’s high time and the organization can’t
do without closing that requisition. Not anticipating the type of
talent that the organization requires to thrive becomes a bottleneck
quite soon. All too often, a requirement pounces right after dissolv-
ing contacts with a candidate previously in touch.
That’s where the entire recruitment strategy falls apart. Therefore,
HR teams must get into the practice to get in touch with hiring man-
agers to understand the requirements in advance, so that the right
talent doesn’t slip off or worse, land into the competitors’ kitty.
And then, no matter how many messages you drop on Linkedin or
follow-up, the candidate is gone forever. Offering a solid strategy to
deal with such situations, James Conway, Head of Talent Acquisition
at BambooHR says, “We’re in a lucky position where we have lots of
quality candidates who apply, but we don’t have enough jobs to hire
all of the people we interview. We’ve started building Talent Pools
with these candidates.
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We stay in regular contact with them, how they’re liking their cur-
rent job, and potential openings here. When we have a position that’s
going to open up and we think someone from our pool is a good fit,
we won’t even open the position until we’ve brought them in. Some-
times, this makes our time to hire just a few days.
On similar lines, he also suggests how important it is to create ideal
candidate profile as a benchmark to know how the potential hires
are performing and whether they are worthy enough for the organi-
zation.
“One of the best techniques that I can recommend based on run-
ning proactive recruiting programs would be to create Ideal Candi-
date Profiles,then evaluate companies that may have similar roles
as you will be hiring for, and identify the individuals in those roles,
then connect with them directly. Invite them for a phone call, cof-
fee, lunch, etc. Explain that you are building your talent pipeline and
have identified them as a strong candidate and wanted to get to
know them more, as well as share about your company. Then log all
of the interactions on an internal talent pipeline document, which
should indicate where the individual would fit in the org chart, so
you are ready to hire top talent when the need arises.”
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As it’s quite evident that once you start building a talent pipeline, not
only you can have a list handy to close tricky positions, but you can
also reduce your time per hire to bring down recruitment costs by
significant margins.

7 . I N A D E Q U AT E TA L E N T B E N C H M A R K I N G

Before you think about hiring top talent, you must know how top
talent looks like and what role you want them to lead once they are a
part of your organization. Until you sketch the skeletal structure of
top talent in terms of what they will do, what their KRAs will be and
what support would they be expecting; you will be far from appealing
to top quality talent. Daniel Mori, president with Employment Solu-
tions proposes a better alternative to counteract the problem,

“One of the biggest challenges that companies face in attracting

talent is that they don’t know what they are looking for. They don’t
take the time to properly define what talent looks like for their
company. Misguided, they routinely look externally to define a tal-
ented employee. Organizations rarely look at their top performing
employees to benchmark potential applicants against. They should
evaluate their current top performing employees to create an Ideal
Candidate Profile, that will be used as the benchmark for assessing
qualified candidates.”

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HOW HR TEAMS CAN CLAIM

T O P TA L E N T
Every year brings a new surprise to the recruitment arena and 2019
is going to be no different. With more emphasis on automation and AI,
organizations can no longer over rely on traditional methods of hir-
ing to attract and retain quality talent and must have a well-defined
talent acquisition strategy in place. As candidates have more and more
options to choose from, the tables have turned in recent years. Now,
you don’t pick talent, but the talent picks you. Candidates have got
more power in their job search and a number of tools are available to
give them a fair idea about joining an organization or not. So, operating
in a recruitment market where everyone tries to pounce on top talent;
how do you survive and keep up with the changing recruitment market.

To know the exact, we conducted a research with over 2000+ orga-

nizations and this is how talent acquisition is going to change in 2019
and beyond. Let’s take a look.

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1. SPEED & QUALIT Y OF HIRING more likely to attract and obtain high-quality talent. If they can
perform background screenings while being FCRA compliant, they
There is no dearth of recruiters across the globe who miss out on can ensure they have a qualified workforce, with less risk.
top quality talent for long-winded interviews or inability to roll out
offers in time. For efficiency, recruiters naturally have to respond to a tight job
market,where the fastest recruiter is more likely to get the best
Even Mettl’s internal research validates the fact that closing an entry candidate.”
level position takes 7-15 days whereas mid to senior level positions
require a month or even, two.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR
And, spending such exorbitant times to close positions not only I N T E L L I G E N T H I R I N G P L AT F O R M
increases the recruitment costs but also results in a poor candidate
experience. Although the stats about average time to close a requi-
sition are quite understandable, given the high-quality standards that
recruiters need to adhere to. However, improving the speed & quality
is going to be one of the key priorities of recruiters in 2019 and be-
yond. Again, our same research conducted on 2000+ organizations
reveals a similar story as 67% of organizations agree that improving
the speed & quality of hiring is going to be the game changer.

Highlighting the importance of speed in hiring, Zach Townsend, HR

Manager at Verified First quotes,

”Reducing time to hire should be a recruiter’s highest priority be-

cause ofthe competitiveness of the market. With a generational-
ly-low unemployment rate, time is a competitive advantage for HR
professionals. If a recruiter can decrease their time to hire, they’re

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2. EMPLOYER BR ANDING
To attract and retain top - quality talent in 2019 and beyond, building
a strong employer brand should be on the cards for every recruiter.
With more and more organizations striving to create better work-
places and spend more to drive employee engagement, your brand
must create a positive buzz in the market.
And positive buzz means employees looking for a change should be
aware of your employee-friendly policies, a conducive work envi-
ronment, employee benefits and most importantly, how work makes
them feel at your organization; even before they join. Even a leading
Linkedin Report also suggests that 75 percent of candidates factor
employee branding before joining an organization. A positive employ-
ee brand can help you attract quality talent, retain them and can also
help you close multiple requisitions on autopilot through referrals.
Such is the power of employee branding.
Attesting to the fact, Amanda Cruz, PR & Internal Communications
specialist at Gartner says, “SMBs that emphasize an appealing work-
place culture receive 50 percent more job applicants, and appoint-
ing a staff member to respond to online customer reviews can help
to minimize the impact of negative reviews.”
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3 . C A N D I D AT E E X P E R I E N C E
When candidates have multiple jobs to choose from, you have to give
them a pretty good reason to join your organization; which should
be different than a fat paycheck. And, providing a gratifying candi-
date experience can do the job. The recruitment process is broadly
classified into three stages, Sourcing, Screening & Selection and
Onboarding. Now, your job is to provide a seamless and hassle-free
experience in each of these stages, so that the candidate thinks,
“The organization has a pretty decent and structured recruitment
process. Must be a good place to work for.” And, you are all set! On
the other hand, if there are roadblocks in any of these stages or
they get an impression that your recruitment process is haywire,
they might look for a better fit elsewhere.
Thanks to recruitment technology, there are plenty of options you
can exercise to provide a great candidate experience.
As found in Mettl’s internal report on State of Talent Acquisition in
2019, 53% of organizations use structured assessments and 40% do vid-
eo interviews to save candidate time.
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Apart from that, thoughtful onboarding with pre-boarding engage-
ment, goal setting or training & assessments is also a time-tested
method to improve the candidate experience.
C L I C K H E R E T O C R E AT E A G R AT I F Y I N G
C A N D I D AT E E X P E R I E N C E
Even our internal research validates the importance of building a
strong talent pipeline as more than 67 percent of organizations
will focus on building a strong pipeline of quality talent in 2019 and
beyond.

4 . B U I L D I N G A S T R O N G TA L E N T P I P E L I N E

Do you chase candidates every single time a requisition comes?

That won’t be the case if you get proactive and build a strong talent
pipeline for future requisitions. It’s like a repository where you keep
every candidate that applies directly or through a referral or other
avenues. And when a new requisition comes or a previous employee
decides to leave, you don’t have to start over with floating a new
requisition, waiting for the CVs to pour in to start the interview pro-
cess.

Candidates who organically became a part of your hiring funnel in the

pipeline can be the first ones to check out for. Believe it or not, hav-
ing a quality talent pipeline can drastically improve your hiring time by
at least 25 percent as you will always have a prospective candidate
list at your disposal, every single time.

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5. HIRING A NICHE WORKFORCE

Going forward, organizations can no longer rely on vanilla hiring and

expect business growth to skyrocket. Recruiters must identify the core
skills instrumental to the organization and recalibrate the hiring strat-
egies in place to hire for these skills first. This approach ensures that
there is no dilution in the hiring funnel and the topmost requisitions get
the priority they deserve. But, hiring for niche skills is not a cakewalk
even though it can save recruiters some serious pre-screening time.

Nevertheless, 40 percent of organizations in our internal research said

they are going to focus more on niche hiring through social media, tai-
lored job descriptions and more in 2019.

Having a structured assessment process with an emphasis on cognitive

and psychometric assessments is another way to go.

C L I C K H E R E T O H I R E R I G H T C A N D I D AT E S F O R
RIGHT SKILL

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CONCLUSION
Unlike before, when money used to be the deal breaker to attract,
hire and retain a candidate for long, recruiters now have to be
quite meticulous during the entire hiring cycle to ensure the right
candidate not only joins, but also stays for long enough. For that to
happen, recruiters need to be on top of their toes to claim their
share of top talent before it slips away forever.

To say the least, it’s a long shot and no one process can make it
possible. Rather, it’s a sequence of processes in the different
stages of recruitment such as sourcing, screening & selection that
demands a difference.

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