Recruiting Best Practices for Improving Your Employer Brand

Business owners can follow these guidelines to keep employer branding a top priority while recruiting talent:

Create a group of metrics, and hold to them

Establishing a core set of metrics will help build efficiency in your recruiting process. These metrics can include any measures that will help build consistent procedures, though should mainly take focus on consistently representing your company well. Key factors in this category can include:

1. how quickly you first respond to a candidate
2. how responsive your subsequent follow ups are
3. close the loop on whether candidate was hired or rejected, and being sure to follow up with every candidate’s questions

Establish full transparency

As a candidate, feeling uncertain about the position you’ve applied for can create constant stress. General uncertainty during the application process can also cause a sense of hesitancy to work for your company if hired, or even applying for other positions later down the road.

There are several bits of information that can be offered to candidates that will both provide reassurance and a sense of transparency to your applicants. This can include information on the size of the candidate pool applying for the position, when the position has being filled, and a specific timeline on when the hiring process is expected to be completed.

If an open position has been removed and will no longer be filled, then consider informing all candidates accordingly to provide transparency and build trust in the employer brand.

Prioritize the candidate experience

Making your communication personal with candidates will make the experience memorable, and your company will remain a standout against the competition. Keeping your conversation on a personal level will also allow make your applicant feel more comfortable with hiring into your company. This can be accomplished with frequent check-ins, making small talk, and asking about their emotions regarding the application process.  Also consider candidate surveys.

Referral program

Creating a strong referral program will eliminate your need to outsource new candidates and will lesson your personal time researching. If an applicant has an all-around great experience during the interview/onboarding process, they will be likely to suggest your company through natural conversation with others. As an added benefit, adding incentives to your referral program will help hired interns want to stay with the company even past the internship stage.

Ben Siegel, co-founder of Scholars, the student recruiting platform that makes it easy to find the right remote workers to fit with your team. Simply enter your search criteria to find a qualified pool of candidates to interview.