Recruiting in 2023 is all about finding the right candidates with the potential to grow in your company and using different strategies and tactics to achieve that goal. Employers like you are feeling the pinch as the employee market shrinks and it takes lots more effort to hire good team members. Not only are there fewer candidates, but those also that do apply are often underqualified or not qualified at all, or they are looking for compensation at rates way above what a small business can pay.

What can you, as an employer, do to make recruiting easier in 2023? We’ve compiled our Top 10 tips for hiring brilliant team members.

1. Focus on Potential over Experience

Look for candidates who have the skills and initiative to grow and succeed within your company and be willing to invest in these candidates. They will be grateful for the opportunity to expand their knowledge and are likely to work a little harder to meet your expectations if you make them clear up front.

2. Use New Recruiting Methods

Application numbers from traditional sources like Seek have dipped in previous years, so it’s worthwhile to examine new methods of recruitment to see if they would work better for you. Online assessments, behavioural interviews and work sample tests can give you a better understanding of a candidate’s skills, personality, and work style, which help you to hire the right person for your job.

At Staffr, we’ve developed a comprehensive system of recruiting that includes matching your company and job to the candidate with the right skills and personality. This is so that your new hires feel a sense of affinity with your company from the very start, minimizing the risk of them being lured away by other companies.

3. Align with your Business Culture

Look for candidates who fit with your values, mission and overall way of doing business. A strong company culture can create a sense of belonging and engagement amongst your team members, which leads to increase productivity, higher job satisfaction and lower turnover.

However, the reverse is also true. If your company culture is negatively influenced, it can create disharmony and unhappiness, with team members voicing their dissatisfaction by creating problems and by leaving.

At Staffr we can help you examine your company culture from an external viewpoint, to pinpoint the positive and potentially negative aspects of it, and to work with you to turn it around, if that’s what you need.

Creating and maintaining a strong company culture is an ongoing process that requires active leadership, consistent communication and regular feedback for it to drive a company’s success.

4. Offer Training and Development Opportunities

Investing in your existing employees skills and knowledge by offering skills training, mentoring or cross-position training can be an effective way of moving employees up in your organisation, and leaving the jobs with the lowest skill requirements as the ones that need recruiting into, which provides a wider candidate pool for you.

Apart from that, if your company has a reputation for offering opportunities for training and growth, you’re more likely to attract and retain top talent.

5. Offer Remote Work or Hybrid Opportunities

The Covid epidemic showed that it is possible for companies to run effectively even with the team geographically separated from each other. Where possible, offering remote or hybrid (some home, some on-site) work will make your job more attractive to potential employees, and will tell candidates that you are prepared to trust them to work effectively under their own steam. Of course, not all jobs lend themselves to remote or hybrid work, so where the job must be conducted on-site, consider other measures to allow employees to regulate their own time – flexible schedules, the order in which tasks are completed, or more control over job tasks.

6. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

We all have biases, whether conscious or unconscious.  When it comes to recruiting in a tight market, we need to let go of our biases and embrace the differences between people.

Don’t immediately write off applicants of different age groups, skill levels, genders, ethnicities or those who are over-qualified. Thinking outside the box has led to some organisations harnessing an entirely different set of viewpoints and understanding that has led to improvements within the business.

7. Consider Mental Health Support

While this is not something you would necessarily put in your job ad, the psychosocial aspects of work are something that employers need to look at even more closely, especially if their teams are geographically separated. Team members may need support to keep from feeling isolated and lonely, and levels of stress are more difficult to assess when you only see your team members over a Zoom call. Make sure you are checking in with your existing employees often and address any work-related stressors that might be affecting their mental health immediately. This is more of a tactic to hold on to your existing team members rather than so much a recruitment tactic but again, if you get the reputation in your industry of being an employer who takes care of their employees mental health, you’ll attract better applicants.

8. Use Social Media Recruiting

Utilising social media platforms to reach a wider pool of candidates and to provide a better understanding of your company culture is one of Staffr’s core strategies. We understand the power of social media to drive your message, and we have talented social media advertising experts on our team who optimise and refine your social media ads to reach a tightly targeted audience of real potential candidates. We make sure we target to the platform where your potential candidates are most likely to be, create our ads and ad copy specifically to attract them, and always include a ‘call to action’ to get them to take the next step toward becoming your employee.

9. Utilise Employee Referrals

Your existing employees can be the greatest source of qualified candidates and can help to increase employee engagement. Make sure all your employees know how to submit the names of people they know who might be interested in working for you, and if possible, have a bonus system in place for when a referral is accepted.

10. Track and Measure your Recruitment Efforts

Regularly track your time-to-hire results, candidate satisfaction, and retention rates to gain insight into your recruitment and retention processes and to optimise these by making data-driven decisions. Here at Staffr, we constantly refine our processes based on the data we track, because we want to provide you with the most cost effective service that will result in long term employees who love your company.

In conclusion, recruiting in 2023 is not just about filling a position, but about finding the right candidate who fits with the company’s values and culture, is open to training and development and who has the potential to grow in the organisation. Companies that prioritize these elements in their recruiting efforts will be better positioned to attract and retain top talent, which is essential for staying competitive in today’s market.

To see if Staffr is the right solution for your recruiting needs, give us a call on 1300 318 459 for more information.