​With everything in life, there’s always a need to review and refresh. The same goes for your talent acquisition strategy – or your long-term strategic initiatives to seek out qualified talent to help your business grow.

Over time strategies date and become less effective in achieving what they’re designed to. So, how do you go about reviewing your current talent acquisition strategy? And what can you do to refresh your process? We’ve compiled our top tips to assess and improve your talent acquisition strategy including some simple actions you can take today.

Review what’s in your talent strategy

What’s actually in your strategy? The word ‘strategy’ tends to get thrown around a lot but the depth and work behind it can be lacking.

A great talent acquisition strategy includes an in-depth analysis of your current and future talent needs. It protects you from global trends such as the great Australian resignation. And maps out everything you need to do to protect current talent and acquire new talent.

This means strategies should include advertising locations, recruitment tech-stack, career page upgrades, company values – the list goes on. Your business is as good as the workforce you employ. So, your strategy should showcase a trajectory of how you can get the best hires with the best skillsets you need now and in the future.

Tip: Build your employer brand.

An employer brand encompasses everything to do with your reputation as an employer. You want to be seen as the employer of choice. So, part of your strategy should focus on the candidate experience (all interactions throughout the hiring process with candidates), and current employee experience (your staff are your living billboards).

Evaluate your time to hire

Time to hire gives insight into where you’re spending time in recruitment and can be measured differently from company to company based on personal preference (e.g. from invite for job applications through to offer, from approval to start recruitment process through to new starter’s first day).

According to HRD, the typical recruitment process takes 39.2 days. Common delays in the process come from miscommunication between the hiring manager and recruitment lead, crafting broad job ads resulting in too many unqualified candidates, and working with outdated systems creating more administrative work. Taking the time to identify pain points in your hiring processes can reduce time to hire. It can save you financially, stop you from losing fast-moving candidates in a critically talent short market, and improve your employer brand.

Tip: Reduce time to hire by building a talent pipeline before you need it.

All too often the recruitment process is triggered when a vacancy needs to be filled. Try being one step ahead and implement talent communities via proactive sourcing strategies, plans, and methodologies to have passive candidates as prospects for future roles.

Assess and reduce your cost per hire

Time is money and so that brings us to evaluating your cost per hire – or the total cost spent on recruiting to fill an open position. Organisations spend an astonishing $18,982 on average to hire one employee. It’s easy to get to this total when you factor in staff time creating and reviewing applications, tech used in the process, advertisements, administrative costs, onboarding, staff equipment, and more.

When reviewing your current strategy, use an out of the box mindset. Your organisation may be using tired tech and there could be something better on the market. You may be wasting time interviewing too many shortlisted candidates. You may have even lost your creativity when it comes to advertising positions and stick to the same ineffective platform. Use this data and do some solid research to try and bring the cost down with new ideas.

Tip: Reduce cost per hire by engaging an outsourced recruitment partner to take part of the process away from you.

Your recruitment partner should be able to offer a wealth of knowledge in areas like best practice recruitment methodologies. They can help you assess your recruitment expenditure and find you ways to reduce it.

Review how you attract talent

Attracting talent to open opportunities is becoming an increasingly difficult feat. If you follow our tip from earlier about being proactive in building a talent pipeline, it can be easier. But how do you do this? With growing candidate touchpoints ensuring candidates are excited and eager to join the team can be a difficult task.

The first place to go is to investigate and gather data on the different channels you use to advertise, such as job boards and social media platforms. The insights you can gather here will show you which platform is working and what may need to be reconsidered.

Another good data source comes from surveying candidates. Include a question asking candidates what attracted them to the role as part of your job application process. This can unveil critical information about your employer brand and show you what key motivators drive applications e.g. your flexible and supportive culture throughout COVID.

You could also survey candidates about their application process. This can be useful to find out details about interview cancellations, no-shows, application pain points, and more. If you do survey post-application, be sure to protect the candidate’s privacy as they could provide biased information in thinking it may benefit their application for the role.

Tip: Be proactive with review sites and social media to future source talent.

Often overlooked is review platform sites such as Seek, Glassdoor, and Google My Business. Negative information here can deter good candidates from submitting job applications. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to remove past reviews. To sway candidates to look past negative reviews, we recommend you encourage current staff or successfully placed candidates to leave reviews, and be active in showcasing the great things happening at your organisation through your organisation’s social media accounts.

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Reviewing and refreshing your talent acquisition strategy is a process that is often difficult to undertake while your internal recruitment team is busy filling jobs.

“For many of our clients, we recommend conducting a minor review of the talent strategy every quarter and a complete review annually, but some sectors require a more regular refresh,” says Joel Broughton, Paxus Talent Solutions Manager.

Our team can help

Seeking external help from a credible and experienced recruitment partner is often the best way to ensure that you get an expert, external view while your own team keeps working. If you’re looking for an external party to review and refresh your talent acquisition strategy (even if it’s just part of it), reach out to Paxus, digital and tech recruitment specialists. Our Paxus Talent Solutions consulting team can help you move towards achieving your workforce goals.