The Art of Attraction: Proven Tactics for Business Leaders to Attract Top Talent

By Andy Perks, MD of Vistage International.

Despite officially entering a recession earlier this year, workforce expansion plans are looking more optimistic as we enter a new financial year. In fact, according to the latest Vistage Confidence Index, 27% of UK SMEs anticipate that the economy will improve over the next 12 months; with a further 50% confident that their firm’s profitability will improve within the same period.
As a result, business leads are proactively planning to invest in talent, and organisational structure in the next quarter to keep pace. Specifically 25% of all SMEs are looking to recruit for new leadership positions.

Attracting the right talent is one of the major struggles for small and medium businesses, and it’s only getting more challenging as the demand for top talent continues to grow.

As attention turns towards talent recruitment it’s important for any business owner to understand that today’s job market is different. It’s a job-seeker’s market whereby fewer highly-skilled individuals are actively job searching, and there’s a massive demand for their skills and expertise. Posting a generic job advertisement, as you did 10 years ago and hoping for the best, simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Here are three tips on how to best elevate your recruitment strategy for a savvy and evolving talent market.

1. Understand your ideal candidate persona

Many hiring managers assume that writing a job ad is their human resources department’s job. But HR doesn’t do those jobs and don’t always know how to present a role in an attractive way to potential candidates.

One simple tip? Enlist the help of hiring managers, and their top performers, by sitting them down to help draft up a persona of the ideal candidate. In this conversation you’ll need to get to the crux of what it is they do, what results look like, key deliverables and what skills they might be missing as a team already.

From there ask your top performer to rate the job ad on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 equals boring — they’ve already stopped reading it — and 5 equals compelling — they’d consider leaving their current job if this ad were true. If they rate it anything lower than a 5, your job ad is not on the mark and you need to go back to the drawing board.

2. Showcase yourself as an employer brand

Every organisation needs a clearly defined company brand — specifically a value proposition or brand promise — that articulates the benefits that customers will gain through the client relationship. Once realised, a value proposition transforms customers into brand advocates. Similarly, businesses need an employer brand — their employee value proposition — to compete and win in today’s increasingly complex job market.

Think of a company you’d love to work for. Why do you have this perception? What have they done proactively to make you think this way? It’s all part of their employer brand.

That’s why when it comes to finding new talent, it’s critical that your recruiting team partners with your marketing team to promote your employer brand as part of the overall strategy. This helps solidify your company as somewhere top talent want to be.

This means you should have consistent messaging across channels, from the careers page on the company website to your social media accounts; and through these channels emphasise the employee experience, values and culture at your workplace.

Social media has become the primary vehicle for engaging with candidates, especially with posts, pictures and short videos that cover topics such as:

Culture and values
Diversity equity and inclusion
Employee spotlights
Client interactions or major successes
Volunteerism and other community or philanthropic initiatives

3. Meet top talent where they are

If you’re relying on one or two traditional recruiting methods you might be missing out. Ask yourself who are you looking for? If it’s a recent graduate, college partners, career counsellors or job fairs might be the way to go. But if it’s a mid-to-senior-level talent, then referral programs, alumni associations or utilising LinkedIn Recruiter Lite to reach out directly will likely be much more effective than posting to a jobs board.

Across the board the most effective method is networking. When next recruiting make sure to tap some of the best people at your company, across levels, to provide them with direction on how to reach out to their personal network. To further incentivise you can offer them a cash bonus for successful referrals.

With that said in today’s modern workplace it’s important to meet talent where they are. Quite literally. Remote and hybrid work practices have broken down geographical barriers, serving as a powerful tool in assessing talent. No longer limited to candidates in the local area, you can take a more national, or even international, approach and use this to the businesses’ advantage.

The process of finding qualified personnel has always been a challenge for businesses, and the current economic climate means that business leaders need to continue to think holistically and creatively about how they’re attracting a newer labour market.

The Art of Attraction: Proven Tactics for Business Leaders to Attract Top Talent

The Art of Attraction: Proven Tactics for Business Leaders to Attract Top Talent

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