At the moment, many employers are competing for talent in what is shaping up to be the toughest candidate market in decades.

Job openings are skyrocketing, but application levels aren’t meeting demand. Organisations are struggling to find enough talent to fill open roles, with lack of applications and skills gabs at the top of the list of challenges.

So, how can your organisation overcome these challenges and win its share fair of talent?

Effective talent acquisition hinges on three key pillars: a strong employer brand and Employee Value proposition, an efficient recruitment process, and an effective recruitment marketing strategy.

Here’s how you can harness these three essential elements to achieve the best recruitment outcomes.

1. A strong employer brand and Employee Value Proposition

In a candidate market full of near identical job ads, career sites and social buzz, what makes your employment offer stand out? How do you cut through the noise and connect powerfully with the best candidates?

Your employer brand is what positions your organisation as a great place to work, for the right people, for the right reasons. It’s how potential, current and future talent think and feel about you as an employer. The strength of your employer brand determines the quality of the workforce you attract and retain.

Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is the foundation of your employer brand. What do you offer employees? How to do you engage, entice and inspire them?

Creating a compelling, unique EVP requires strategic, conscious decision making. This will ensure you’re providing the right opportunities and benefits to your existing team members – and are able to showcase these to potential candidates.

For example, here are a few EVPs from some of the world’s top employers:

• Hubspot The company’s EVP tagline – “Your best work starts here” – says it all. Hubspot offers its team members unlimited vacation days, remote work, parental leave, and a host of other employee benefits.

• Gartner: Market research firm Gartner’s EVP is defined by five key pillars – challenging work; talented people; limitless growth; community impact; and big rewards.

• LinkedIn: The company offers benefits that cover health, family, passion, must-haves and extras. This includes childcare, eldercare, pet subsidies, education reimbursement, life insurance and more. (Plus paid shut-down weeks once, at the end of each year.)

2. An efficient recruitment process

Is your recruitment process simple, transparent and well-planned? Or complex, confusing, time-consuming?

Unsurprisingly, poor recruitment processes lose candidates’ trust, resulting in less applications and a longer time to hire. (Think: things like tedious application processes, lack of communication, and outdated technology.) Likewise, this can create frustration and lost productivity for your internal teams.

So, when it comes to recruitment, speed and quality are two important factors to focus on. An efficient, effective recruitment process will improve your organisation’s ability to move the right candidates through your recruitment funnel and make hires quickly.

3. Effective recruitment marketing

Often, recruitment marketing is seen as placing job ads and building a careers site. But leading employers are stretching wider than these traditional channels and using marketing activities that deliver real results.

Authentic, consistent recruitment marketing will fill your talent pipeline with qualified, engaged candidates.

Where does your talent spend most of their time? Can you target unexpected channels in interesting ways?

Think about engaging recruitment marketing campaign ideas, such as: paid social media ads, expression of interest forms that nurture interested candidates through talent community newsletters, or increasing the reach of your videos through your website and social channels.

Microsoft, for example, has created Facebook communities dedicated to educating and informing candidates.

Where are companies falling down?

The biggest pitfall is when companies rely on an outdated recruitment marketing strategy that fails to grab attention, offer valuable insights, or influence candidates.

If you’re looking to hire top talent, reactive recruitment (like posting a job ad, social post, and cold LinkedIn InMails) won’t enable you to tap into a broad candidate market.

Many organisations blame a talent shortage – despite having a recruitment process that only targets active candidates. The reality? The majority of the candidate market are passive job seekers.

At Stream Talent, we solve this challenge through attention-grabbing content that offers valuable insights to educate and inspire talent about working in your organisation. Content that focuses on your people, jobs and teams. Content that increases engagement across all your key recruitment channels, including: job boards, social media channels.

Final thoughts…

Many recruitment agencies can improve your hiring process and support your hiring efforts. However, the majority don’t know how to market your opportunities in a way that engages both active and passive candidates. They’ll often use traditional recruitment marketing tactics that are becoming less and less effective.

At Stream Talent, we incorporate employer branding and recruitment marketing as part of your recruitment process – without long, drawn-out and expensive employer branding projects. It’s the best way we improve recruitment outcomes for our clients.

Combining a strong employer brand and EVP, an efficient recruitment process, and effective recruitment marketing will enable you to reach the wider market.

You can expect to see a faster time to hire, strong shortlist-to-placement ratios, and a larger, more engaged talent pool.

Focus on these three essential components to drive hiring success, improve outcomes for your recruitments, and strengthen your overall employer brand.

For support strengthening your employer brand, recruitment process and recruitment marketing, get in touch with StreamTalent.