New Year, New Hire: Salaries and Candidate Attraction

With 2019 in full swing, more and more jobs are posted online each day and applications are being sent every minute.

Are you attracting the right candidates to your job? 

With 55% of companies saying they plan to hire in 2019, it’s a competitive market to be an employer. It’s important to ensure you are attracting not only top-quality candidates but people who are the right fit for the role and your business. As online job advertising becomes a more saturated market, the candidate pool becomes more diverse.

A mixture of people with different skill sets come forward as potential candidates each and every day. The issue many businesses are having is making sure their job adverts are being seen by the right people, in order to gain valuable applications.

Promote (and Develop) your Employer Brand

Branding and how your business is presented is not always at the top of the priorities list when recruiting for a new role, despite the ever-increasing importance of employer brand and awareness. It’s becoming clearer that a weak employer brand can cost you top-quality job applicants, meaning owning your brand is crucially important to secure the candidates you’re after.

Luckily, brand promotion is easier than ever before. Whatever your business model or service offering may be, highlighting your culture, company benefits, and work ethic can be a top method in attracting candidates.

Whether you operate in a more corporate environment or want to showcase your quirky, personable brand, showcasing this within your website and social media pages will allow potential candidates to quickly get an idea as to whether they’re a good fit for your business. Reviews from past and current employees (on services like Glassdoor) can be a great way to show what your company is really like to work with.

The average user now has 7 social media platforms, so make sure your brand message is consistent across all channels and represents the same message.

Your Job Ad

Once you’ve established a strong company brand, the next step is looking at the content and quality of the job advert you’re using to advertise your role. With job boards becoming inundated with new adverts each day, employers need to ensure their “Sales Team Leader” advert stands out from the thousands already posted.

The advert title and first paragraph are vital, as job-seekers scrolling through page after page of job postings are likely to only read the first part of your advert – if they’re not gripped in this part, they will move on. Ensure your adverts are compelling and include enough information that will not only appeal to the candidate but make them want to read on and apply.

Refining your interview process

Assuming you’ve been promoting a strong online brand and developed and advertised a persuasive advert and job description, you could be looking at beginning the interview process with a handful of your best applicants. But there are things that must be considered before diving right in to the interview stage.

Like who are you going to assign to run the interview? It’s astonishing how many businesses spend copious time and effort to draw up stellar candidates and then blow it all with badly prepared interviewers.

Consider who would be a strong ambassador for your brand and business, (with the knowledge and skill to conduct a professional interview) rather than just someone who’s “not too busy to do it”. Good candidates aren’t idiots. They can recognise when they’ve been given a weak or sloppy interview.

Being busy simply isn’t an excuse and being poorly prepared is even worse. Put your best employees at the forefront of your interview process. If you’re interviewing a successful and ambitious candidate, they are likely to have other opportunities on the table, so you need to sell to them as much as they are trying to sell to you.

Looking for more hiring advice?

The CMD Recruitment Salary Guide and Market Insights Report is your complete guide to confident hiring and salary allocation for the year ahead. Based on our own data and research from vacancies and roles across the South-West, this report provides an extensive overview of key trends affecting hiring in 2019.

CMD Recruitment have created this guide to allow employers to remain competitive in their sector and show just how competitive the South-West market has been in 2018, and how this trend will continue throughout 2019.

• In-demand positions and skills • Predicted trends for 2019 from sector-dedicated consultants • 2018 Market overview of working the South-West • Roles to watch, year-on-year salary growth and average salaries Request your copy now!