Due to the Great Resignation, post-pandemic hiring continues to be a significant challenge for talent acquisition professionals across the globe. The steep increase in hiring demand and fierce competition for better talents demands a substantial overhaul in the way organizations attract and engage candidates. In this blog post, let’s dig deep into why the typical “Post & Pray” strategy is no longer effective and why recruiters should focus more on targeted engagement to meet the current market needs.

Why Post & Pray is Inefficient?

Post & Pray recruiting pivots around the mistaken belief that the job gets completed by just posting a vacant position online. It doesn’t work in large parts because it understates just how technically challenging posting a job and job searching is.

As a recruiter, if you think simply publishing job postings on your company’s website, Linked In, and job boards would help, and the ideal candidate would apply their own, you are in big trouble, especially in the current job market scenario. Purely relying on posting jobs as a recruitment strategy, you are missing opportunities to engage with and build this 70% of your available talent pool in your recruitment pipeline for the current and future open positions. I.e., Recruiters are exposed to a talent pool much larger than would be available to them if it were restricted to people who are actively looking for jobs. Most companies need passive candidates, people who are in jobs and not looking to make the jump, recruiting professionals via just posting in LinkedIn and other traditional hiring methods no longer suffices. In order to effectively recruit and hire the best talent, you have to diversify your recruitment strategy and look beyond just posting jobs.

Why We Need Targeted Engagement?

Attracting apt candidates and keeping them engaged through your entire hiring process is critical in making sure that you can land top talent while maintaining and building your employer’s brand for future big recruits. Modern recruiting strategies must drive building relationships with candidates and sustainably engage them throughout the hiring process. This is where the Targeted Engagement comes in handy and proves well in the current scenario compared to the traditional Post & Pray.

Let’s split this strategy into two parts, Targeted Hiring and Candidate Engagement.

Targeted hiring is the practice of advertising your job opening efforts to a specific audience based on differentiating variables such as region, skill sets, or experience. In other words, a targeted hiring strategy is a predetermined plan for advertising vacancies in places and ways that appeal to candidates with specific backgrounds, skills, or characteristics. With targeted campaigns such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and other digital marketing approaches, it’s feasible to develop campaigns with targeted messages that have broad reach yet are highly targeted towards specific profile parameters. This strategy also drives engagement among apt candidates and accelerates the hiring process.

Talent engagement strategies are critical to recruitment because they can help you shorten time-to-hire and lower your costs-per-hire, making it easier to recruit people who already know your company and feel connected. By approaching candidate engagement well, hiring managers can ensure that current and prospective candidates get a favourable impression of the hiring manager’s brand, which should continue beyond the one-time recruiting cycle. Recruiters devote plenty of energy reaching out to new candidates, but tapping into your existing pipeline is a sure-fire way to uncover familiar faces that may be open to unexplored opportunities. As recruiting is more challenging than ever, you want to ensure that you have a strategy to reach every candidate at every stage, regardless of whether or not you are ready to hire. TekIntelligence is a preferred recruitment partner for many businesses across the globe. Our Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) helps you offload your recruitment-related challenges, so you shall solely focus on your core business. With vast experience, we are well aware of the nitty-gritty of the hiring process and help you fill your organization’s hiring gaps.