7 Can’t-Miss Tips for Top Talent Recruitment

And The 14 Best HR Software Solutions

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Philip Mandelbaum
05/09/2022

A closeup of old fashioned wooden chess pieces on a chess board, symbolizing the war on talent (the talent wars)

I’ve shared my top tips and tools for mastering content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing and SMS marketing. I’ve published a white paper on how to convert customer feedback into free promotion. I’ve cannonballed right into the metaverse to identify your opportunities. I’ve interviewed the civil rights director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to ensure we’re all prepared for what Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover may mean for digital businesses. And I’ve even outlined all the pros and cons of remote work, hybrid work and in-office work. But I haven’t fully leveraged my experience in HR strategy to help you hire — and keep — the top talent that can actually execute on all the most effective digital marketing and CX strategies. Sure, you can hire an agency. I’ve worked for a few. And sometimes they do incredible work. But no matter how talented your outsourced account strategist, manager and content creators may be, they’ll never understand your business as well as you or your internal employees. That’s why it’s so important to recruit top talent, and to provide the right employee experience, benefits and corporate training so you can retain your top talent too.

HR Strategy

According to John Storey, professor of human resource management at The Open University, strategic HR is an employee management approach designed to gain a competitive advantage by integrating cultural, structural and personnel techniques to develop a more highly committed and capable workforce. While there is no one universal definition of strategic HR management (HRM), the primary goal is to connect the HR function to the brand’s business objectives and improve performance by facilitating and maintaining a work culture that inspires innovation. Today, that means recruitment and benefits, as well as facilitating employee engagement and strengthening culture.

a wall of colored pencils in different colors and sizes, symbolizing the diversity of candidates available for recruitment and retention

To provide a strategic human resources plan, your HR leaders must prioritize the behaviors, culture and competencies needed to achieve your larger organizational goals. The most effective strategic HRM strategies:

Are based on an analysis of the organization and the external environment
Guide the direction of the HR department
Shape the company culture
Dictate the allocation and deployment of organizational resources
Target and measure performance against quantitative key performance indicators
Are revised on a yearly basis, and whenever necessary

Your HR strategy could include:

Assessing staffing and skills needs
Analyzing competitors’ recruitment and retention practices
Establishing a dynamic, future-forward approach to corporate training and professional development
Developing and maintaining competitive employee compensation and benefits packages
Designing and managing performance and rewards systems

In developing your HR strategy:

Conduct a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis of your organization
Envision and articulate a desired future, and create a vision statement that is inspirational, aspirational, compelling and concise
Provide clear objectives that recognize your organization’s strengths and weaknesses; can be achieved and measured; reflect the organization’s overall strategy; and can be effectively communicated and supported firmwide
Identify the steps required to achieve your objectives, and set milestones, plan contingencies and determine necessary resources
Establish a process for evaluating progress and identifying opportunities to adapt, streamline and/or optimize

A yellow stencil reading 'DON'T WASTE YOUR TALENT,' sprayed onto gray pavement

7 Ways to Win the War on Talent

Along with hiring, onboarding, training, benefits, promotions and terminations, attracting top talent has always been one of HR’s core responsibilities. In fact, with our increasingly global, remote workforce, the opportunity has never been greater. Nor has the competition. So what separates the HR departments and businesses that recruit top talent from the ones that don’t? The brands that win:

1. Design a Recruitment Strategy

A recruiting strategy is a formal plan for successfully identifying, attracting, recruiting and hiring high-quality candidates. Ask yourself:

How will we source and qualify potential candidates?
What tactics will we use to secure applications and interviews?
What will be required of hiring managers before an offer is made?
What will be required of potential hires before an offer is made?

2. Set Recruitment Goals and KPIs

As with any other initiative, your talent recruitment efforts must be measurable, and measured — and setting and measuring performance against your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) will allow you to track progress and optimize your process.

In developing your talent acquisition goals, Indeed recommends following the SMART goal setting framework, ensuring each goal is:

Specific, like filling a particular role or creating a new team
Measurable, with specific target KPIs
Achievable, given your available resources
Realistic, or aligned with your business objectives
Time-based, with a target for when the goal will be achieved

Then, create an HR dashboard to track performance against the following KPIs:

Number of qualified candidates per job post
Time to hire
Offer acceptance rate
Source of hire
Cost per hire

(More on dashboards below.)

3. Develop and Promote the Employee Value Proposition

While most company websites have an “about us” page, they don’t often highlight the value of working for the company. Likewise, though most companies post on social media and some have Glassdoor, LinkedIn or Indeed profiles, many don’t follow clearly defined strategies for attracting top talent. So, before you even consider posting a position online, your HR and digital marketing teams must collaborate on a strategy and supporting content to demonstrate to potential employees what it’s like to be a part of your organization.

To develop rich, engaging content:

Use your employees. Ask your executive team, your managers and your employees to serve as brand ambassadors, sharing their stories of career transformation with your organization. Offer incentives, if necessary.
Use your competitors. Research what your top competitors are doing on their websites and social media accounts — and do your version of it, better.
Use video. Nothing expresses a feeling or emotion better than sight and sound together, so create videos to tell your story. This could include employee testimonials, interviews with senior leaders, behind-the-scenes office snapshots, animated company overviews, or whatever else you can think of that is fun, unique and true to your brand and company culture.

Then, to further stand out from your competitors:

Expand the “about us” and “careers” sections of your website to include the content you’ve created
Include links on all your own properties (e.g., your corporate website) to your Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed and social media accounts
Enhance your profile on these third-party sites using iterations of the same branded content to support your messaging

4. Make Job Posts, Ads and Applications Stand Out

There are more than a million employers on Glassdoor. Ten jobs are added to Indeed per second. So, separating yourself, your job listings and even your application process from the very crowded field is critically important to attracting top talent and meeting your target KPIs. Here are the top five tips for standing out:

Shed the corporate veneer and get personal. Speak to potential hires, and whenever possible let your employees do the talking.
Get creative in telling your brand story — whether you’re detailing an open position, defining an ideal candidate or soliciting applications. Use videos, gifs and graphics, share anecdotes and testimonials, ask unique questions, and encourage atypical responses.
Highlight your company culture and employee experience. Show potential hires what would be expected of them — and what they could expect from you and their coworkers. This will demonstrate your commitment to your team as well as help you filter out potential candidates who would not excel in your work environment.
Promote the perks. Display them prominently, and provide as much detail as possible.
Think like an applicant. I’ve been a hiring manager, and I’ve applied (successfully, and unsuccessfully) for jobs. One approach I’ve always taken, which, as a job candidate I’ve rarely experienced, is to base recruitment efforts not on HR policy, historical practice or industry standards but on what will entice top talent to truly engage with your application. And the best and easiest ways are to (a) never require applicants to submit a resume or curriculum vitae and complete an online form with the very same information; (b) allow applicants to submit their LinkedIn or Indeed profile, or a video resume, instead of the standard resume or CV; (c) never require a cover letter that typically regurgitates what’s in the resume or CV; and, instead, (d) require answers to a short series of unique, thought-provoking questions that can determine not only the applicant’s qualifications but their potential fit with your company culture.

white neon sign reading 'this must be the place,' on a wall with geometric shapes in red, pink, orange and green, symbolizing the workplace that focuses on company culture

5. Offer Competitive Benefits and Perks

Take your cues from ‘cool’ megacorporations like Facebook and Google, or the fastest growing startups across the world: if you don’t offer the right employee benefits and perks, you’ve got no shot. Conduct an employee survey to ascertain what they most appreciate (or would most appreciate). Then, coordinate with your financial department, C-suite and team leaders to determine what creative incentives you can reasonably offer beyond the traditional benefits. What’s most important isn’t which benefits or perks you provide, but that you offer your employees rewards for their hard work.

In a gratitude survey of 2,000 Americans, 81% said they’d work harder for an appreciative boss; 70% said they’d feel better about themselves and their efforts if their boss thanked them more. So, in addition to offering work flexibility, as well as effective learning and development opportunities (see below), I recommend:

Mental and behavioral health care. Even before the pandemic, the vast majority of workers believed their employers should have a mental health policy, according to a survey commissioned by Zapier. With COVID-19 creating short- and long-term psychosocial and behavioral health implications, the need has increased dramatically.
Paid sick leave and PTO. For years the trend in HR had been to combine sick and vacation days into one PTO bank, but this led to an increase in employees reporting to work sick, increasing the spread of illness in the workplace. Post-COVID, with worker safety considerations at an all-time high, many employers are (a) reverting back to distinguishing between sick days and PTO — and encouraging employees to stay home when they feel sick; (b) offering unlimited PTO, which also benefits the business by preventing carryover and end-of-year payouts; and (c) strengthening team morale by allowing employees to donate their excess PTO to coworkers who may need additional time off.
Telehealth and virtual care. As Business Group on Health proclaimed in its 2021 report, “virtual care is here to stay.” When you offer virtual care to your employees, they have 24/7 access to everything they need to stay informed about their health and can make virtual appointments with a variety of doctors and other providers at times that suit their busy lives.
Digital health. In addition to what traditionally qualified as telemedicine or virtual care, employers are now offering stipends to employees to invest in other forms of digital self-care. This can include apps for meditation, sleep tracking, meal planning, physical fitness, and even maternity. The annual fee for most mobile apps is relatively low, and some offer bulk discounts to businesses; some of my favorites are: Calm, Headspace, MyFitnessPal and Sleep Cycle.
In-home care delivery. “While the pandemic certainly accelerated the transition away from facilities to home care, the transition has been underway for some time,” said Paul Kusserow, CEO and President of Amedisys. “Care in the home is the most economical for all payers. It’s where patients want to receive their care — and it has proven, quality outcomes.”
Family wellness. A simple concept, family wellness entails extending your benefits to the members of your employee’s family. As part of your wellness program, you could offer family health coaching, fitness classes, meditation, yoga or massage, kid-friendly events and family challenges, or summer camp stipends and internships.
Personalized wellness and tailored benefits. As is true of digital marketing, personalization is everything. Ask your employees for advice, coordinate with finance and the C-suite to develop your slate of offerings, and promote your most innovative, employee-centric benefits. Some examples include: student loan repayment programs; college tuition reimbursement; pet insurance; higher education investments (like 529 plans) for dependents; self-care subscription services and fitness stipends; meal plans and snacks; happy hours, half-days and mental health days; workday and weekend team volunteering opportunities; travel stipends or car services; vacation travel vouchers; corporate retreats; and additional holidays like Election Day and Juneteenth.
Financial wellness and emergency savings accounts. It’s well known that the majority of workers live paycheck to paycheck, and approximately 40% of US households would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense. Needless to say, this produces great financial stress — and financial stress causes a 34% increase in work absenteeism and tardiness. Unfortunately, since the outbreak of COVID-19, more of your employees and prospects are financially stressed than ever. To provide financial assistance: create payroll-deduction emergency savings accounts or offer student loan debt contributions or tuition fee reimbursements. To reduce financial stress and assist with long-term financial health: offer complimentary meetings with financial advisors; host workshops on reducing debt and budget planning, or outsource with a company that specializes in employee financial planning; and provide stipends for digital financial tools that provide on-demand financial advice or customized financial literacy training.
Work flexibility. While most benefits/perks could fall under the ‘nice to have’ category, work flexibility — like health insurance and vacation time — is becoming a non-negotiable for more and more workers. In fact, 97% of employees are looking to be a ‘flexible worker’ in the long term, and more than three quarters of workers say they’d be “more loyal” to their employers if they offered flexible work options. I, for one, left my digital marketing job at the world’s leading independent news-gathering organization to take a new position with a small business that allowed me to work from home. So, create a companywide work-from-home policy, and offer it to all of your employees. Then, train your managers to be flexible in extenuating circumstances and accommodate their employees in need. (If the nature of the work performed by your organization does not allow for full-time remote work, create an employee incentive program with additional remote work days as a reward.)

A young Black male employee engages in adaptive learning in a hybrid work environment

6. Demonstrate a Commitment to (Adaptive) Learning, Professional Development and Career Advancement

As LinkedIn explains in How Learning Programs Attract and Retain Top Talent, “to attract top talent, your organization needs to be a place where people advance their career. It needs to be a place where people are given opportunities to learn new skills and take on new challenges. And job candidates need to know about it.”

LinkedIn surveyed more than 10,500 recent job changers and found that lack of advancement opportunity was the number-one driver of job change — and this is particularly true of millennials, the fastest growing segment of the workforce

Likewise, 83% of respondents to a survey by SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, said career advancement was “important” or “very important;” 78% said a clear career path would compel them to stay longer at their current organization, while only 20% reported being “very satisfied” with how their employers were managing their professional growth.

Take a look at your learning and development approach, and ask yourself:

When was our L&D strategy created?
Did our HR team survey our employees or make assumptions about what works?
When was our strategy last reviewed and updated?
What percentage of our employees have engaged in our corporate training program?
What have the results of these trainings told us about the skills and knowledge of our existing employees, the skills and knowledge gaps in our workforce, and the effectiveness of our program?
What gaps and opportunities have our managers and employees identified in our trainings?

Armed with the answers to these questions, you should know with certainty whether a new strategy is warranted; chances are, it is. Because unless you’re adhering to the principles of adaptive learning, you’re probably wasting everyone’s time.

So, what is adaptive learning? Adaptive learning is designed to:

Satisfy the need for providing continuing education anytime and anywhere
Improve learner engagement

In contrast to the typical one-size-fits-all approach, envision, for instance, an online continuing education course that adjusts to each of your employees’ unique skills, interests and learning styles. The employee who needs more context, extended explanation or additional practice receives it; the employee who doesn’t simply skips past. And the training lasts only as long as necessary for each individual.

Your adaptive learning system (see below) enables this by:

Analyzing performance in real time
Modifying teaching methods based on the data
Adapting to the learner

Through adaptive learning, your employees get the training they need, through automated customizations triggered by the real-time intelligence of your adaptive learning platform. This benefits not only the learner, but the human resources professional tasked with overseeing and optimizing workplace learning.

The goal, according to eLearning Industry, is always the same — “whether we use algorithms, nonlinear narrative (branching), personal info, clever interfaces, human intervention, or more likely a combination, to achieve it.”

The result, according to Nick J. Howe, chief learning officer of Area9 Lyceum, a global leader in ‘micro’ adaptive learning technologies, is “effective and time-efficient pathways to mastery that are unique to every individual, while improving business-based outcomes.”

A graduation cap, or mortarboard, flying in the blue sky, with tassels waving, symbolizing career advancement

Indeed, implementing an adaptive learning model:

Enables personalized feedback. Adaptive learning personalizes employees’ learning paths; by measuring employee progress, your adaptive learning platform can provide personalized feedback and suggest applicable follow-up courses or materials. This promotes the feeling of one-on-one instruction, even with asynchronous learning.
Reveals skills gaps. Adaptive learning makes it easier to identify skill gaps and deliver the right content in response — and not only in real time but over time, as your adaptive learning platform continues to collect and analyze data, continually strengthening the accuracy of its recommendations.
Improves efficiency. Adaptive learning technology frees up your HR staff from developing corporate training materials, enabling them to focus on more strategic HR initiatives; it also shrinks the time it takes for each employee to complete their training, allowing them to return more quickly to their core duties — with enhanced capabilities.
Produces better results. “According to data from industries including academia, health care, technology, manufacturing, retail, sports, and business services, people are actually ‘unconsciously incompetent’ in a typical 20% to 40% of areas critical to their performance,” explains Ulrik Juul Christensen in Harvard Business Review. Of course, this would mean that your employees are only performing at 60% to 80%. And with adaptive learning you can quickly identify and remediate their gaps.
Provides flexibility. When it comes to workplace learning, what works and what doesn’t changes over time. So do the needs of your organization. With traditional corporate training approaches, it’s complicated to add new material without adversely impacting the learning experience. With the right adaptive learning platform, you stay nimble — and the technology does the work for you. When you introduce changes to a course, your adaptive learning platform differentiates between what each employee already knows and what they still need to learn.
Engages and empowers employees. We’ve all been assigned a boring online compliance training. It’s challenging to remain engaged when the required course feels generic and outdated, doesn’t reflect the actual work we perform, or fails to advance our capabilities and career trajectory. With adaptive learning, you can target your staff anytime, anywhere, and customize to each individual employee. Then, each employee chooses their own adventure — improving their ability to retain the information they’ve gathered, and your ability to retain top talent, who’ve experienced the benefits of your adaptive learning model.
Creates better employees and better leaders, advancing employee recruitment. By empowering employees to take charge of their own continuing education, adaptive learning facilitates confidence to take on increased responsibility. In turn, their upward mobility enables you to leverage your organization’s history of internal advancement for your employee recruitment strategy.

To incorporate adaptive learning at your organization, invest in one of these adaptive learning systems:

To ensure job candidates know about the training and advancement opportunities within your organization:

Include stipends or paid time off for learning and development in your benefits package
Explain in your job descriptions how a new hire can learn, grow and advance at your organization (or wherever they take their talents next)
Clearly define your commitment to learning and development in the careers section of your website, stating the mission and goals of your learning program and highlighting specific programs and technologies your employees have leveraged to enhance their skills and advance their careers
Create, post and share employee video testimonials describing how they’ve developed new skills, used learning to transform their careers, or advanced into leadership roles

A Muslim business woman in hijab sits in her office typing on her laptop

7. Network, and then Network Some More

One of the most effective recruitment strategies has always been to leverage the networks of your existing employees — and there’s no reason to believe your current top talent can’t attract additional top talent. Employee referral programs have been known to improve the quality of new hires, increase employee retention, and save time and money in the hiring process.

To develop your referral program:

Coordinate with management to help set hiring goals, allocate the necessary resources, and promote the program within the organization
Set clear, measurable KPIs and goals for the program, including (a) number of referrals; (b) number of referrals hired; (c) placements through referrals versus other recruiting methods; (d) length of time referred candidates have stayed with the company; (e) and how managers and employees rate the program
Create a simplified referral process, using a Google form, an email template or an employee referral tool, such as Jobvite, Freshworks, ERIN or employeereferrals.com
Announce the program, with clear instructions
Add the program information to your new hire onboarding documentation
Offer a variety of incentives, including bonuses, paid time off or gifts
Empower and inspire your employees by polling them on preferred incentives, hosting contests among teams, and publicly recognizing top referrers
Integrate referrals into your company culture by hosting a launch event and periodic recognition parties, as well as promoting the program through your internal communications department
Track your progress against your goals and KPIs, and iterate and optimize based on your findings.

But be warned: employee referrals are not enough on their own. Like hiring from within, recruiting from the same talent pools can be limiting, especially for forward-thinking organizations looking to invest in diversity, inclusion and equity (and reap the benefits).

When you recruit talent from outside your geographical area or immediate networks, you can attract workers who are:

More diverse in their backgrounds, perspectives and skill sets
More inspired and energized
More adept at newer, increasingly advanced technologies
Earlier in their careers
At lower pay grades

In fact, according to Forbes Insights, “a diverse and inclusive workforce is crucial for companies that want to attract and retain top talent.” And that’s not all: Highly inclusive organizations are 120% more capable of meeting financial targets and generate 1.4 times more revenue and 2.3 times more cash flow per employee. In other words, you’d be more than merely remiss not to prioritize diversity, inclusion and equity in your networking efforts (and more on this another day, I promise).

brown bamboo fence

Of course, all of this is a lot to take in; it isn’t easy developing a new recruitment strategy, expanding your talent pool, altering your benefits package, or providing adaptive learning opportunities. And that’s where benefits consulting companies and HR software come in.

The Top 14 HR Software Solutions for Recruitment, Training, Retention and More

I don’t think benefits consulting companies are necessary, if you’ve hired (and trained) the right HR professionals. HR software, on the other hand, is nearly impossible to live without, particularly at larger companies. For your analytics dashboard alone, it’s worth it; but, HR teams have a massive, diverse set of responsibilities, with numerous stakeholders and even more KPIs. So, unless you want to overwork the very people empowered to recruit new employees, I strongly recommend reviewing and testing out the following: