What activities support recruitment on a daily basis?

Recruitment is not only creating an advertisement, sourcing and interviewing candidates. When a client asks us for a recruitment service, we always emphasize that by cooperating exclusively with one person from Bee Talents, he will use the knowledge and experience of the entire team, which is not limited to the recruitment only.

At Ulu, we support each other every day by organizing brainstorms and sharing ideas on how to improve recruitment processes, and the best of them become a permanent part of the repertoire of solutions we recommend - some of them have actually become separate services, more about which below. Our Maciej Mazurek wrote about several examples of activities that can increase the recruitment pipeline in February 2020, combining the perspective of a salesman and a recruiter. Today, after almost three years (quite interesting, not only in the IT industry), I want to add my proverbial two cents by slightly updating that entry :)

What still works?

• Maciej mentioned recommendations and referral programs. These remain reliable: the possibility of referring to another person strengthens trust in the company, the recruiter and its offer (confirmed quality of the workplace by a friendly developer means a lot!)

• The situation is similar with the aforementioned situation with advertising in social media and browsers. However, it must be admitted that their importance and "depth" has increased even more - today renamed as part of our recruitment marketing service.
• Another example is email automation - still particularly important in recruitment marketing, but also supporting employer branding or taking care of candidate experience . In addition to the ideas mentioned by Maciej, such as a newsletter for candidates, setting up automatic messages allows you to collect candidates' opinions about the process(es) in which they participated (e.g. by using a previously created survey with recruitment evaluation). At Bee Talents, we use this by operating on our database in the ATS (Applicant Tracking System). However, one cannot forget about personalization and a human approach in communication.
• Organizing industry events is also an interesting way to reach candidates. Such events create another point of contact with people who may be interested in recruiting for us or our clients now or in the future. Over the last 3 years, the emphasis on conducting this type of meetings, e.g. webinars or even all-day online conferences, has increased significantly. This is mainly due to greater focus on remote and hybrid work, saved time and costs spent on commuting, or the availability of the event for participants from all over Poland.

What changed?

During the pandemic, when remote (or hybrid) work has become practically everyday, especially in the IT industry - and in many cases it has remained so - a lot has changed, and some activities supporting recruitment have gained importance.

Command programs

The aforementioned option of recommendations and referral programs within companies has also developed into external sources. What does it mean? More or less, now not only our employees can recommend other specialists for the offer we are looking for, but also external technical experts or recruiters operating more freelance. For this purpose, various platforms have been created, e.g. Huntoo or ShareHire , through which you can recommend your friends for work not only within your organization. In turn, some companies, such as Pepperto , have added, in addition to the option of supporting onboarding or training for their clients, as part of their portfolio, also taking care of the referral program.

What's more, in the face of recruitment freezes (i.e. suspended activities) at the beginning of the pandemic in some companies, we could observe that later even potential competitors supported each other through referrals. Which in practice means that they were looking for their employees/contractors on the proverbial "bench" (without projects) for opportunities outside their own company. We can only check whether the current recession will be similar. So far at Bee Talents, we're seeing both internal and external referrals doing very well.

In the meantime, we have also created the #kandydatszukapracy channel at our place, where we exchange information more effectively - at the request of candidates - in a team of 100 people.

As recruiters in the IT industry, we are looking for new channels to exchange information about referrals. Among the places to acquire candidates, apart from traditional groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, there is a new Workspace for programmers on Slack (the messenger we use at Bee Talents) - Devs, or the recently created Talent Pooling Community, where there is also a dedicated channel for referrals candidates.

And since we're on the subject of Slack, I can mention Workspace Marketing Recruitment (greetings, Kasia Ubysz!) and, again, the service of the same name. We wrote more about what it is here.

Recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing is ensuring better visibility of the employer's brand and job offers of our partners' organizations with the help of advertisements in popular advertising systems.

Thanks to dedicated campaigns on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google, we are able to reach and obtain CVs of the candidates we care about the most. Each of the platforms is characterized by different targeting possibilities and ensures the use of various advertising formats.

Thanks to this, we were able to reach, for example, 16 qualitative CVs in a month for the role of Mid/Senior PHP Developer (often candidates not detected in the search itself), which turned into the employment of a sought-after specialist. In turn, during the year we implemented a total of 21 campaigns (for roles such as Senior Front-end Developer, Fullstack .Net + Angular Developer, Mobile - both for Android and iOS systems, or Java Software Engineer), from which we obtained 241 matched resumes.

What's worth adding?

If, despite all the above examples, we encounter the proverbial "wall" when looking for candidates, I am still in favor of going back to what I wrote at the beginning: our Partners get, as part of cooperation with one recruiter, the knowledge, tools and capabilities of the entire Hive, which translates into strongly on the effectiveness of the project.

Recruitment is not only about sourcing and the tasks that are associated with it at first glance. Even the best-written advertisement, high salary, a huge list of candidates at the beginning of the recruitment funnel, perfectly personalized messages to candidates, or increasing access channels may not be enough to complete the recruitment process successfully.

Brainstorm? And what is it for!

At team brainstorms, we share experiences from previous activities with other team members. We identify blockers and collect possible ways to remove them, analyzing data and feedback collected from the market. On this basis, we prepare from a few to a dozen specific ideas for implementation, often immediately, which we share with the client. It also happened in the past to organize combined brainstorms, where for example 3-5 people from us and as many from a partner company appeared at one meeting to take advantage of the synergy effect and knowledge exchange in one place.

Some time ago, we proposed a meeting with one of the clients to discuss ideas and implement corrective actions as soon as possible. After presenting and jointly analyzing inspirations and good practices available on the market, we decided to create a series of blog posts in the form of interviews, in which programmers and other experts from the client's company will tell more about the technologies and solutions used in the organization and the challenges that accompany them in their daily work . After publication, the entries were promoted on social media channels and constituted an additional element in messages to candidates and during conversations with future employees.

The action was warmly received by the developers community, and the candidates participating in the process let us know that thanks to the knowledge contained in the entries, they could better prepare for technical interviews.

It is clear that after joint brainstorming comes concrete actions. In the above example, we observe high efficiency of marketing activities (in a shorter time) or employer branding, although these require more regular, long-term activities.

Summary

All these aspects emphasize that recruitment is not only meeting candidates and hiring them, but in fact a series of supporting activities (often also outside the scope of the recruitment itself).

It is worth noting that we often appear at meetings as not only service providers, but above all, partners and advisors, educating how a specific process can be additionally supported so that it becomes effective.

And what does it look like for you? If you have any questions for me or a blocker in a recruitment project, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn ! Have a good day ;)