Achieve High Performance Recruitment Without Sacrificing Candidate Quality and Recruiter Wellbeing

Employers struggle to attract, hire, and retain qualified candidates and the current labour market isn’t helping. According to Indeed and Glassdoor’s 2023 Hiring & Workplace Trends Report, a tight labour supply is expected to continue to impact hiring. Employers understand that building and maintaining a high performance recruitment pipeline will help them overcome their talent acquisition challenges.  

In this article, we showcase how to recruit better to overcome labour challenges and thrive in a challenging hiring landscape. What’s the key? An appetite and desire to focus on employee wellbeing first.

High performance recruitment evolves

According to the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, labour challenges remain one of the most significant near-term obstacles for Canadian businesses. A labour shortage affects businesses greatly, as it slows business growth and pushes employees to work longer to make up for revenue loss.

Canada’s aging population creates another challenge. As workers retire, there are not enough people to replace them. Hiring practices, processes, and tools require an overhaul to win talent in a hiring landscape that’s changing in fundamental ways.       

At the same time, empowered job seekers expect higher wages, greater flexibility, and meaningful work. The key to building a recruitment team to overcome these challenges and efficiently and effectively hire great employees is to focus on wellbeing, technology, and continuous improvement.  

Create a culture of wellbeing

High performance recruitment starts within. If you’re not concentrating on your recruiters and talent acquisition leaders’ wellbeing, it’s more challenging to attract other job seekers to your organization.

According to Indeed’s Work Wellbeing 2022 Insights Report, while 90% of people believe how we feel at work matters, only 49% report that their company measures happiness and wellbeing. Measuring and understanding employee wellbeing helps your workforce thrive and inspires future talent to apply at your organization.  

In high-performance recruitment, pay attention to how your recruiters and talent attraction leaders are feeling. While high levels of stress and burnout exist within the profession, talent leaders can find ways to manage their teams’ burnout. First, companies can regularly listen to their HR and talent acquisition professionals to understand what they’re facing. Hold formal or informal conversations regularly outside of scheduled performance reviews.

It’s not just HR professionals whose expectations around wellbeing at work are increasing. Employees at all levels seek workplace wellbeing, including increased happiness, satisfaction, purpose, and manageable stress.

Creating a culture of wellbeing involves measuring wellbeing and building a strategy to improve it, such as starting or improving an employee wellness program. Such programs affect employer branding and are an effective way to stand out from competitors. 

Embrace technology — but stay human

Looking towards the future of recruiting, you’ll see advancements in hiring technology everywhere. High performance recruitment involves identifying these advancements and understanding how they can improve productivity and efficiency in your organization. Take artificial intelligence (AI), for example, and what it can do for your recruitment. Automating simple tasks decreases administrative workloads so recruiters can focus on candidate quality and experience.  

Navigating the rapidly changing hiring landscape and its new technologies requires constant learning and experimentation. AI-powered tech tools need rapid feedback and prototyping, making the learning curve problematic during implementation. Employers can foster a learning culture and encourage staff to experiment with new technologies as they are implemented. Education benefits are another way to promote learning while attracting and retaining staff. 

But remember, employees and job seekers still crave a human future. A recent study found that 3 in 4 Canadian employees want to learn new skills to keep up with their job’s changing needs, with digital and interpersonal skills as their top priorities. Canadians want to keep up with technological growth in the workplace, the study shows, as well as improve interpersonal skills to better support human connections.

Promote continuous improvement in the workplace

High performance workplaces strive for continuous improvement. Employers must seek ways to improve efficiencies and be open to employee-driven ideas to enhance the organization. While it may take time to encourage teams to be open to—and even enthusiastic about—change, the results are transformational when everyone commits to steady improvements.

Here's how to improve the recruitment process: 

• Build strong communication with your HR team
• Listen to how you can streamline existing processes
• Find gaps in your recruitment or onboarding strategies needing improvement
• Involve your recent hires—what parts of the recruitment process do they think could be better? 

Start improving your recruitment process now

Building and maintaining high performance recruitment requires a concerted and ongoing effort, but the benefits it can bring are immense. Improve your recruitment process by measuring and understanding employee wellbeing, identifying technologies that can enhance productivity and efficiency in your organization, and creating a workplace where the norm is to strive for continuous improvement. Organizations that can effectively and efficiently attract, hire, and retain qualified candidates set themselves up for the greatest success.