The search for talent has arguably never been more complex. Along with the impact of physical changes in the workplace, there has been a significant shift in recruitment priorities and focus on many organizations.

Some of the challenges faced include:

Building a strong employer brand

Expanding candidate reach and attracting the right job candidates

Targeting and engaging with both active and passive candidates

Hiring for diversity and inclusion and eliminating bias

Streamlining selection and hiring faster

Inefficiencies in talent sourcing

Ensuring a positive candidate experience

Building talent pools proactively

One option is to advertise via recruitment agencies and on social media channels when looking to fill a vacancy. This approach takes advantage of specialized resources that offer a service that can range from advertising the role and accepting applications, to include candidate screening and support for selection. Despite the benefits of reducing the administrative overhead, outsourcing these tasks can pose its own risks by diluting your employer brand and exacerbating some of the challenges listed.

Another option that enables a more holistic solution is investing in a job portal for a more efficient and effective recruitment process.

Here are the key benefits you can gain when taking strategic control of your recruitment process by implementing your own branded job portal.

1. Promoting your employer brand

To attract and retain the right candidates from the available talent pool, you should first define and promote your unique employer brand.

Employer branding can be defined as the process of managing and influencing your reputation as an employer. It is essential to see your employer brand as the way you differentiate your organization's values and culture to potential candidates and stakeholders. People are increasingly looking for organizations that map to their value base and provide ethical and empathetic leadership, challenging work, and room for personal growth, so reaching out and demonstrating these attributes to potential candidates is a significant advantage to have over competitors.

As well as your culture and values, candidates want to know about the benefits you offer and the kind of projects or services you are working on – all of which can be elaborated upon when managing your own job portal.

2. Expanding reach and attracting the right candidates

As well as providing essential information on your organization, your employer brand serves to help your recruitment team attract those candidates who buy into your culture and values.

When done effectively, promoting a consistent and positive employer brand attracts those actively seeking work and taps into the larger pool of talent already in the workforce who get attracted to what you can offer as an alternative.

By having your own job portal, you can control how much or how little you want to share about your organization and the roles you must fill. A portal opens the opportunity for you to include richer content such as employee testimonials, individual achievements, and projects completed. Richer information gives authenticity to the roles described and provides a better feel for the work environment and opportunities available for broadening experience and personal growth.

To engage and attract the right talent, you must be clear about what you are looking for and think outside the box when deciding where to look or describing the role’s requirements. Using your own job portal means that you can be creative with your job descriptions to attract the type of candidate you want. For example, if you are looking for good analytical skills, make your role exciting and relevant to those working in non-traditional fields such as scientific research or clinical trial analysis.

If you want to attract a younger workforce, look at your employer's value proposition for the benefits you offer and how employees are rewarded. Using different media options such as video, online assessments using gaming and linking to social media may be effective attraction strategies to take. In summary, you need to know your audience and think of your job portal as a marketing tool to attract the right talent for your organization.

3. Improving administrative efficiency and speed to hire

Without a job portal in place, it is common to see recruiters receiving resumes via email, internal referrals, and paper, each using different formats and holding different data elements. Inconsistent structure and data slow down the recruitment process and may mean missing a perfect candidate who gets lost in all the clutter.

It is invaluable to be able to collate resumes in one place, tag and share information with hiring managers and other recruitment colleagues, and standardize the data retrieved to compare both during the recruitment process and post recruitment when looking at lessons learnt for future recruitment activities.

Incorporating AI into your portal to be able to search for and extract relevant details and, for example, compare the credentials of applicants using your portal to vacancies across your organization, is more efficient and results in a faster recruitment process. Intelligently comparing data can also avoid losing candidates who may not fit the advertised role but would be perfect for another position you may seek to fill.

Automating the collection and processing of resumes via a job portal also increases transparency and reduces the impact of personal bias on diversity and inclusion. Another benefit is that the data is stored for retrieval in the future. When another vacancy occurs, recruitment teams can proactively search the database to see if they have previous candidates who might fit the requirements.

For organizations who actively address diversity and inclusion, or who have quota systems in place, reporting against and analyzing recruitment data is invaluable in communicating progress against goals and future workforce planning.

Streamlining workflows can reduce the cost of hiring, and the improvement in processing speed reduces the risk of losing the best candidates who can be snapped up by other organizations. Recruitment teams can also quickly identify blocks in the process flow and proactively resolve to save time and improve the candidate experience.

Sharing data online enables a more efficient and transparent process for collaboration between candidates, recruitment and hiring managers. It also provides an avenue for collating and comparing critical recruitment inputs such as interview, psychometric and assessment records for better selection decisions,

A well-designed job portal is more than just another marketing tab on your website; it fundamentally changes the whole landscape of your recruitment process. It is an invaluable tool in helping you attract, identify, and retain the best talent in the market. And having the best talent in the market is the ultimate differentiator for success.

Contact us at HRBluSky today to explore how we can support your recruitment activities.

https://www.hrblusky.com/