Essential Best Hiring Practices To Attract and Retain Top Talent

by Allie Blackham | Apr 5, 2024 | Applicant Tracking, Blog, HR and Recruiting Industry Information, Recruiting Best Practices

Attracting, hiring and retaining top talent is not a game of chance — it’s all about strategy. In fact, there are right ways, wrong ways and optimal ways to go about hiring that can increase your chances of attracting the right people for your open roles.

When completed with care, you can:

• Get your job listings in front of the most qualified candidates.
• Attract passive candidates.
• Engage job seekers.
• Improve the candidate experience.
• Retain top talent.

In this blog, we’re discussing some of the most important and lucrative hiring best practices that can help set you up for recruiting success in 2024 and beyond.

The Benefits of Getting Your Hiring Process Right

At the end of January 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported approximately 8.9 million job vacancies nationwide. This figure is down from an all-time high of 12.2 million in March 2022, but there’s still some work to be done to fill these millions of open roles.

And, while hiring best practices can change significantly from one industry to another, we believe there are a few core principles and strategies that provide value to recruitment and retention across the board.

Before diving into those best practices, let’s first understand some of the benefits that a focused and well-balanced recruitment process can provide for your organization.

Higher Quality Talent Acquisition

A well-executed hiring process can increase your chances of attracting the most qualified candidate for your open role — someone who possesses the skills, experience and cultural fit necessary to excel at your company.

Well-executed, of course, means a genuine, optimized and fair hiring process. Unfortunately, this is something that employers need to be reminded about. A recent study revealed that a surprising 36% of hiring managers admit to lying to potential candidates. Even more surprising, a whopping 80% of hiring managers believe that lying is “very acceptable” during the recruitment process.

So, what is the cherry on top of all this fibbing? About 35 percent of prospects that were lied to and then hired ended up leaving the company within one month, and 31 percent within three months.

Finding and retaining good talent needs to start off on the right foot: the honest one.

Improved Performance and Productivity

Hiring the right people can enhance team dynamics and productivity, which can lead to improved performance and better business outcomes. McKinsey calls this employee archetype the “thriving stars.” And, based on research, they say that employees belonging to this archetype “bring disproportionate value to the company” and “have a hugely positive impact on performance and productivity by, among other things, creating psychological safety and trust in a team setting.”

Cost Savings

Hiring the right candidates from the outset can help reduce recruitment costs associated with turnover, training and onboarding. No study is required to discern that hiring is an expensive mechanism of the modern workplace.

Job advertising and interviewing aside, high turnover sometimes means higher severance pay for fired employees, while onboarding new ones may mean more signing bonuses and relocation assistance.

Beyond the cost of the recruiting process itself, there are plenty of other expenses that can strain your budget quickly.

Enhanced Company Culture

Hiring individuals who embody your company’s core values and contribute positively to the workplace culture can strengthen your organizational ethos and foster a sense of belonging among employees.

The result? Oftentimes, hiring individuals who are a good cultural fit results in higher employee engagement, reduced turnover and better performance all around. By consistently hiring and retaining top talent, organizations position themselves for long-term success, growth and sustainability in today’s increasingly competitive business landscape.

The Negative Impacts of Hiring the Wrong People

We’ve discussed a few benefits of hiring an ideal new employee, but what about some of the less obvious, negative impacts associated with poor hiring practices?

Have a look:

• Wasted resources: Unoptimized processes take longer, are more prone to error and may unnecessarily extend your time-to-hire, which costs money.
• Missed opportunities for innovation, growth and achieving strategic objectives: With a drawn-out recruiting process, you risk losing the interest of qualified candidates.
• Reputational damage: Poor practices are pretty evident — especially to prospective hires who have no stakes in your organization. An unideal process may warrant criticism, which can harm your brand image.

5 Hiring Best Practices

Hiring isn’t easy—but it also doesn’t have to be rocket science. Employ these five recruiting best practices to get the ball rolling in your organization’s favor (while also appeasing prospective employees).

1. Define Clear (and Honest) Job Descriptions

Harkening back to the research done on employer honesty, you absolutely should not lie to a potential candidate at any point throughout your recruitment strategy. Not in the job description, during the interview process or onboarding.

For curiosity’s sake, here are the top five things that employers lie to candidates about — so you can do the opposite:

• The role’s responsibilities (40 percent)
• Growth opportunities at the company (39 percent)
• Career development opportunities (38 percent)
• Company culture (31 percent)
• Benefits (28 percent)

Be honest about the responsibilities and expectations of each role in your job postings, and your new hires may just stick around for longer.

2. Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

The average time to fill (TTF) across companies is 47.5 days, according to recent research. Using an ATS can help reduce TTF to get new employees hired and onboarded more quickly to help save company resources. Beyond this, however, 32 percent of companies are looking to consolidate their talent acquisition tech providers, and instead want partners that can help with multiple areas of the funnel, including:

• Sourcing (30 percent)
• Onboarding (25 percent)
• CRM (24 percent)
• Assessments (19 percent)

One ATS platform that can do it all is exactly what recruiters are looking for. More than that, 21 percent want AI-driven solutions.

3. Don’t Forget To Assess Cultural Fit

Workplace culture is at a bit of a strange juncture these days. With an increase in remote/hybrid working arrangements, employees say that feeling less connected to their organization’s culture is a major challenge.

For organizations, some believe that hybrid work has negatively impacted their workplace culture. So, what’s the solution?

Both of these revelations communicate that culture is still important, even if employees are going into the office less and less as time passes. So, when hiring new employees, it may be more important than ever to assess cultural fit and how a candidate could positively contribute to your hybrid atmosphere. Here are some questions to ask during the interview process to glean good cultural information:

• Can you describe your ideal work environment?
• Tell me about a time when you successfully collaborated with a team.
• How do you handle ambiguity or change in the workplace?
• Describe a situation where you had to resolve a conflict with a colleague.
• What do you value most in a workplace?

4. Invest in Your Employer Branding

According to Universum’s 2023 Employer Branding NOW study, employer branding is a top priority for organizations right now and a critical HR investment.

What’s influencing this investment? Well, 86 percent of surveyed employees revealed they are likely to research a company’s reviews and ratings when deciding on where to apply. Moreover, half of all candidates say they wouldn’t work for a company with a bad reputation. Here are a few ways to  improve branding to optimize the hiring process:

• Create consistent brand messaging
• Provide growth opportunities
• Emphasize employee well-being
• Welcome, monitor and respond to employee feedback

5. Promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

DEI in the workplace is a bit of a difficult topic these days. There’s a strong political divide between those who support DEI efforts and those who believe having strict race requirements for certain roles, grants or opportunities is iffy.

What we do know for certain, however, is that everyone—no matter their background—deserves an equitable chance at success in their work.

As we progress further into 2024, the way organizations approach DEI may change, so it’s important to stay abreast of hiring trends to determine the most beneficial path forward for everyone—job seekers, employees and organizations included.

Here are a few ways to help promote that success:

• Foster inclusive leadership: Train managers and leaders to promote inclusivity in their teams, to actively listen to diverse perspectives, advocate for underrepresented employees and create an inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued.
• Review and address pay equity: Regularly review your organization’s compensation practices to identify and address any disparities based on gender, race or other characteristics.
• Create employee resource groups (ESGs): Establish employee resource groups or affinity groups where staff from diverse backgrounds can connect, share experiences and advocate for positive change.

Optimize Your Hiring Process With a Purpose-Built ATS

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With solutions for recruiting and hiring, candidate management and onboarding, ApplicantStack is an end-to-end recruiting solution that streamlines, automates and optimizes the traditional, time-consuming tasks of hiring to help you find better candidates, faster.

Cast a wider net, communicate promptly and onboard quickly in today’s ever-evolving job market. Want to see it in action for your organization? Try it for free today, no strings attached.