3 Recruitment Tactics To Attract The Best Employees In 2024

John Rampton is the founder of Palo Alto, California-based Calendar, a company helping your calendar be much more productive.

It’s a new calendar year. After the typically sporadic holiday schedule, it’s time to get dug back into the business of your business. Invariably, that includes recruiting talent to fill open positions quickly and with the right people as they arise.

Attracting employees who are the best fit for your openings is always the goal. But how you define “best” and how you get these individuals on your payroll are moving targets. A renewed focus on employee diversity, a commitment to upskilling employees in the wake of increasing tech adoption and reckoning with remote and hybrid work are trends in 2024. How you navigate them will help determine your success.

You don’t have to throw out recruitment tactics that are working for you. Still, you should resolve to shake things up in the new year. Here are three approaches you might want to try now.

1. Employ Technology

There are a growing number of ways you can use technology to ramp up your recruitment efforts. Begin with speeding up the process. Naturally, you can use one-stop, comprehensive recruitment, interviewing and hiring platforms like Indeed and Handshake that are go-tos for a lot of job seekers. But aim to automate the entire recruitment process using an applicant tracking system that allows you to tailor it according to the qualities most important to your business. Find an ATS that integrates with those popular online platforms to get both the reach and the customization.   

Don’t overlook the value of social media, either. Platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook can provide massive reach for job posts. They also allow you to engage personally with promising talent. Plus, social media offers an easy way for your current employees to share and comment on those openings.

Use tech to put recruitment on the fast track by doing everything you can do online. Basic questionnaires and skills tests can be digitized to suss out initial candidate qualifications. And, of course, videoconferencing platforms make interviews quick and easy to schedule and conduct. Whatever tech you use, make sure it’s optimized for mobile because that’s how a lot of talent flies these days.

2. Build Connections

As valuable as technology can be to the recruitment process, there’s still enormous merit in good old-fashioned networking. Remember college career fairs, trade shows, conferences and chamber of commerce events? These types of opportunities may have fallen off your radar during the pandemic, but they are back and better than ever.

In-person networking and tech-enabled recruitment aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, online networking holds great potential for reaching top talent and engaging with them. But meeting prospects in person, shaking their hands and having a conversation about your company makes you—and the prospect—more memorable.

Enthusiastic recruiters are great assets to your efforts. They reflect your company and its culture. Prospects get a sense of what it might be like to work for you, and your recruiter gets a sense of whether a prospect appears to be a good fit. Video can mask all sorts of clues you can detect more effectively in person.

Reaching a high number of potential candidates quickly using social media and online platforms has a quantifiable advantage. But nothing can match the quality of a connection made in person.

3. Ask The Right Questions

If you do take advantage of digitizing basic questions, you can skip asking those again during the interview process. That means you can use interviews to dig a little deeper into the strengths and weaknesses of candidates. But you will need to be thoughtful about what questions to ask and how to ask them.

Gauging candidates’ emotional intelligence is important these days. Solid communication skills, better performance, higher productivity, strong collegial relationships and robust commitment to career advancement are hallmarks of high EI. So ask questions that encourage candidates to reveal their greatest challenges, delve into how they dealt with them and invite them to disclose what they learned from the experience.

For example, ask a candidate if they have ever faced an ethical problem at a previous job and, if so, how they handled it. If you’re hiring for a managerial position, give the applicant a hypothetical situation involving a conflict between two of their staff members and ask how they’d resolve it. 

A prospect’s ability to be introspective, or lack thereof, can reveal a lot about them and how well-suited they are for the job. By getting the routine Q&A out of the way digitally, you can spend more time getting to know your candidates on a deeper level.

The continued low unemployment rate in a job market forever altered by a global pandemic spells nothing but “challenge” for recruitment in 2024. Overcoming it will take some new tactics as well as a return to some tried-and-true ones. Employ the right recruitment approaches, and you're more likely to employ the right people for the job.