The EU and especially Germany is currently facing a labor shortage that brings significant challenges to businesses across various sectors. According to a recent study, 2 million jobs are currently open in Germany alone. Whether it’s in IT, Engineering, manual trades, or social work, companies have a hard time filling their open vacancies.
How to attract top talent to your company
So what can you do to attract more talents to your company? In this blog post, we will explore effective strategies especially for start ups and small and medium sized companies to tackle the labor shortage.
The key strategies are:
- The first step: Building a great company culture
- Spread the word and build an employer brand
- Write interesting job advertisements
- Become active and start sourcing candidates
- Embrace diversity and hire without bias
Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
1. The first step: Building a great company culture
Before you think about how to attract top talents, you first need to make sure that people actually want to work for your company. If you have a bad company culture, you might be able to lure talents by offering high salaries in the beginning. But you will also see a high number of turnover and many of your new hires leaving again shortly.
To assess your current culture, make sure to talk to your employees honestly or consider an anonymized survey. Ask your employees what they enjoy most about working with you, but also what could be improved. Make sure to listen to their ideas and think about implementing them.
A healthy company culture is characterized by trust, honesty, and a focus on a common goal that everyone is trying to reach. Make sure to always stress these points with your employees.
Also don’t forget that the leaders in your company are the ones setting the culture. Make sure to invest in leadership development trainings, and consider doing 360° performance reviews, where employees also rate the performance of their managers.
2. Spread the word and build an employer brand
With a great company culture in place, you are ready to attract more talent. Make sure to get the message out and talk publicly about why your employees like working for you. Include this information on your website’s careers page. If you can, feature quotes of your employees as testimonials.
We also recommend your HR or Marketing team to start creating content about you as an employer on social media. Your company’s Linkedin page is perfect for that. As an inspiration, you can for example make a series about interviewing your current team members and what they are doing in your company.
If you have some more budget, we recommend to partner with a video agency and create a 2 minute company video. Talk about why you are doing what you are doing and show employees working in your company’s premises. This is an investment, but it will definitely pay off because you can later feature it in your job advertisements and active sourcing activities (see below).
3. Write interesting job advertisements
When it’s time to actually recruit for an opening in your team, don’t make the classic mistake and just publish an internal job description document to your jobboard. Instead, focus on creating an interesting job advertisement.
What’s the difference? A job description is an internal document that you use to outline the main responsibilities and requirements for a certain position. It is rather formal, boring to read, and mostly for internal allignment and documentation. A job advertisement on the other hand is a piece of marketing content that also outlines what a job will be about, but further communicates why someone should be interested in the job and join your company. For example, a job advertisement should include information about the benefits you are offering and be written in an activating and motivation tone. If you have shot a company video, you can also include it here.
If you want to get a head start over your competition by writing great job advertisements, you can download our free Job Ad Template.
4. Become active and start sourcing candidates
In today’s job market, waiting for applicants to apply to your open jobs is a thing of the past. Most good candidates already have a job and don’t want to apply to new roles. Instead, top candidates want to be approached on LinkedIn about new employment opportunites that are a good next step for their career. This process is called active sourcing.
If you don’t do so already, we recommend you to start with active sourcing as well. Yes, it is time consuming to search for people with the right skills on Linkedin. But it’s the best way to find top talent in today’s market.
And if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, you can always outsource it. As a recruitment agency, we at Careerbee are happy to help you with approaching the right candidates for your open roles.
5. Embrace diversity and hire without bias
Once you have implemented the above measures, you will surely be talking to a lot of candidates soon. So now it’s time to think about how to select them and decide whom to hire.
Unfortunately, we as humans tend to have cognitive biases when making decisions. For example, we tend to prefer people that are similar to us compared to candidates with other attributes. This can be particularly damaging in hiring decisions, because we might end up hiring someone we like instead of the best candidate who has a different background or comes from another culture.
The best tip to counter biases in the recruitment process is to pre-define your selection criteria even before you start the interviewing process. Clearly define what you are looking for, and with which interview questions you want to assess that information. Read this article to learn more about how to conduct job interviews.
Bonus Tip: How to retain your talents
Hurray! You were now able to hire great candidates. But how can you make them stay with your company for a long time?
First off, having a good start and onboarding to the new role is paramount. The first days will decide a lot how your new employee will feel about your company. Make sure to create a structured onboarding guide, enable all technical access, and integrate your new hire in the team.
Long term, ensure employee satisfaction by having competitive compensation that increases over time with taking more responsibility. Also, offer training and development opportunites as this enables employees to feel valued and be able to develop their skillset within the company.
Regular feedback talks will also help you keeping in close touch with your talent. Listen to what they have to say and implement their feedback if applicable.
Summary: How to attract top talent to your company
In today’s job market, it’s really important to invest into your recruitment efforts if you want to attract top talents.
As a start, make sure you have a great company culture and start building your employer brand. Write interesting job advertisements instead of publishing boring job descriptions. And start with actively reaching out to candidates, either yourself of with a trusted recruitment agency. Lastly, focus on hiring the best candidates without bias, and make sure to retain your talents.
Do you still have some open questions about hiring top talents in your company? We are happy to offer you a free consultation.
