Recruitment and Talent Acquisition Strategies in a Tight Labour Market

Atlas recently cohosted a live webinar with Bluefin Resources on effective recruitment and talent acquisition strategies for tight labour markets. The webinar focused on several important topics, such as the challenges presented by the labour market today, the importance of employer branding, diversity, and inclusion, and how Atlas and our services can help you attract talent. In this article, we’ll recap some of the key points made in the webinar about recruitment best practices.  

Current State of the Labour Market  

Today’s tight labour market presents many challenges to hiring businesses such as: 

• Time to hire has slowed – the average time to hire has increased from 30 days in 2020 to over 50 in 2023. 
• Poor response rates to job adverts – the lack of available workers in many regions means that the response rate to job adverts has dropped significantly.  
• Lack of diversity – this problem is caused by a combination of the tight market and over reliance on job adverts. 

• Salaries have increased – global inflation has resulted in salaries increasing, especially in the tech sector. SEEK estimates that salaries in the tech industry have increased by 10% to 22% in recent years. 

As a result of these challenges, businesses must use effective recruitment strategies to navigate tight labour markets.  

Strategies for Effective Recruitment  

There are many different tactics that can be implemented to make hiring processes more efficient.  

The candidate experience is the most important factor behind effective recruitment as it impacts the quality of new hirers along with how people discuss and perceive your brand. Ideally, you want to streamline the interview process and ensure that your time to hire is no more than two weeks. This will reduce the number of candidates voluntarily dropping out of the process. You can also improve the candidate experience further by using an applicant tracking system to automate feedback, and by staying connected with your new hires after they accept a new role with your organisation.  

Getting your employer brand right saves you a lot of work as the candidates you attract will already be familiar with your business. You can improve your employer brand by using social media, responding to external reviews, and implementing a referral program.  

Hiring talent overseas is beneficial for recruitment as it can lower recruitment spending, reduce headcount costs, cut the time to hire, and improve diversity. Employer Of Record providers like Atlas make it easier to hire overseas talent by removing the difficulties associated with entering new markets. Atlas enables businesses to hire the best candidates available globally, without the need to set up new local entities in every country you hire in. This makes global expansion significantly faster and more cost effective for organisations. 

Specialist recruiters can help you navigate tight labour markets through their expertise and by providing access to passive talent, allowing them to fill roles quickly.  

Innovative Talent Acquisition Techniques 

Along with the strategies discussed above, innovative techniques can help companies in tight labour markets stand out.  

Through A.I. automation software such as Source Whale, you can automatically reach out to talent that is not actively looking for a new role and build up diverse talent pools. 

Video interviewing software such as Adro can help you speed up the interview process and reduce the time to hire. It is particularly useful for first round interviews as it saves the hiring manager's time.  

For example, rather than interviewing ten candidates for about thirty minutes each, the hiring manager can put together the questions on a link and watch the interviews after they are completed. Hiring managers can usually get a good sense of who is well suited to the role within the first few minutes of each interview.  

Another huge benefit of video interviewing technologies is that you can create video job ads on them. This is a very powerful tool when used correctly as it gives the candidates a real sense of what the role will entail.  

These platforms are like a CRM for recruiting talent. They allow you to build talent pools, schedule interviews, and send out job offers. Greenhouse and Workable are good examples of ATS. 

Key Takeaways 

To conclude, businesses today must think creatively when recruiting talent in tight labour markets. Strategies such as considering the candidate experience, partnering with specialist recruiters, and hiring talent overseas can help you navigate challenging labour markets. There are also innovative technologies such as video interviewing and applicant tracking systems which can help you stand out.  

Along with these strategies and technologies, an EOR provider like Atlas can help you attract talent in tight labour markets by opening your business up to a global pool of talent and offering your employees the best-in-class benefits. 

At Atlas, we believe that every organisation should be empowered to thrive internationally. Our platform enables businesses to recruit the best talent that suits their needs, wherever in the world that talent exists. We provide organisations with the ability to compete on a global scale by offering best-in-class benefits to their employees, including health insurance, training allowances, sign-on bonuses, asynchronous working hours, and the flexibility to adopt a digital nomad lifestyle and flexible working hours.  

Atlas can also help with employee retention by allowing your employees to work from where they want to live as opposed to being restricted to where your organisation has established entities.  

To discover more about the subjects discussed in this blog, you can replay the on-demand webinar here. To learn more about how Atlas can help you recruit talent, request a demo from our team of experts today.