Struggling to Recruit?
In 24 years of recruitment there are plenty of errors we see recruiters making here are our top six issues that we think adversely affect recruitment campaigns.
1. Failing to research current salary and benefits you are not going to recruit the best people if you offer an uncompetitive salary poor benefits or career prospects. Either adjust your expectations or amend the benefits to match the market.
2. Poor editorial content, advocate your company its work, ethics and approach to safety these are all important to a potential applicant.
3. Bad advert placement. We understand it's tempting to put your recruitment campaign with big multimillion pound jobs boards with lots of visitor traffic but with only .03% of the UK workforce being skilled in arboriculture or forestry how much of that traffic will be suitable trained workers for our industry? Targeted marketing may cost a little more but if it brings in applications from qualified applicants surely it's worth it.
4. Communication barriers arboricultural staff are specialist and hard to find so don't create barriers to prevent them applying. At arbjobs we built the system to allow applicants to contact employers by simply entering their name and email no registration or long applications forms required. Yet employers insist on sending potential applicants to huge forms. Our advice would be to capture an applicant’s interest communicate with them and then if all goes well encourage them to fill out a form for formal purposes.
5. Failing to market the vacancy is failing to sell the job to applicants. We may have 10-15,000 visitors a month to the site but companies need to budget to push your specific advert out to the wider industry. In any marketing campaign there is a recognised sales funnel using marketing to push awareness out to a wide audience. With our adverts we allow clients to set a social media budget to help us do this the larger the budget the more potential people we can reach. Because we are an industry specific jobs board most of our social media followers are industry specific job seekers. The funnel diminishes at each process from awareness to interest from interest to reading the advert to hopefully application. If you want more applicants pay to make more people aware but that can still fail if you are failing in sections 1,2,3,4.
6. Unrealistic time scales sadly arborists do not grow on trees and funnily they are not all sitting around in a wooded glade waiting for you to offer them a job. The highly skilled and experienced ones will almost certainly be working and hopefully coveted by their current employer so don't put a job on with a deadline in seven days’ time and expect great results. To find the perfect match for your business may take some time we set our minimal advertising period to a month in recognition of this.
Well we hope this helps highlight some of the errors to avoid and on a positive note if you'd like guidance on creating a great campaign please have a look at our free recruitment guide.