For large organizations, finding the right talent can take a great deal of time and resources away from other tasks. It is not enough to just post an open position on a job board and hope for the best, as this could result in thousands of applications that the HR team would have to sort through manually. Businesses know the importance of selecting the right candidate for the job, but is it really necessary to take hundreds of hours of sorting applications and dozens of interviews to do this? The answer is no. With AI-driven technology, Loxo’s Talent Intelligence Platform has made this process fast, effective, and smart.
Rather than worrying about how to spot a good candidate at interview time, a company can start with the right talent sourcing strategy so that when it is time to interview a candidate, the hiring team does not have to waste time interviewing the wrong people. Therefore, the right plan and tools will save time and money when selecting the right person for the job.
Additionally, the importance of employee retention is vital to understand, for it prevents the loss of resources that could occur when a company has to hire new employees continuously. When employees stay with a business, not only will they become an asset to the company, but this will mean less time hiring and more time doing what the business does best.
For many businesses, there are job openings that require a particular set of skills, education, or experience. The issue is that the importance of hiring the right employee for this opening becomes watered down because recruiting hard-to-find talent seems an impossible task. Different tools can make this easier, but you often need to use several different ones to truly make a difference in the hiring process. Loxo, however, is an all-in-one hiring tool for businesses that uses AI to rank active and passive candidates and will learn from past searches so that hiring becomes streamlined.
One question businesses of all sizes want an answer to is this: why is attracting and retaining talent important? There are several answers to this question. First of all, attracting talent, meaning the process of getting candidates with the right skills and qualifications to want to apply to the open position, is vital because it affects both quality and retention. An employee that is interested in the company and values it will do better work and will be far more likely to stay on for the long run.
Secondly, companies need to be attracting top talent for positions because it will reduce costs. If a business finds they are hiring hard-to-retain employees, this can be mainly due to a problem in the process of attracting and retaining talent, meaning the business is not doing enough to attract people who will be a good fit for the company culture as well as the job itself. Finding the best people for the job and company will result in fewer costs because of the lower turnover rate.
The following question companies may ask is: since this is so vital, what are some creative ways to attract and retain employees? The number one thing to do is highlight and describe the company culture and the specific job requirements in the job posting. In addition, attracting the right people requires cultivating a relationship between the company and the prospective employee.
The most innovative ways to attract talent, however, involve a more up-to-date approach. By using AI-powered technological tools that streamline time-consuming tasks, such as sourcing, screening resumes, and creating target candidate lists, companies can attract and retain the right talent easily. The Talent Intelligence Platform from Loxo frees up a business’s time to focus on high-value activities, including candidate engagement and relationship building with the best candidates in the talent pool.
A company’s talent attraction and retention strategy should only be built after answering these questions: 1) what is talent attraction, and 2) why is attracting and retaining talent important? Having answered these questions briefly above, it is time to elaborate on the latter. The importance of talent attraction lies in the following areas:
Without talent attraction, a company’s brand image can be either unknown or damaged. The same is true for the company’s reputation. How is this? Well, let’s assume a business does not do anything towards talent attraction, and they simply post a job to a job board and await the applications of thousands of people. The opening is for one position, so that company will have to turn down thousands of people. In the rejection process, thousands of people can feel resentful towards the company, and a few might even intentionally leave negative reviews because they were turned down. Avoiding these possibilities is the task of talent attraction, which can reduce the number of applicants so that there are fewer rejections and a far higher probability of finding the perfect candidate.
On the employee side, talent attraction is about getting the right people for the job so that their work quality will be the best and they will stay with the company. This latter point is where employee retention comes in. By starting with the right employee attraction strategies, a business does not have to know how to fix retention issues because there will be no issues. Hiring the right people from the start by using the right attraction strategy is one of the key drivers of employee retention.
Another critical factor in the hiring process is talent acquisition. What is talent attraction vs. talent acquisition? Simply put, talent acquisition is about building connections and relationships with people over the long term, even when no job is available. We will take a closer look at this subject in the next section.
Before building a plan for attracting candidates, examining some talent attraction strategy examples is a good idea. Not only will examples demonstrate how a similar organization may have built a successful strategy, but they can also bring awareness to a valuable tool for the task. For instance, companies that want to maximize their resources can use a tool like Loxo to automate their talent attraction and retention strategy, resulting in efficiency gains of up to 500% or more.
While talent attraction is closely tied to talent acquisition, these are different tasks. As mentioned above, talent acquisition is about the long-term process of finding people with specific skills, even when there is no current opening for them, who may be invited into the company at a later date. The challenges in talent acquisition are simply that the people a business builds a connection with may want a job sooner than the business can give it to them, and some may not be available for a position when the company needs to fill it. This is the primary downside to working too far ahead in the hiring process, but the advantages of talent acquisition often outweigh this one potential downside.
With a traditional talent attraction strategy, when it comes to the latter stages of the hiring process, recruitment and selection, there can be difficulties. The challenges in recruitment and selection include ensuring the candidate will fit in with the company culture, that they actually do possess the skills they claim, and that they will perform the job well. These challenges of the selection process are not unavoidable. Knowing how to overcome recruitment challenges like these involves starting on the right foot–namely, not being one of those companies with employee retention problems. How is this done? It is accomplished by using the right tools for the job and attracting the right people from the start.
Recruitment challenges and solutions may vary for every company, but what remains the same is that those traditional talent attraction and acquisition strategies are neither efficient nor effective. Even companies that use technology to aid in the process still use and maintain separate ATS, CRM, Outbound Recruitment, Data, and Sourcing tools. Individual tools for every process require extra time and effort to use, but Loxo gives businesses an all-in-one AI platform to simplify workflows, cut costs, and radically improve talent acquisition.
Having covered the importance of attracting talent to your company, you may wonder how to attract talent. Attracting and retaining talent, meaning the process of finding the right people for each job from the start, can be done in a few different ways.
Traditionally, knowing how to attract employees was about advertising, offering benefits, and writing compelling descriptions for job postings. This method raised the question of how to attract employees with benefits and whether this was a helpful strategy. The answer to the last question is generally no, as offering benefits may attract applicants, but there may be better choices for businesses that are interested in attracting and retaining _talented_ employees.
One attracting top talent challenge is how to find the perfect candidates when there are so many people. Some creative ways to attract and retain employees include maintaining a specific company culture on social media so that people can find your business, demonstrating your company’s values, and offering opportunities for advancement.
Alternatively, one of the most innovative ways to attract talent also happens to be one of the most efficient and effective ways–AI automation. Loxo is an AI-powered Talent Intelligence Platform that allows businesses to source talent faster by automatically recommending and ranking candidates from the industry-leading database of 1.2 billion professional and social profiles. This makes attracting talent easy, as a company can quickly reach out to the best-matched candidates without worrying that applicants will not be suited for the company.
Recruiting hard-to-find talent that stays with your company can appear challenging and time-consuming, but businesses that use Loxo for their talent attraction and acquisition needs will find that selecting the perfect candidates has never been faster or more successful.