Recruiters: have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet? If not, it’s time.

After all, the new year is a time for embracing change and striving to improve for the coming year — including professionally. Whether you’re the head of HR or a recruiter in the trenches, it’s vital to stay on top of new recruiting methods as the industry evolves and trends emerge, like a greater focus on the human side of recruiting. New methods help you stay competitive, which ultimately means that you’ll be able to hire better workers.

That’s why we’ve compiled these cutting-edge new recruiting methods that you should incorporate in 2020.

1. Beef up your branding.

Nowadays, a strong employer brand is essential. That’s because of a core truth: candidates are assessing you as much as you’re assessing them. If your application process is dry or your company doesn’t demonstrate a strong sense of personality and culture, prospects will lose interest.

So jump on this trend by employing some branding-focused new recruiting methods. Dedicate some time to creating a great careers page. Create branded, exciting job adverts. Embrace cutting-edge techniques like pay-to-click and sponsored posts on social media or Google, which have become a significant tool in the past six months.

At the end of the day, all your efforts should feed into a larger brand story that represents who you are.

2. Incorporate more direct sourcing to save money.

Hand in hand with employer branding is an increase in direct sourcing: in-house recruitment teams have ballooned recently. Expensive agencies are becoming less relevant — they’ll always serve a specialised need, but with the advent of the internet, direct sourcing is more affordable than ever.

That’s why it’s vital to have a clear brand. Ads on social media or career sites can deliver tremendous bang for the buck. You’ll also reach a broader range of candidates, including those not actively looking for jobs who could be a great fit.

Get more details on direct sourcing with our guide to in-house recruiting methods.

3. Focus on the person, not just the skillset.

We’re also seeing a rising emphasis on candidate qualities, beyond role-specific hard skills. Every recruiter should aspire to find out more about the person they’re interviewing, including true conversations.

Some new recruiting methods that help with this are skills tests, personality tests and pre-screening questions. Establish a comprehensive skills test and distribute it to likely candidates to get a sense of their background skills — and then focus the rest of the recruitment process on getting to know the candidates.

This will help you get a clearer sense of who’s a well-rounded or truly good fit prospect, including the soft skills they have to offer like leadership qualities.

4. Invest in your candidates.

Naturally, focusing less on the skillset may sometimes require you to invest a bit more in your candidates. This is a powerful approach to recruiting that’s on the rise, especially with rising skills shortages. And it’s absolutely worth it.

Often, soft skills and the ability to mesh with your team are more important than hard skills, which can be trained on-the-job. So be more holistic in your approach: widen your parameters to look for transferrable skills and ensure that the skills test is only one factor in recruiting.

This essentially boils down to one of the most straightforward new recruiting methods: look past what’s on paper.

5. Leverage tech from automation to video.

Tech — and by extension the data insights that tech provides — is the other main factor that’s overhauling modern recruitment processes. Technology like an applicant tracking system streamlines the process and enables better direct sourcing. It also saves time for recruiters and prospects alike.

You can even incorporate brand-new recruiting methods like AI to enhance candidate screening and reduce bias, or automation to make hiring more candidate-friendly, such as reducing the need to travel for interviews.

So, what will these new recruiting methods change?

These recruiting methods have two core benefits: they make the recruiting process easier and faster, and they ensure that humans are the hero in hiring. Those benefits combine to make you stand out as an employer and keep you on the forefront of trends.

Want to see the impact of these new recruiting methods for yourself? Check out this case study to see how Domu Brands revolutionised its hiring process and saved money with the latest recruiting techniques.