It’s that time of year again, to start a-fresh, reflect on the previous year and map out your New Year recruitment goals.

Here at Webrecruit Ireland, we have pulled together 10 essential components to consider when creating your 2016 recruitment campaign strategies.

Whether this is to improve your candidate journey or management, or to reduce your 2015 recruitment costs and time-to-hire; this essential list can help you achieve your new recruitment advertising campaign goals.

(For more information on how you can make the most out of your recruitment in 2016, download our 2016 Guide to Online Recruitment Advertising.)

1. Introduce an ATS

If you haven’t already, investing in an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and bringing your recruitment in-house, will save you both time and money.

When starting to think about your strategy for the New Year, it’s important to evaluate last year’s successful and unsuccessful recruitment strategies.

An ATS can help you to report on your previous campaigns by showing your time-to-hire, cost-per-hire and candidates placed by source, giving you a clear indication on where you need to focus your time and money in your 2016 campaigns.

To learn more about bringing your recruitment in house and cutting your recruitment spend and reliance on costly recruitment agencies, read our In-house Direct Sourcing Guide.

2. Create quality job adverts

When you create your recruitment campaigns, it’s important to invest time in producing high quality job adverts to ensure you engage a good response for each.

Having a concise but informative job description will grab more attention than a full page essay, so keep your campaign brief, whilst ensuring that it contains all the relevant salary, location and contract information.

3. Build on employer branding

75% of talent acquisition leaders say their employer brand significantly impacts their ability to hire great talent, according to the LinkedIn 2015 UK Recruitment Trends Report,

As such, more and more employers are recognising the need to promote their brand across their recruitment campaigns.

In a recent Glassdoor survey it has shown, 94% are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages their employer brand (October 2014). This explains why jobseekers are more likely to view and apply to job adverts that feature the employer’s logo or by applying on the company’s own career website.

If you are interested in promoting your employer brand across your recruitment campaigns, why not look into our Fusion recruitment software.

4. Use relevant job boards to attract the right response

Spend some time evaluating your current list of advertising sources, such as job boards, and see how effectively they are reaching your intended candidates.

To reach desired candidates, posting on the relevant job boards will increase your chance of gaining good responses.

More and more jobseekers are using their mobile to search for jobs online. The last year has also shown an increase in the use of social networks as a way of searching for the most recent job advertisements. To attract the attention of these jobseekers, ensure your chosen job boards have mobile friendly candidate journeys to maximise your application rates.

5. Explore social networks

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are a fast way of communicating to your candidates, so make sure to include your recruitment campaigns on these most popular networks.

A LinkedIn 2015 Global Recruiting Trends survey found that 61% of talent leaders use social professional networks to grow their brand.

The popular social network LinkedIn is a great platform to increase your employer brand and post your recruitment campaigns. Be creative by sharing relevant and engaging content from your employer profile and communicate with followers.

Other social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, can also be used to promote your brand awareness, and are great for sharing interests with other subjects, this gives a more humanised level to your employer brand.

We are the only UK and Ireland based Official LinkedIn EMEA Talent Solutions Partner, giving us access to 15 million passive candidates.

6. Integrate a career optimised website into your employer brand

As discussed, jobseekers are more likely to apply directly through a career optimised website. With recent technology, this has been made accessible to SMEs, to help build their employer brand and to compete for top talent against larger businesses.

According to a Glassdoor survey, 89% believe a mobile device is an important tool for job searching (April 2014).

Now that more and more jobseekers are using their mobiles to search and apply for jobs, it is paramount to ensure your recruitment campaigns are optimised for mobile or tablet use.

To stay ahead of the trends, why not look into creating a mobile optimised careers site, one of the most essential recruitment tools every recruiter needs for 2016.

With our Fusion technology you can create and host your own careers site, and access other features, such as CV uploading options, applicant filtering competency based questions, candidate management features such as, automatic email responses and much more.

Request more information on how Fusion can transform your employer brand and, ultimately, your candidate journey.

7. Manage your time

If you have found one of your main pitfalls in 2015 was spending too much time filtering through applications, with no real time to spend attracting and communicating with your candidates; one of your goals may be to reduce your time-to-hire with as little cost as possible.

Introducing an ATS in-house, will store all your recruitment campaigns, applications and generate reports, saving you time sorting through spread sheets and CVs.

Download our helpful guide to learn more about how an ATS can benefit your recruitment needs.

8. Read up on recruitment and jobseeker trends

It can be helpful to read up on recruitment blogs, helpful guides and reports throughout the year, to ensure you keep up-to-date with any new emerging trends.

You may even learn more and broaden your recruitment know-how, or simply use this to re-fresh your memory for the year. If you would like to make a start on reading up on helpful tips and guides, why not visit our recruitment blog.

9. Download our new case studies

To help you gain perspective on your New Year goals, we have released our new Webrecruit Ireland client case study guides, for you to learn how other clients have used our recruitment services to attract, manage and recruit the best quality talent for their business.

Visit our Testimonials page to find out what our clients said about their experiences with us and how they achieved their recruitment goals.

10. Webrecruit Ireland’s Recruitment Solutions

With our Talent services you can find expert levels of recruitment advertising through to candidate management and management of the complete candidate journey.

If you are interested in finding out more about our Talent Finder and Talent Recruit services, give us a call or email us at info@webrecruit.co.