It’s that time of the 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 three important components to consider when creating your 2018 recruitment strategies.

Whether this is to improve your candidate journey or management, or to reduce your recruitment costs and time-to-hire; this essential list can help you achieve your 2018 recruitment advertising goals.

Introduce an ATS

HR departments becoming overstretched is precisely why it makes sense for many to invest in the right recruitment software. If you haven’t done so already, investing in an Applicant Tracking System 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 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 2018 campaigns.

Build on employer branding

Developing an employer brand strategy is often thought to be a drain on resources and expensive – the last thing you need in your busy work schedule.

However, investing in creating this brand – no matter what size your business – will help you tap into new candidate markets, retain staff, boost response rates and even reduce your hiring spend. Get it right and you will not only attract the best talent, but you’ll also experience wider benefits.

A strong employer brand should highlight an organisations values, people strategy and HR policies. How to get started? Collaborate with other departments to get their insight, employ “out of box” thinking to attract candidates and set realistic objectives to measure engagement. Why not conduct internal surveys to see what your staff actually think and don’t forget to develop a strong EVP – after all, your employees are your brand ambassadors.

Create quality job adverts

When you create your recruitment campaigns, it’s important to invest time 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, while ensuring that it contains the relevant salary, location and contact information.

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

Also note that more and more jobseekers are using mobile devices to search for jobs online. The last few years have 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.

Webrecruit Ireland would like to wish you the best with your 2018 recruitment. Should you ever require additional support or guidance on improving this year’s recruitment, we would always welcome an opportunity to speak to you to find out and discuss what methods would work best for you.