Human resources and employment professionals today have a big challenge: finding and recruiting new employees. Unemployment rates are low across the country, and they’re especially low in Lancaster County. Most people who want jobs have them, so recruiting means taking someone from their current job. This highly competitive recruitment environment is much different from a few years ago when all it took was placing an ad and the resumes just rolled in.

How to find qualified job applicants in Lancaster County PA

You’ve tried ads. You’ve tried job boards. The costly open positions still remain unfilled.

The answer is developing a recruitment strategy that identifies where your best prospects are, providing an enticing offer, and implementing an advertising plan that reaches them.

This is uncharted territory for many HR professionals. It’s a new approach but it can work for you.

Create a Profile of the Ideal Employee

Start by creating a detailed description of the ideal person you’d like to hire:

• You need to go beyond creating a job specification. Describe who they are, what they like to do, where they live, and more.
• Include details about the preferences of certain types of employees. For example, did you know that accountants like to play fantasy baseball? How about warehouse workers? They like to work on their cars. Including that type of information will help target the right prospects with the right media.

Do a Recruitment Market Analysis

A recruitment market analysis will tell you where prospects for your job live and work right now. And it will guide your efforts to find them. Let’s assume you’re recruiting accountants. Here’s what the market analysis for accountants should include:

• A recruiting area: create a circumference on a map showing the maximum distance this person might be willing to drive to work. Unless you are paying for relocation, this circumference should become your recruiting area.
• A prospect pool: using demographic data, determine the number of employed accountants in your recruiting area. Now you know the size of the prospect pool for your job.
• A competitive salary analysis: unless you cross-reference the employed accountants with salaries you could be wasting time recruiting in markets that will outprice you. Instead, look for nearby communities’ salaries that are lower, on average, than one you are offering. This will ensure your salary is attractive to prospective employees.

A good recruitment market analysis will reveal the kind of details you need to determine exactly where to recruit. It will become the foundation of your recruitment strategy.

Set Up Geo-targeted and Demographically-targeted Digital Campaigns

Now that you know where to target, you’re ready to set up the details of your digital recruitment campaigns:

• Use geo-targeted digital ads to deliver your message to the right prospects in the right places. This is especially important when you factor in the salary you are offering, and the fact that you want this salary to be attractive to your applicant pool.
• Layer demographic and lifestyle attributes on top of your geo-targeting. Some types of digital campaigns, such as email marketing, even offer targeting by current job title, which can be very effective.
• Remember the fantasy baseball that your accountants are playing? You may want to incorporate this information by targeting particular websites.
• Don’t forget social media which also has geographic and demographic targeting options. Building awareness for your job posting via Facebook and Twitter campaigns can yield surprisingly good results.
• Your advertising plan should also include job postings that reach prospects by profession. Do this by placing your job postings at job boards. You can even target through diversity-oriented job boards.

Use detailed ads to get the best response rates. Good prospects are already employed and it will take a strong and detailed message to win their interest. However, beware of over-cluttering your ad with so much detail that it becomes hard to read. Have your ad artist create a three-slide gif so that your ad copy can be spread across the three slides, thus avoiding clutter. The gif should rotate on an endless loop so that your full message is continually being displayed.

Take a good hard look at the landing page for your digital campaign. Too often, recruitment ad campaigns click through to an applicant tracking system (ATS). While these systems are great at record keeping for HR professionals, they are generally not user-friendly for job applicants. An ATS can take a long time for an applicant to fill out which can discourage application completion, especially for lower-skill positions. Instead, consider creating a landing page that collects basic applicant information in a simple form. Do the initial screening on these applicants then ask your top picks to complete the full ATS application.

Clearly today’s employment environment requires much more than the same old recruitment approach. It requires data, ingenuity, and effective digital advertising across a variety of media. Do you need a recruitment partner who can plan and coordinate this effort for you.   We’re here to help with a free assessment of your talent acquisition challenge. Our recruitment team has years of expertise exclusively with in finding qualified job applicants for your openings. We are recruitment experts who can help you build a detailed recruitment marketing analysis and an effective recruitment digital campaign.

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