In a day and age dominated by digital commerce and ever-evolving technological perks, entrepreneurs must wear various hats to keep their venture’s door open. Therefore, you ought to be aware and capable of embracing all the suitable perks that will ultimately ensure the maturation of your startup. 

Adopting advanced technological processes such as Professional Services Automation (PSA), pre-employment testing, and currently prioritizing digital hiring is a sure way of ensuring your startup has a competitive edge against its competitors and attains optimal success. 

Over the last few years, attracting and hiring top talent hasn’t been like taking a picnic. Competition to grab and retain high-quality talent has been skyrocketing. As a result, hiring managers are always looking for a competitive advantage to source, attract, select, and effectively employ the right and top talent for their ventures.  

Unfortunately, and especially for startups and SMEs, some organizations still utilize outdated and traditional hiring methods such as local newspapers and bulletin boards to attract high-quality talent. Consequently, they struggle to attract and retain top employees suitable for propelling them to scalable heights. Therefore, it’s paramount for such organizations to revitalize their recruitment strategies and a practical way to do this is by leveraging digital hiring techniques. 

This post gleans insight into what digital hiring entails and the best practices to crush it for your startup. 

What is digital hiring?

Digital recruitment or social recruitment is the process of capitalizing on technology as a tool to source, attract, assess, select and hire the right and top employees for open job listings. Embracing digitized processes concurrently with human components in the hiring cycle ensures organizations stay on target for their recruitment and broader business objectives. 

Alongside pre-employment testing, digital hiring streamlines the recruitment process since it enables hiring managers and human resources professionals to search employee profiles, screen, assess, interview, evaluate and hire the most qualified individuals for open job requisitions. In sum, an apt digital hiring strategy entails everything from vacancy planning to employee enrollment. In addition, it covers fields in social media, online PR, digital branding, skills testing, virtual events, and networked job boards. 

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other hiring software such as Instajob are prevalent avenues for digital recruitment, hiring managers to effectively match ideal prospects to open positions in their firms. 

The benefits of digital hiring

Digital hiring processes enhance the lengthy and unpleasant traditional recruitment processes. Conventional hiring processes have several bottlenecks, such as constantly writing and posting job advertisements, manually retrieving and reviewing resumes, contacting candidates, and scheduling interviews. 

Ultimately, such tedious tasks prevent the hiring process from being fast, efficient, and cost-effective. Not to mention the time they are taking away from impactive and revenue-driving priorities. 

As already outlined, digital recruitment is a competitive advantage since it allows recruiters to connect with prospects quickly and efficiently. Moreover, it identifies and makes job offers to qualified candidates faster compared to employers who take weeks to reach the offer stage. 

More importantly, digital hiring allows recruiting teams to hire remotely, consequently keeping prospects and teams safe and allowing businesses to venture beyond geographical boundaries for candidates. What we mean is that an automated hiring exercise eliminates the hassles of traveling distances to both recruiters and candidates. 

Other benefits include:

• Hiring managers can schedule and conduct video-based interviews online. As a result, digital hiring creates flexibility for all parties involved to participate in interviews anytime and anywhere. 
• Automated features hasten and accurately ensure repetitive manual tasks such as document collection, sending application updates, checking candidate responses, screening, and many more are done effectively. 
• Digital hiring ensures organizations attract and employ high-quality candidates. Also, it enhances candidates’ experience during the recruitment process, whereby they have access to instant feedback and engagement with your brand. 

In sum, digital hiring will go a long way in ensuring your startup conducts efficient and lucrative recruitment exercises. 

Digital hiring and how to crush it for your startup

Primarily, digital hiring processes are job-specific. Nonetheless, here are some practical and contemporary social hiring techniques to incorporate into your startup’s operations. 

1. laying the foundations

Your brand is the cornerstone of your startup’s digital recruitment. In most cases, potential candidates scrutinize a firm’s profile and reputation before applying for a position. As a result, it’s vital to ensure your startup’s branding is perfect before beginning the recruitment journey. Highlight the attributes that make your venture ideal for prospects. Create enticing content that will attract top talent. 

2. Get active on socials

In the digital and remote modernization era, you will most likely find adept individuals selling themselves online. Being active on the appropriate digital channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook highlights your startup in the orbit where prospects are spending significant time. In addition, social media is an ideal place to broadcast your brand and position yourself as a leader in your industry. 

Utilizing social media platforms for recruitment, such as posting jobs on LinkedIn, helps draw several target candidates while enabling you to connect with industry leaders. 

3. Mobile-friendly career websites

Considering most job seekers use their phones to look for jobs and check companies’ websites, it’s paramount to ensure your startup’s site is mobile-friendly. Landing pages, career websites, and digital hiring resources have to be readable, viewable to ensure candidates don’t switch to other friendly websites. Also, ensure you configure your websites so that visitors don’t have to pinch or excessively scroll to access the relevant information for the application. 

4. Digital interviewing

Digital interviews are perfect when working remotely and are an efficient, cost-effective, and advanced way of hiring. Thanks to Google Hangouts, Skype, FaceTime, and other communications channels, hiring managers can interview candidates remotely. 

5. Executing a hire

Social media might be ideal for broadcasting and engaging with prospects, but it would be best to post ads on a job board for optimizing your hiring process. Posting on niche-specific boards increases the chances of finding a talent specific to your requirements. While at it, incorporating the relevant hiring tools can help identify high-performing prospects and screen them using convenient tests. 

Candidate experience should be an utmost priority in your hiring exercise. It’s essential to maximize the candidate experience by enabling instant application on the job ads and giving feedback to prospects that have applied for your roles. 

6. Embrace feedback

It’s almost impractical to nail your startup’s digital hiring process the first time. Instead, it will take time, improvements, learning from mistakes, trial and error to ultimately figure out what works for your business. As a result, it would be best to embrace feedback from candidates to enhance your social hiring techniques.