Each year Fortune Magazine publishes a list of 100 best companies to work for. The list contains industries from IT to insurance and consulting with companies such as Google, ACUITY Insurance and Mayo Clinic. For an untrained eye, it might seem that these companies do not have much in common; and yet, something behind their names keeps many jobseekers wanting to be a part of them.

As Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, simply puts it, "Leaders of companies that go from good to great start by getting the right people ON the bus and letting wrong people get OFF the bus." Additionally, they do a great job of placing right people in the right seats. This ability to attract excellent talent and place new hires in the best position for their, and the business's, success.

It is completely clear that attracting the right people to your business needs serious attention and an ongoing effort. So, what can you do to attract them if your company is not on the Top 100 list? 

The Problem with Traditional Recruiting

Traditional recruiting is expensive and time-consuming, with end results often ranging wildly from excellent to mediocre - an inconsistent, inefficient way to fill open positions.

In a recent study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the cost-per-hire for organizations below 1,000 employees was $3,079, while larger organizations had a cost-per-hire of $4,285. Talk about a huge investment!

Despite the fact that most companies have easy access to past applicants and various external databases filled with potential talent, traditional recruiting and utilizing these past applicants and databases is often complex and ineffective at identifying the right candidates and placing them to the right seats. This manual process increases the cost-per-hire and time-per-hire because of the excessive manpower involved in the recruiting process, especially in larger organizations.

A recent Gallup study has shown that only 32% of employees are engaged in their current position, meaning that they have daily effort to perform detailed work and offer genuine ideas to help their organization meet customer demand and support business growth. What is even more startling is the fact that 51% of employees are not engaged in their current position.

With engagement issues and high cost-per-hire, what makes companies to still stick to the old recruiting methods? Since we know for a fact that the hiring process has evolved in the last 10 years, and more than 70% of job seekers begin their search through Google, it's clear that the recruitment industry is ready for a change. It's time to look at how your online presence - and the ability to measure engagement online - can help you to recruit excellent talent, fill your candidate pipeline for future hiring, and place more of the perfect candidates in the right positions.

The New Method of Sourcing Talent – Inbound Recruiting

It's a fact – your online presence can have an impact on your recruiting as much as it has on your marketing, sales and business development. It's time to tear down that Berlin Wall that stands between your marketing and HR departments; your human resources professionals need to work closely with your marketing experts in order to build a spotless online presence for your business - to gain both prospective buyers and prospective hires.

Inbound marketing has changed the process of customer acquisition for companies who are paying attention to their cost of customer acquisition; inbound recruiting is changing the way companies attract top talent. The biggest part of your inbound strategy is building your brand awareness. By investing your resources in activities such as blogging, staying active on your social networks, and other types of content and inbound marketing, you are building a database of followers that will not only be interested in your products or services – they may be interested in working for you, as well. By applying the same inbound strategy to your recruiting, you are able to save both time and money while employing people that are already familiar with your company and are proud to be a part of it.

While it can seem as a completely new method, inbound recruiting has been in practice for years. In a 1989 study done by Cornell University, the results showed that the U.S job market was too competitive in order for most companies to secure bona fide talent. That was long before the Internet was an option to raise talent and today the level of competitiveness in sourcing top talent is much higher.

Using inbound recruiting, companies can tap into the power of Internet and online marketing to build their brand awareness which will not only increase their sales but make them a desirable place to work.

Want to learn more about inbound recruiting? Jül can help! We apply inbound marketing methods and our data-backed closing methods in a unique way to create attraction recruiting, a unique talent aquisition method with engagement measurement. Next week, I'll be writing about attraction recruiting and how it works for all indistries - especially hard-to-fill positions.