How to Attract Perfect-Fit Candidates to Your Company

It’s important to consistently bring top talent into your company in order to ensure it continues growing. Top talent is typically off the market in about 10 days, and it takes an average of 27 business days to successfully make a new hire. Based on the numbers, drawing in highly experienced candidates can seem like a matter of luck.

The good news is that you don’t have to lose sleep over these numbers. While HR should be concerned about onboarding talented workers, attracting candidates that are a good fit for your company is arguably more important.

If a candidate is a good match for your business, they’re more likely to stick around longer. Bringing in new hires based merely on “top talent” will lead you right back to square one: recruiting someone new to fill their vacancy.

Surveys from OfficeVibe indicate that at least 60% of employers are concerned about the cost of filling vacancies in a timely manner. In order to minimize this stress and the costly inefficiencies of high turnover rates, make sure you’re hiring not only the most experienced candidates but the candidates that align culturally with your company.

1. Define and showcase your core values

In order for the right talent to find and engage with you, you need to flesh out your company’s core values and make them accessible to prospective candidates.

If you don’t have a set of defined core values already integrated into your current company culture, now’s the time to do so. This will help candidates understand what you’re looking for in terms of soft skills, helping you narrow your search without much effort.

It’s recommended that you choose between 3–10 values. That way, there aren’t too many for your employees (and future hires) to remember when learning about your company, but they holistically, yet simply, embody what you find most important in your employee’s behaviors and actions.

To help generate ideas, think of some of your most valued employees. What do they bring to the table that propels your company forward? Write your ideas down and search for commonalities. Then, boil your ideas down into simple words and phrases that can be easily communicated outwardly.

Before using values to attract candidates, make sure you properly integrate them into your current company culture. After your current employees understand and embody your values, you can begin to use them in your onboarding efforts.

There are several ways to promote your values to your candidates;

• Through social media accounts
• On your company website
• Even via job postings

Values should be short and sweet enough to be included in social media biographies, but they can be further fleshed out on your website.

Take Squarespace, for example. They have six distinct values. Three of the six are shown below as they appear on the company website.

Source: Squarespace

Squarespace presents their values simply and legibly, bolding the value itself and briefly providing further explanation underneath. Those interested in working for Squarespace are able to review their values to make sure they align with them before applying.

This will funnel prospective applicants that personally embody and appreciate your values toward your open positions. Conversely, it’ll deter those who aren’t aligned with your values from joining a work culture that isn’t right for them.

Implementing values that best represent your company and properly showcasing them outwardly will help make it clear what kind of candidates you’re looking for.

2. Prioritize the importance of company culture throughout the recruitment process

Now that you’ve determined your values, you’ve taken the first major step of emphasizing the importance of company culture to your prospective hires. It’s now time to apply your values and the critical nature of company culture to the recruitment and interview process.

One of the best ways to put your company culture on display for candidates is through the interview process. You have control over your brand’s messaging in those situations, so use that to your advantage; discover whether or not a candidate is a good fit for your culture.

To do this successfully, consider a more collaborative hiring process. Share some of the recruiting responsibilities with several different staff members. For instance, expand the number of people on your interview calls or panels. This will allow several people to get a feel for the values a candidate embodies. Having several perspectives will only help you in your efforts to find the best fit.

If you don’t have the ability to create a small panel for interviews, consider integrating different experienced staff members into different parts of the recruiting process. A marketing manager with a solid understanding of your values may be unable to sit for an in-person interview, but available during a phone interview. It’s important you give them the opportunity to be involved.

Expanding your interview team will also help the candidates get a better understanding of the many personalities of your company and how each of them comes together to meet your goals. They’ll have more opportunities to engage with questions and receive several different perspectives.

Inviting new staff members into interviews also gives you the chance to revamp interview questions to gain insight into a candidate’s values and soft skills. Once you have your core values selected, plan on asking questions related to them. This will give you a clear idea of how well their values align with those of your business. 

3. Get your employees involved in the process

Hiring doesn’t have to be left exclusively to the senior members of your staff. In fact, getting your employees involved in the hiring process can get you closer to discovering the right candidate for the position and company culture.

According to Recruiter Box, 66% of candidates think that interactions with current employees are the best ways to learn about a company. Prospective hires understand that your current employees know, comprehend, and act according to your values on a day-to-day basis. For that reason, they can offer the greatest insights about working at your company.

Relinquishing some control over the process to your employees can be difficult. However, you should embrace the candidate’s interest in hearing from them! Provide applicants with reasonable access to your employees to engage them.

Try asking your employees to share job postings on LinkedIn. That way, they’re connected to the post and can engage candidates on a more individualized level. Their share attaches a face to the posting, which helps engage prospective applicants.

Some companies, like Intel, also offer their employees a referral bonus for bringing in top talent that aligns well with the company’s goals. In their case, the referrals encourage improving diversity in the office.

This provides an incentive for your employees to reach out to skilled members of their network. It offers a similar incentive for the candidate to apply to your opening over others. This method of recruiting works best for those hard-to-fill jobs.

Leverage your resources to find the perfect fit

Oftentimes, candidates that are right for your company culture and embody your values will be happy working at your company. This eliminates the need to constantly worry about filling open positions, making life easier for everyone involved in the recruitment cycle.

In order to pick the perfect candidate from the stack of applicants on your desk, make sure to clearly define and express your core values, prioritize culture in applicant interviews, and invite your employees to help you in your search for the right match.