How can you run a successful recruitment campaign to attract and recruit the ideal candidate?

According to HR Voice, successful recruitment can save a company between €45,000 and €100,000.

Recruitment is essential if you are to develop your business with the best possible resources. To be sure of success, recruiters often use a recruitment campaign to maximise their chances of finding the right candidate and making a success of their recruitment. In this way, you can integrate new employees into the various positions to be filled within your company.

Follow our methods to become a recruitment whiz and find the rare gem!

See all software Recruiting

Step 1: Identify the position to be filled

As a good HR manager, you need to be clear about what you want so that your candidate has as clear a vision as you do.

The first step in your recruitment strategy is to accurately describe the characteristics of the position to be filled, so that you can choose the right target and define a recruitment policy. Based on this description, you'll be able to draw up a job description quickly and efficiently.

Don't panic if you don't know where to start, we've spared you the trouble 😉

Just get straight to the point with this information:

• List your future colleague's main tasks (feel free to write down anything that comes to mind!),
• List their daily tasks: answering emails, telephones, organising meetings, etc,
• Specify his/her responsibilities : managing a team, responsible for professional development, career management, performance indicators, etc,
• Positioning: this is vital so that your candidate knows why he or she is here and feels comfortable,
• Links with other departments (who does he/she report to, apart from the big boss?),
• Working conditions,
• The possible difficulties of the job (a candidate who knows what to expect will be more effective).

Now imagine THE ideal candidate for you!

And here again, we've got a little present for you: a table you can fill in in 5 minutes flat.

• Knowledge: academic background and qualifications
• Know-how: mastery through experience
• People skills: personal qualities

List complementary skills, skills that are not essential, but that have charm, such as mastery of a foreign language. Don't forget to mention geographical mobility, availability, whether you have a driving licence and any other information you consider useful or essential for the job.

Step 2: attract the perfect candidate

Your job advert must be attractive and really make people want to apply. Working conditions are an important criterion, especially when recruiting for short-staffed jobs, but there are also other factors that employers very often overlook:

Personality

You employ candidates for their skills, of course, but are you really interested in them? Their passions, their travels, their moral values, their fears... It's important, because these questions build their confidence and help them to open up to you. For the recruiter, it's a way of revealing your potential soft skills, in other words, the qualities and skills you use on a daily basis.

Be curious and ask them questions that will let them reveal themselves.

Ambassadors

Oh dear, what would life at work be without Barbara's coffee-break gossip? In fact, they help you recruit! Your employees are your company's ambassadors when it comes to recruitment, the best way to stand out from your competitors and attract the attention of genius candidates. If your employees feel good, do you seriously think they won't pass the message on to others?

Step 3: advertise the vacancy

You've got the profile of your ideal candidate and you know what they do in your company - great, but they don't know you (yet!).

Disseminating your advert will enable you to reach your potential candidates. Recruitment communication is essential for this stage.

According to Jobvite, 55% of recruiters are influenced by social networks and digital recruitment. Since the health crisis, these figures have risen, and we're seeing more and more e-recruitment. So it's impossible to ignore this channel.

Make sure that your recruitment offer is adapted to your distribution channel, such as :

• APEC and Cadremploi for jobs aimed at executives,
• Studentjob, Jobteaser, Wizbii, Linkedin and other social networks for recruiting young candidates (79% of candidates under 35 use social networks in their job search),
• StepStone for sales staff, engineers and technicians,
• and Pôle emploi, Indeed, Meteojob and Monster, which are more general recruitment sites.

👉 Applicant tracking software such as Softy allows you to save time in posting your ads while boosting your visibility over the long term. Directly via the tool, you can multi-post your adverts on over 70 job boards (Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn, Pôle Emploi, Apec, etc.) as well as managing your entire recruitment process via customisable functions: tailor-made career site creation, unlimited recruitment tests, intelligent CV management, live and deferred interviews, and much more!

Ḗtape no. 4: organising an effective interview

That's it, you've finally received some applications! Now it's time for the fun part - the interviews.

Here are a few steps to follow:

1. Get out your job description and your picture of the perfect candidate,
2. Compare its content with your applicants,
3. Select at least 3 candidates who meet the maximum of your criteria and whose profile interests you,
4. Define an order of preference and don't hesitate to discuss it with your work colleagues to validate your final choice.

Suit up, little suit, your candidates are all fresh and beautiful for the interviews. For 30 minutes, you'll be admired, respected and complimented, but don't fall under their spell straight away!

When you conduct the job interview, ask the right questions! We've put together a quick selection that works every time:

• "Introduce yourself": pay attention to the way they speak and hold themselves, while at the same time paying attention to your candidate... mission séduction, remember?
• "What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• "Why have you chosen our company?": assess their motivation.
• "What is your ideal job?
• "What are your interests?
• "Do you have any other questions?

Feel free to be original, but take care not to make your candidate feel uncomfortable.

💡 If after the one-to-one interview you're still sceptical, you can proceed with recruitment tests. This part often scares candidates, but it's very useful for him and your company.

By passing the test, your candidate will feel confident and legitimate about joining your company. Above all, it tells you about their skills and seriousness. To all those who used to boast about their punctuality, now's the time to prove it!

Step 5: Use software to improve efficiency

You're in a real hurry and you're looking for a way to carry out your collaborative recruitment campaign as quickly as possible. We've still got solutions for you: adopt recruitment software that will do all the work for you.

👉 softgarden is a cloud-based applicant tracking software, recognised as a Core Leader in the "2022 Fosway Group 9-Grid" for talent acquisition and recruitment. With a wide range of features, softgarden simplifies your recruitment processes with automated tasks and the publication of your job offers on partner sites. With the app and Smart Calendar, you can set appointments quickly and meet your candidates without going through lengthy email exchanges.

👉 Beetween is an intuitive digital platform that lets you manage all your recruitment processes seamlessly, from sourcing to onboarding your new recruit. Multi-post your vacancies on more than 150 partner sites in just one click and automatically populate your CV library with the applications received. The selection of your dream candidates is made easier by an intelligent matching function and the sending of tests to automatically pre-qualify the most promising. Its communication functions help you keep in touch with the candidate throughout their experience with you, to engage them more easily.

👉 Nicoka ATS is a dynamic, easy-to-use software package aimed at both companies and recruitment agencies. It lets you centralise and organise your recruitment processes, but that's not all! Thanks to its user-friendly interface, you can digitise and structure your day-to-day tasks. Mail thousands of candidates, browse their CVs, import contacts directly from social networks like LinkedIn and integrate an application form directly into your website.

👉 RecrutOr is a comprehensive recruitment and application management software package designed for VSEs and SMEs. Ergonomic and easy to use, it lets you multi-post your job adverts free of charge on a multitude of job boards. The publisher also develops a personalised careers site for you, optimised for natural referencing. All the applications received are then centralised in a collaborative CV database. This enables you to manage your applications efficiently, filtering them according to the criteria of your choice to find the ideal profile in just a few clicks.

👉 Taleez ATS is a collaborative tool for managing and monitoring recruitment from A to Z. Simple to use, Taleez takes care of every stage of recruitment, from posting the vacancy on multiple channels, including over 90 job sites and 13,000 higher education courses, to validating new recruits. Follow your applications step by step and assess your talents as a team in a single tool.

👉 Tool4staffing, the software that uses Artificial Intelligence matching for your candidate database. It targets jobs in short supply by providing a range of modern features. The solution offers an interface where recruiters, managers and candidates work together. The immersive candidate portal (chatbot, collaborative meetings, etc.) is ideal for integrating candidates into a transparent recruitment process and enhancing your employer brand.

Recruitment testing software can also save you a considerable amount of time in your recruitment process:

👉 With People In, there's no longer any need to search for the rare pearl amongyour applications, the solution allows you tocarry out a pre-selection thanks to personalised skills tests. Attract andassess candidates with practical cases, quizzes or even videos, and never miss out on a competent candidate again!

See all software Recruiting

5 examples of inspiring recruitment campaigns to help you stand out from the crowd

Example 1: Google

Google knows how to talk to developers... and their playful side! The company had the idea of targeting users who typed "python lambda function list comprehension" into its search bar, because only a well-informed audience can understand what it's all about. An invitation appeared on their screen to play a game that was in fact a recruitment test. Those who succeeded were put directly in touch with HR.

Example 2: Ikea

Using its specific features to recruit? Ikea has done it! The company added a special leaflet to its customers' boxes explaining how to apply to join its workforce. The operation, which took place in Australia, attracted more than 4,000 applications at low cost from customers who were already fans of the brand. All to the good!

Example 3: Bonduelle

During the pandemic, many people lost their jobs and job insecurity increased in almost every country. In Canada, the brand came up with an idea that was as original as it was philanthropic: on the tins of food distributed to food banks were written job offers with the contact details of the HR department. It's a great way of tackling the real recruitment problems while doing a good deed (and doing your employer brand some good!).

Example 4: Burger King

A festival or a recruitment event: why choose? Burger King organised the Whop! Music & job festival to create a unique hybrid event. Donuts, concerts, photo booths and a relaxed atmosphere to get to know the recruiters and soak up the quirky corporate culture... and land a job. The fast food restaurant managed to recruit 300 people following this event, no less!

Example 5: Michel et Augustin

Recruiting directly in the field? Many companies would shy away from this approach, but Michel et Augustin took the plunge and had its HR department shout out job offers in the metro. It was an original and useful recruitment campaign, in keeping with the company's values, which did not leave public transport users indifferent.

So if recruiting can be complicated for certain profiles, don't hesitate to be creative and find an original way of making yourself known to your target candidates and attracting their attention!

What tips do you have for successful recruitment? Tell us in the comments!