4 ways businesses can better attract and recruit new talent

• Office culture is important to people in their job search, says employee engagement and diversity expert Bernard Coleman.
• Businesses can attract new talent by proving they care about what matters most to future employees.
• Coleman believes recruiters can source better talent by expanding their search pool and engaging with those that's right for their company.

When it comes to recruiting well, it is an art as much as it is a science. Unfortunately, many organizations aren't unlocking the full power of recruiting, and are settling by using outdated processes.

To attract the best and brightest, you need to make sure your recruiting strategy and team are up to the challenge and are up-to-date for what the future of recruitment will look like. So if your organization really wants to succeed, your recruiting needs to level up, and fast. Here are four essential ways to supercharge your recruiting.

1. Change where you look for talent

A lot of recruiters look for talent in the exact same places: the same universities, the same companies, etc. Instead, sourcing should be like fishing: Cast a wide net and go where the fish are. Because if every recruiter is sourcing from the same places, they are effectively overfishing and creating a perception of scarcity.

The perception of talent scarcity typically comes from a combination of three elements: overtaxed pipeline, lack of knowledge, and speed over precision. All three elements are solvable.

First, expand the search to find more talent by looking in new places. If you normally recruit at schools, change it up and choose new alternatives like historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) that match your general skills and needed criteria. Second, study up on the type of talent you're seeking and find where they congregate. Simply put, go where the talent hangs out virtually and in-person to build presence and relationships.

Further, deploy more complex Boolean searches to achieve richer results on websites like LinkedIn. The greater specificity, the better. Finally, proactively build pipelines to create evergreen channels instead of reactively starting new searches.

2. Better define your employee vision proposition

Talent naturally wants to know what it's like to work at your company. They'll look at the company website, read Glassdoor and other places that convey the culture so the employee value proposition (EVP) needs to be crystal clear. Talent needs to know what the company stands for, what the company is committed to, and they want to connect to the mission beyond the boilerplate language.

People are interested in diversity and inclusion, in what office culture feels like, how people treat one another, to know they'll be engaged and set up for success. Overall they want to know the entirety of the employee experience. That's why the EVP must be clearly understood in words but also in actions. Organizations have one time to make a great impression.

3. Go beyond LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a powerful tool. But used in isolation, it is an incomplete plan, and over-reliance on any one tool is a limiting strategy. Great recruiting requires a differentiated approach. You should use different tools because all talent isn't listed on LinkedIn.

Try using Twitter lists, where you can follow certain industries like technology and sub-categories to find different ways to connect to candidates. Leverage Slack and explore the numerous communities to informally source and start up conversations with passive candidates.

Using all the tools, you can have improved outcomes and find talent that's off the beaten path.

4. Gatekeeper versus door opener

Recruiters have a great deal of influence and should lean into how they can maximize the recruiting experience. Recruiters are the first people talent meets and should act as door openers to opportunity, as opposed to gatekeepers.

Roz Francuz-Harris, director of technical recruiting at Zillow and host of the podcast Y'All Hiring, put it well when she said to be mindful of your impact on job seekers at one of their most vulnerable points in life. When you act in a way that is either elitist or not fully transparent, it creates an image of a gatekeeper. As a recruiter, you want to be talent advisors to clients, add value, and be an asset to the business.

As much as you are interviewing the applicant, they are interviewing you and gauging the acceptableness of the culture. At the end of the day, as the saying goes, you're not just recruiting employees, but are sowing the seeds of your reputation.