It’s already known that job-seekers have a hard time finding a job at times, but employers also have a hard time finding and hiring employees as well. Many applicants begin a job application, but don’t finish; they’ll finish their application and receive an invitation for an interview, but never get back to the hiring manager, or they’ll even finish their application and their interview, and get hired, but soon leave to find another job. This can make the entire process for hiring managers extremely stressful.

Fortunately, there are a few solutions to this problem. However, before you can try these solutions, it will be helpful to have a hiring team and a career page on your website. A career page allows the most serious job-seekers to apply for one of your open positions right from your website, and you get to avoid the influx of applications that come through on job search sites. If you have a small business, a full hiring team may not be necessary, but a career site is, and here are the four solutions to your hiring problem.

#1: Build and Nurture a Talent Pipeline

A talent pipeline is a pool of qualified individuals ready to fill a vacant position that may come about. Building a talent pipeline is known as taking a proactive approach to hiring, as opposed to a reactive approach and only screening applications, interviewing, and hiring when necessary. Creating and maintaining a pipeline is an ongoing process, and you can start building your pipeline with one or more of these methods:

Create an employee referral program and give rewards when referrals result in a new hire
Host networking events to establish stronger connections with passive candidates
Social platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram

Nurturing your talent pipeline is just as important as creating one, as the majority of individuals in your pipeline may be passive candidates. This doesn’t require a lot on your part, as bombarding them can discourage them. All you need to do is send them relevant, engaging content. Networking events can also help nurture your pipeline.

#2: Candidate Experience

If your application, interviewing, and hiring processes are too long and drawn out, the majority of candidates won’t complete this entire process. This is another reason why a talent pipeline is such a good idea— it cuts down the entire hiring process because you already know that they’re qualified. Another way to create a consistent candidate experience is to create a standardized interview process that all the members of your hiring team can follow and implement so that each candidate will have a similar experience. You can also invest in employee recruitment software to help speed up this process even more.

#3: Get Feedback from Candidates and Your Hiring Team

If you’re not directly involved in the hiring process, then make it a priority to get consistent feedback from those who are, i.e., your hiring team. Together, you can create a better hiring experience for your candidates by going over what works and what doesn’t. This will help you strengthen the consistency of your candidates’ experience.

It’s also important to get feedback from the actual candidates who have gone through the hiring process, especially the ones from your talent pipeline. Ask your candidates what they think of the length and quality of the application, interviewing, and hiring process. This feedback can also help you provide a better and more consistent candidate experience.

#4: Retargeting is Another Great Strategy

The candidates in your talent pipeline are pretty secure, but what about other job-seekers who begin to apply and don’t finish, or those who visit your career page and don’t apply? These candidates need to be retargeted the next time they visit your website, and using retargeting in your recruitment strategy can help re-engage them and turn them into applicants. This method works because sometimes would-be applicants get distracted— they’re applying on their smartphone and a call, text, or some other notification comes through, and their attention is directed elsewhere. Of course, not every would-be applicant has the intention of completing the job application, but retargeting strategies are still proven to be effective in engaging would-be applicants.

Making these four changes to your recruitment process can help solve any hiring issues you may have experienced in the past. Recruitment is essentially marketing towards job-seekers, just as you would market toward consumers. In the same way, you engage potential customers at every step of the buyer’s cycle, you have to engage job-seekers at every step of their journey as well.