The adoption of virtual recruiting strategies skyrocketed amid the height of the pandemic, as talent acquisition leaders scrambled to continue recruiting in safe and effective ways. As the imminent danger of the global health crisis gradually recedes, TA teams around the world are looking ahead and making decisions about what recruiting will look like going forward. In our recent survey with Talent Board, a majority (84%) of TA professionals said their teams plan to use hybrid recruiting in 2022.
In this article, we’ll explore the key benefits that have made hybrid recruiting so popular, common models of hybrid recruiting, and a few predictions about the future of hybrid recruiting.
Benefits of Hybrid Recruiting
We’re really not surprised by our survey findings. Combining virtual and in-person recruiting practices into a hybrid recruiting strategy offers employers the best of both worlds, and the flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. There are lots of different reasons that hybrid recruiting has become so popular and so needed.
Let’s take a look at how hybrid recruiting events help employers:
- Expand reach. Hybrid recruiting events allow talent acquisition teams to tap into new talent pools and engage with passive talent.
- Reach more diverse candidates. With hybrid recruiting, you can strategically improve diversity in your talent pipeline, target niche talent pools, and better support accessibility and inclusion.
- Bust geographic barriers. Leveraging the advantages of virtual recruiting helps expand geo-diversity capabilities by reaching talent outside your local region.
- Deliver a better candidate experience. Adding virtual recruiting events can help you level up your candidate experience, and virtual tools can also help you measure the experience you deliver so you can improve all aspects of your recruiting process.
- Reduce candidate ghosting. Hybrid recruiting enables more engagement and conversations at scale earlier in the recruiting process, which helps you combat ghosting, the #1 challenge of TA teams today according to our survey.
- Ease burdens on TA teams. Hybrid recruiting saves time and travel costs, and helps you scale the impact of virtual programs nationally across your team. Streamlining processes and reducing tedious manual work can help protect your recruiting team from burnout.
- Create more cost-effective in-person events. Adopting a hybrid recruiting strategy enables you to streamline the lift and cost of in-person elements, so you can decide on the best times and ways to connect with candidates in-person. (More on this below.)
Hybrid Recruiting Event Models
In addition to the myriad benefits, there are also lots of ways to do hybrid recruiting. Every organization can choose what works best for their challenges and goals, and it’s easy to shift between different models. Here’s a look at some of the most common hybrid event recruiting models.
Funnel Hybrid Model
One common approach to hybrid recruiting is to host virtual career fairs for large pre-screening events and even initial interviews, and reserve in-person events for smaller group site tours and second-round interviews. This is essentially using virtual recruiting for the top of your funnel and in-person strategies for the lower part, and works very well for high-volume employers who need to staff onsite positions.
Multi-Day Hybrid Model
Rather than divide the recruiting funnel, you can opt to apply virtual and in-person strategies throughout the funnel. You could host virtual career fairs at one time and in-person fairs at another (on different days or AM/PM). This approach gives candidates maximum flexibility and choice about when and how they engage with your team.
Screening Hybrid Model
Similar to the funnel model in that it uses virtual at the top of the funnel, this approach calls for leveraging virtual tools for registration and interview scheduling, but all actual recruiting events are in-person. This can be used for group facility tours, meet-and-greet events with pre-screened candidates, or final interviews.
Lifecycle Hybrid Model
For high volume recruiting needs with remote or hybrid positions to fill, this model maximizes the benefits of virtual and in-person recruiting tactics. In this model, you can use virtual recruiting events and tools in an ongoing cadence, alongside the strategic use of in-person recruiting events across the candidate life cycle.
Other
Perhaps the best thing about hybrid recruiting is its flexibility. You can customize your hybrid recruiting events to fit your organization’s needs and goals, even as they evolve over time.
The Future of Hybrid Recruiting
Hybrid recruiting will become even more widespread in the years to come. As CandEs award-winning TA leader Brian White, executive director of human resources and operations at Auburn-Washburn Unified School District 437, said, “The integration of virtual recruiting into the talent acquisition process is here to stay!” The fact that 84% of teams plan to use both virtual and in-person recruiting events underscores this fact.
Over time, employers will come up with more clever, effective ways to leverage the advantages of virtual recruiting alongside in-person strategies. We’re hearing creative approaches (and their success stories) from our clients every day. Because we understand the value of hybrid recruiting in the ever-changing and ever-challenging world we live in, we’re continuing to develop new capabilities and improve our tools to allow hybrid recruiting to become even more robust and allow organizations to maximize the benefits of hybrid recruiting even further.
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