Recruiting strategies for modern hiring teams

Your recruiting strategy determines the caliber of candidates you reach and the order in which you reach them. The strategy also defines which tools you use along the way. The right mix of tools and tactics depends on the type of candidate you're trying to attract, whether active or passive, specialized or high-volume.

Whatever kind of hire you’re making, this guide will show you how to build a recruiting strategy to match. We'll cover how to choose tactics by job type, the role of employer brand, and how to measure what's working.

What are recruiting strategies?

A recruiting strategy is a plan to attract, evaluate, hire, and onboard candidates. 

Recruiting is different from hiring. Recruiting refers to the process of identifying candidate pipelines before selection, while hiring is the act of selecting and onboarding candidates from those pipelines. Recruiting naturally sits upstream of hiring, so good hiring must flow from effective recruiting. 

For teams, the recruitment strategy must answer four fundamental questions: 

• How are candidates sourced? In other words, sourcing channels like job boards, referrals, or hiring agencies. 
• How are candidates engaged? How teams conduct outreach and represent the employer brand during recruitment. 
• How are the best candidates hired? Selection and interview panel and structure definition. 
• How is the recruiting process measured? Defined metrics at hiring process stages. 

How to choose a recruiting strategy

Assess hiring needs and candidate profile

Before picking a strategy, teams should work backwards from the role itself to identify the non-negotiables. What skills gaps are present when looking at the existing team? How quickly does the req need to be filled? How much experience is required? How large is the candidate pool?

A vital point to clarify early is whether the talent pool is composed of active or passive candidates. Active candidates are those already looking for new roles, who can be recruited at job fairs or found on job boards, and who are likely to interact with recruiting agencies. Passive candidates, on the other hand, require more outbound engagement and targeted recruiting. 

Volume is also an important consideration. You need scalable strategies when hiring 40 customer service reps, for example. But targeted efforts work best when the goal is hiring a lone principal engineer. 

Match channels and approach to the role

Here’s where knowing the capabilities and potential of current team members pays dividends. Is there potential for someone to step up and assume the responsibilities of the role? Then internal recruiting via promotions or lateral moves becomes feasible. But if the needed skillset (or the potential to develop it) isn’t already reflected in your existing roster, then you know to look externally. 

When candidate pools are large, recruiting efforts should be disseminated broadly and use inbound recruiting as a primary engine. This model is best for services and support roles. But when candidate pools are smaller or the roles you’re going after are more senior, sourcing should be more targeted. 

Ultimately, your budget governs the channels you can use. Targeted sourcing implies spending on both recruiter time and sourcing tools. Job boards charge posting fees, and recruiting agencies typically assess a fee worth 10–15% of the first year salary. 

Two different recruitment strategies for hiring needs

High-volume roles

Hiring needs, whether for active and high-volume or passive and specialized-candidate roles, determine the strategies teams ultimately use; most businesses employ a combination of the two in concert for different roles. 

Roles with lots of inbound interest will typically draw on a few core tactics. The first of these would include distribution via job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed. It’s a foolproof way to reach applicants at scale and costs less than alternatives like recruiting agencies. But social media is another solid way to reach active applicants that already hang out on those specific platforms; think TikTok for reaching DTC brand creators. Finally, employee referral programs can provide a reliable way for current team members to open up their networks to your recruiters and get compensated for the access; both individual employees and recruiters benefit from these arrangements. 

A few additional considerations for high-volume roles

High-volume roles are likely to draw attention from candidates applying with their phones. Take the time to ensure your application portal works on mobile web browsers and doesn’t introduce too much friction into the process. 

You’ll also want to implement a form of candidate scoring for roles that draw high applicant headcount. Opening up the floodgates of a trendy job description without a system to weed out poor-fit applicants beforehand is a surefire way to waste recruiter time with unnecessary filtering and call screens that don’t go anywhere. 

Specialized roles

Recruiting for either specialized roles or roles where the top candidates are likely passive requires teams to take a different tack. 

Here, the name of the game is targeted outbound sourcing; specifically, searching candidate databases like LinkedIn Recruiter or GitHub, building a shortlist, and warming the target candidates with personalized outreach. 

Other channels include: 

• Networking or community sourcing: Look to conferences, alumni networks, or professional communities. The best way to leverage these channels is to allow your team to build the relationship and lean on employee referrals once a role opens.
• Content marketing: Technical blog posts, podcasts for engineers, and conference talks are all great ways to showcase your company’s brand and expertise for passive candidates to notice over time. 

For teams that leverage outbound but need to pair a state-of-the-art sourcing layer with their existing applicant tracking system, Juicebox can help. Recruiters, founders, or anyone else tasked with hiring can use Juicebox’s natural language search to surface candidates with everyday language that draws from more than 800M profiles pulled from everywhere, not just LinkedIn. And Juicebox Agents helps teams put outreach on autopilot. 

Employer brand and candidate experience

Employer brand is a decisive factor for recruiting outcomes. Your team could choose the channel and toolset perfectly molded to your role, but if candidates find your overall brand and candidate experience underwhelming, they’re not going to jump through hoops to join the team. Here are the relevant factors to consider for both.

Employer brand signals

What does a candidate gain from joining your company that others just can’t provide? That’s your unique Employee Value Proposition (EVP); i.e., your brand competitive advantage. It’s incumbent on recruiting teams to harness the EVP and use it to drive messaging everywhere from job posts, career page copy, and in personalized outreach. 

A few concrete ways to broadcast the correct employer brand signals: 

• Highlighting what it’s actually like to work at the company. Record interviews with the team, share engineering blogs written by a member of your technical staff to LinkedIn, or even pull in one of the Gen Zs on your team to record a “POV: Day in the life at your company” type video. This allows you to control the narrative instead of outsourcing to review aggregators like Glassdoor. 
• Make your careers page and company LinkedIn profile look lived-in. Too many companies build these types of candidate-facing assets without investing the time to maintain them; rest assured that prospects will check both before applying.
• When writing job descriptions, think like a newspaper editor; these should always answer the who, what, when, where, and why behind the role. Make titles as clear as possible. Include salary ranges; not just because it’s required by law in some places, but because candidates will always want to know anyway. Use inclusive language and avoid merely vague descriptions of responsibilities, the interview process, or anything else the type of candidate you want to attract would want to know. 

Candidate experience variables to check

Nothing makes a candidate turn the page on what otherwise seems like a great opportunity like a suboptimal experience when applying. Check each of these in particular: 

• Keep candidates in the loop at all times and let them know when to expect an update, as well as how to reach out if they have a question. An unstructured interview process can be severely detrimental. Rejected candidates should receive timely and respectful notice that they’re not being selected. 
• Automated status updates and scheduling via chatbots reduces friction and prevents busy recruiters from becoming bottlenecks. 
• More candidates apply from their phones than ever before, so a working mobile experience is non-negotiable. Keep forms simple and don’t require an attached resume to submit.

Metrics to track for your recruitment strategy

Recruiting strategies without metrics can stall hard-earned progress. Teams need reliable data to know what’s working—and what’s not—at each stage of the funnel. 

While there’s no such thing as a universal list of metrics to track, the following will provide helpful directional indicators to most recruiting teams: 

• Time to fill: Amount of time between the req opening until offer acceptance. 
• Source of hire: Defines the channels hires (and the highest volume of applications) come from. 
• Offer acceptance rate: Percentage of offers accepted. A low rate might indicate either misaligned comp or poor candidate experience. 
• Quality of hire: Retention rates at 6 and 12 months; performance ratings; manager satisfaction. 
• Conversion rates at each funnel stage: Examples include application-to-screen, screen-to-interview, and interview-to-offer rates. 

Maximize your recruiting strategy with Juicebox

Successful teams choose recruiting strategies based on their hiring needs. Factors like the level of specialization and candidate motivation inform the framework. Teams tighten up their approach with a strong employer brand, robust candidate experience, and a curated list of data points that make the argument for further investment, not just vanity metrics. 

Explore how Juicebox handles the sourcing and automation layer of the recruitment strategy stack with autonomous Agents that run searches and sequences continuously. Learn more here.