How to choose focus points for a more profitable talent acquisition strategy in 2023

The year 2023 in the SaaS industry starts in a situation where profitability and efficiency matter more than ever. Most of the decisions are made to increase profitability – and talent acquisition is not an exception.

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Even if you are growing the headcount of your company more moderately or not at all, there is a need to make your talent strategy and actions more efficient and smart.

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Also, in every company there will always be employee turnover – normally 10–15 %, which creates the need for replacement recruitments. And as every business owner knows, recruitment is always about minimizing risks. This is exactly what you can do when aiming to decrease burn and make your processes more profitable.

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🔥 So here we go! We love to use the pirate framework in talent acquisition for:

• choosing smart metrics,
• identifying bottlenecks and
• coming up with smart actions that make your talent acquisition processes more efficient.

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Here’s how you can detect bottlenecks and choose relevant focus points to make your talent acquisition more profitable

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1️⃣ Employer brand awareness

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Did you know that a strong employer brand can reduce the cost per hire by 50 %, whereas a negative reputation can cost a company up to 10 % more per hire?

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Some companies have a bottleneck here: the strategically important talent audience doesn’t know your company or has a wrong perception about it.

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Social media is by far the most efficient way to achieve a strengthened employer brand.

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Detect a bottleneck by asking yourself these questions:

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• Do you get relevant applications? Some do, some don’t – if you don’t, it might be because your strategically critical talents don’t know your company.
• Do you get your outreach messages answered? People might not answer if they don’t know the company & don’t have any reason to. This is a concrete way how not having an employer brand makes your talent acquisition process inefficient and costly.
• Are the people who are interested in joining your company ready to join now or “later”? If later, it’s because they only just found out about your company and are not planning to change jobs right now.
• Are your current employees leaving & joining companies with stronger brands?

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If it seems that employer brand awareness is your bottleneck, you should focus on this step and create a smart strategy to make it better. Investing in the brand and differentiation will also increase your employee retention.

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Know your target talent audience and choose the best strategy to get your EB messages in front of the talent audience. Social media is by far the most efficient way to achieve this.

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2️⃣ Acquisition – are you able to convert your audience into candidates?

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This step of the pirate funnel means converting your talent audience into candidates. Simply make sure to generate a sufficient number of inbound leads, applications for open roles, or do better outreach. Outreach is something you can start doing differently right away to make your talent acquisition more efficient.

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Outreach is something you can start doing differently right away to make your talent acquisition more efficient.

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Here’s how we do it: ditch ineffective ways of mass-contacting people and go for personalized video outreach messages. Our outreach message acceptance rate is 79 %.

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3️⃣ Activation

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This step pushes your candidates to become your employees. For many companies the real bottleneck is that the talents that are offered a job, don’t accept the offer. If the job offer acceptance rate is low, it increases your cost per hire a lot, unnecessarily.

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However, there are a number of things you can do to improve your job offer acceptance rate relatively easily.

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If the job offer acceptance rate is low, it increases your cost per hire unnecessarily.

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For example, create personalized growth plans for each talent you are offering a job. A relatively small thing can make the whole process critically more efficient and profitable.

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4️⃣ Retention

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Now you have new colleagues on your team. It’s important to find ways to make the employment of the best talent last as long as possible. Even a small enhancement in churn will decrease your talent acquisition costs significantly.

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Even a small enhancement in churn will decrease your talent acquisition costs significantly.

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So, how will you make the hired employees stay longer? Minimize the risk of leaving with a strong employer brand and focus on making your employee experience better.

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For example, create a regularly recurring process for following up the things on the growth plan. Each employee should have their own personalized growth plan: how can they reach their own growth goals and how are those aligned with the strategy of your company?

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5️⃣ Referral

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Now you have HAPPY employees. How will you incentivize them to share the career opportunities in your company with peers?

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This is a great opportunity to decrease your talent acquisition costs, and increase your candidate pool & quality significantly. Many times the best candidates are those who have come through a referral from a current employee.

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There are many ways to approach this – one of them is to tie the talent referral goals to the salary & bonus model in a strategic way.

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Another way is to leverage social media. It might not be the smartest thing to “force anyone to start creating employee generated content on social media”. That usually doesn't work. Of course, there can be great ways to do this. It’s usually required that your employees already have a tendency to be active on social media, and you have managed to create a culture of vibrant social media activity.

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Here’s what you can do if you don’t have that culture naturally: offer your employees a forum to grow their own expert brands while sharing their journey in your company. Make it actually valuable for them – something that increases their own brand value. It could be an expert blog, podcast, Instagram LIVE, event series… And make sure to create something weekly, monthly, quarterly or bi-yearly recurring.

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6️⃣ Revenue – all the time increasing profitability and efficiency

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Now you should be in a situation where you can reach, hire and retain strategically important talent. However, don't stop here! Keep measuring and following the data & increasing your company's competitiveness as an employer.

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Keep detecting the bottlenecks and reassess your talent acquisition strategy and focus points often enough. We recommend choosing the maximum of 3 focus points from the overall AAARRR funnel at a time.

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