Recruitment Methods: 12 Types Which You Should Know

Quickly filling a vacancy and finding an ideal candidate from the first CV is the dream of any recruiter. To achieve such a perfect match, you need to understand all the types of recruitment methods. In this post, we will detail top ways to recruit employees and reveal the secret of the most effective recruitment!

What is a recruitment method and why is it important?

The recruitment method is a way of finding specialists meeting the goals and needs of the company at the moment. Recruiting methods are a kind of tool in the recruiting process and at the same time one of its stages. An HR specialist builds a hiring plan, chooses a recruitment method, and only then proceeds to consider candidates.

According to some research, each open vacancy will cost a company around $500 a day. It is the successfully applied recruiting methods that can reduce this sum and find the most relevant candidate for an open vacancy.

Best ways to recruit employees

There are dozens of ways to recruit employees since every HR or recruiter tries to do their best looking for an ideal candidate and comes up with the most diverse and unexpected search methods. In our opinion, now among the most popular and universal methods, the following types of recruitment methods can be distinguished:

Direct advertising

This method includes the basic set of actions to advertise the vacancy. For instance, publishing the vacancy on the company’s web page, social media profiles, and placing vacancies in the internal recruiting platform. Read how to use Twitter for recruitment.

This method is a good the employer’s brand and can attract job seekers interested exactly in your company.

Internal recruitment

Sometimes HR specialists get too carried away with the selection of candidates from external resources, while in fact, the required people are already working in the company. That is why the internal selection is one of the best ways to recruit employees. It is carried out in several ways: posting an announcement of a new vacancy within the team, promoting worthy employees, and transferring an employee to another department.

Talent pool management

It is very important to always save potential candidates who have not been selected in previous rounds to a separate talent database.

Enough time passes from the previous vacancy for which they were not hired to the new one. During this time, your candidates could already gain experience and improve the skills that they lacked last time. In addition, these people are already more loyal to your company than job seekers who hear about you for the first time.

Now you can publish vacancies on the auto-generated pages directly from an ATS and share it with candidates via unique links.

Social media advertising

This way to recruit employees is also known as social recruiting focused on targeting suitable job seekers on social media.

Among the types of recruitment methods, social networks suddenly became one of the most popular. Social networks have long been a source of useful information and promotion, even for a recruiter. For example, LinkedIn is aimed primarily at professional communication between its members. There is often an exchange of professional experience, including the search for suitable employees in your company. Other social networks that were not created for such purposes (such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) also provide a lot of opportunities to find a job and find employees - target advertising, professional communities, groups with posts about finding a job, etc.

Referral system

The referral system is a hybrid of internal and external selection, yet it makes it possible to search for candidates among friends and acquaintances of your colleagues, and this is a priori a plus in the loyalty to the company. You can offer the team to bring in good applicants for an appropriate compensation bonus.

Boomerang employment

The term "boomerang employee" was given to employees who have already left the company, but now want to return. Perhaps the most famous boomerang employee is Steve Jobs. He returned to Apple after 12 years of working elsewhere. Of course, not every boomerang will be the next Steve Jobs for your business, but they have their advantages. 

Hiring a boomerang employee is much less risky than looking for a newcomer since you are aware of their productivity and competence. Former employees typically need much less time to return to work with full productivity. Therefore, companies can save up to 50% of recruitment costs for each employee by hiring former employees.

Passive recruitment

Passive recruiting is a type of recruitment strategies in which people themselves find you, and are interested in your company. In fact, these are ready-made customers, they do not need to be persuaded, it is important to convey information to them correctly. If you properly design your website and social networks, indicate all areas of work and write about your corporate culture, then people who are interested in this will find you themselves.

Freelance

If your company has small projects or tasks that do not require permanent employment and full-time employment, freelancers will suit you. Unlike full-time employees, freelancers perform only specific tasks, receiving a one-time payment. Search of freelancers also requires certain methods of recruitment. You can find such employees on exchanges, such as Upwork and Fiverr.

Recruiting agencies

Recruiting agencies is a quite popular among types of recruitment methods. However, searching through recruiting agencies is the most expensive way for both candidates and employers. Recruitment agencies operate efficiently, but they charge a fee for their services, often a hefty one.

Employment centers

The state is interested in increasing the level of employment of citizens, therefore it creates services with its own databases. They work with big companies. For example, you can let them know about an open position so that they send suitable personnel to you. But here there are some drawbacks: 

• Not all people address in the state structures. There is a risk of not finding a good specialist.
• Sometimes persons address in the employment centers only to receive unemployment benefits, thus they are irrelevant candidates for your company.

Internship programs

​​Many people without experience are embarrassed to apply for full-fledged jobs that require experience. In some cases, it will be more efficient for a company to hire a capable and talented university graduate, even without experience.

After a traineeship or internship, you’ll have an employee perfectly prepared for work. Of course, here we are talking more about the lowest positions in the company but requiring, nevertheless, professional training.

Networking events

Networking events are a great opportunity to attract people who are already looking for work and are interested in your niche. This isn't the top among the recruitment methods but it can still bring talented people to your organization.

• Job fairs are not only the ways to recruit employees but a good opportunity to make a presentation of the company and collect contacts of candidates interested in the job.
• Doors open days are an acquaintance of candidates with the company “from the inside”, an opportunity to assess working conditions and communicate with managers. The main disadvantage of this method is the lack of guarantees of attracting interesting candidates and the very laborious process of organizing an event.

What is the most optimal recruitment strategy?

All the above-mentioned types of recruitment strategies are popular but not the most effective ones. You can search for vacancies and post them manually. In this case, you need to spend much more time posting the text of the vacancy on all selected sites, reviewing candidates, and transfering information about them to the system. This is a working option if you have a very limited budget, you do not save your time, or you have only a few employees.

There are innovative types of hiring that bring the highest efficiency and go far beyond manual recruitment. Here we talk about professional recruitment platform, such as Axterior.

Main advantages of Axterior recruitment platform:

• An internal talent pool, where all the specialists you have viewed are included with full information about them 
• The ability to parse information from candidates' CVs directly into the system
• Ability to request jobs from departments so you can automatically track employee needs
• Automatic sending of follow-ups with custom reminders
• Reduced costs due to the easier and quicker selection process

The main advantage of such a system, of course, is time-saving - a recruiter can make the same mass selection many times faster, without making mistakes when recruiting, and without losing sight of important stages when communicating with a candidate.

Conclusion

As you have seen, there are dozens of ways to recruit employees. All recruiters will probably agree on one opinion: there is no universal types of hiring that would suit absolutely every company from scratch. Any method needs to be tested in practice in the realities of your company, its capabilities, and budget.

Despite this, if you want to keep up with the times and invest in modernizing your recruiting processes, we recommend that you consider a recruitment platform. You can still apply all your recruitment methods but keep all their results in one place. Be innovative!