Nidhi Kala

Picture this: You are sitting in the conference room with the leadership team. The team asks you about the roadmap for the company’s hybrid campus recruitment strategy. It’s been weeks since you have been talking to your recruiter friends from other organizations to pull off the strategy but haven’t been able to do it. And now, you have no answer and no strategy!

You stay quiet. And confused.

This picture can be quite startling, especially when everybody’s eyes are on you.

To make sure you don’t land in this situation, we have made a list of 5 effective hybrid campus recruiting strategies you can use.

Let’s get started.

What is hybrid campus recruitment?

Hybrid campus recruitment is a strategy companies use to source, engage and hire candidates for internships and entry-level jobs. Earlier, this form of recruitment was done on campus, hence called campus recruitment. But, with the fusion of in-person and virtual recruitment strategies, it is termed hybrid campus recruitment.

With campus recruiting, you need 4 key players:

1. Employers
2. Campus recruiters
3. University career development centers
4. College students

But, with hybrid campus hiring, you need extra key players— virtual phone system or campus recruitment software that connects candidates and recruiters, improves candidate engagement, and conducts virtual interviews.

Types of hybrid campus hiring:

The three types of hybrid campus recruiting methods or approaches include:

Blended approach

It uses both online and offline methods of hiring. Like, conducting interviews via video calls at the beginning of the selection process and face-to-face meetings with the top candidates during the last interview phase.

Composite approach

With a composite approach, companies host virtual job fairs and in-person recruiting events. By doing so, they run a parallel collaboration to expand the scope of their recruitment drive.

Synchronous approach

Chances are not every student can participate in the on-campus recruitment event. That’s where the students who are not present on campus can benefit and participate in the virtual fair.

With a synchronous approach, students can choose between on-campus and virtual events. This helps companies reach out to more students and widen their recruitment drive.

How Do You Build an Effective Hybrid Campus recruitment Strategy?

It’s hard for companies to transition from an offline recruiting strategy and build an empire of hybrid recruitment. So, we have curated 5 effective hybrid campus recruitment strategies to help you create the roadmap.

Strategy #1—Communicate the new campus recruitment strategy with campus coordinators

Communicate and coordinate with the campus coordinator on the dates and the transition in the hiring process.

Plan the execution of events and activities, whether they will take place in person or online. The majority of pre-placement conversations, employer branding, and coordination with colleges and institutions are now conducted in person, while screenings, assessments, and the early rounds of interviews are conducted online.

Best practices to adopt when shifting to hybrid campus recruiting:

• Use a good online assessment tool to avoid plagiarism during the shortlisting phase.
• Interview the leadership team and get them to talk about how their organization empowers young talent.

Strategy #2—Create a streamlined recruiting process for students

In an offline campus recruiting setup, you’d reach out to campus coordinators, help them understand the company and job role, share resources (JD/ ECP), and decide on the entire process—placement, assessment, interview, and final selection—all done on the same day.

But, with hybrid campus hiring, you are focusing on both online and on-campus hiring. So, your recruiting strategy looks something like this:

Once the candidate is selected virtually, the onboarding process can have physical training sessions where employees educate the students about the company’s values and how each department operates.

Best practices to make the hybrid campus recruiting seamless

• Make your written communication via emails stronger
• Use virtual meeting tools like Zoom and G-Meet to communicate with college coordinators and students
• Create online forms and questionnaires for job applications using tools like Google Forms, Jotform or Typeform
• Send the JD to college recruiters in PDF format

Strategy #3—Opt for hybrid campus recruitment software

Automation is the joining dots of a hybrid campus recruitment strategy. Why? Because they make your process smooth and keep the candidates engaged with you in a virtual setup.

For example,

If you are hiring software developers virtually, you’ll need technical assessment software to understand the student’s language and programming expertise.

HackerEarth Assessment helps you generate the assessment instantly and select the top candidate based on the leaderboard score. Once you select the candidate, invite them for a video interview using FaceCode.

To keep your hybrid recruiting engine running, make sure your company uses these tools:

• Assessments: Use assessment software to create a questionnaire and send it out to the candidates as part of the screening process.
• Email software: With automated emails, you can keep the conversation who have applied for the emails consistent. Create email sequences for each phase from screening to interview.
• Video conferencing platform: Use video conferencing platforms like Zoom or G-meet to communicate with candidates virtually.

Also Read: Importance of Online Proctoring in University Hiring

Strategy #4—Cross-promote your hybrid campus recruiting event

Do you think informing students about the hybrid campus recruiting event happening at their university is the finishing line when promoting the hiring spree?

It’s not. Once the students get to know about the placements happening at the university, they are likely to go through the process and find out more about the company.

That’s where you need to be strategic.

GenZ is constantly scrolling through social media—mostly, Instagram and YouTube. And these days, students are active on platforms like Linked too.

So, along with the billboards and posters on campus, share about the hiring event online:

• Share a post on LinkedIn, Whatsapp, and Discord communities where college students are active
• Ask your employees who are active on social media to share about the hiring event on their socials channels
• Create a video with your leadership team talking about the perks of working with you and share it across social media

Strategy #5—Showcase your employer’s brand

The big question: why should students work with you? And to nail down the response, you need to build credibility. Gen Z today is smarter than you think. They don’t work *only* for the paycheck anymore.

Students now work with companies that:

• Align with their values
• Encourage mental health and work-life balance
• Focus on their employees’ development

And to make sure you check all these boxes, you need to build your employer brand and show the students “why” they should work with you. Here’s how you can do it:

• Get the leadership team to engage with students through seminars and workshops. These can either be physical events or can be conducted virtually.

For example, you can organize a LinkedIn event where the leadership team sits down and discusses the importance of diversity and how their company empowers it.

• Interview the employees from your organization. Ask them about their experience working with the company and share it on social channels. This helps the students understand the employees’ POV and take the decision.
• Showcase the social proof of your credibility via employees talking about you on review websites like Glassdoor.

Take a look at HackerEarth’s profile on Glassdoor, 82% of people say they will recommend the company to their friends, and 87% of people say they approve of the company’s CEO—a commendable social proof for candidates to work with the company and amplifies employer branding.

Also Read: Create an Employer Brand That Sticks

Ready to pull off your hybrid campus recruiting strategy?

True. Transitioning from offline hiring to hybrid campus hiring can be tedious. The recruitment drive that used to take a day gets divided into phases that keep on going for several days. But once you understand how the offline and hybrid interview stages differ, create the strategy and gather resources to use. With the 5 hybrid campus hiring strategies we have shared above, you can get started and see the results for yourself.

Goodbyes are dreadful. Especially, when they come one after the other—from your employees who joined just 6 months back.

“They are just running after a competitive salary.”

“They are just underperformers who don’t have the skills to work with us.”

“They weren’t ready to work 12+ hours.”

Excuses are lame when your employee churn rate is high. Many times, employees don’t leave for a higher paycheck or because they prioritize a healthy work-life balance. They leave because of unorganized company culture, failed growth, and hampered emotional health.

If you picture yourself in this scenario, it’s time to look back at your processes and create strategies that help you retain your existing employees.

In this article, we talk about:

• 10 employee retention strategies
• 4 employee-first businesses to take inspiration from

Employee retention strategies for job satisfaction

Ready to learn the strategies that wow your employees and help you build an ecosystem for employees where work would be fun? Keep reading.

Strategy #1—Create an interactive onboarding process

The next step after the new hire accepts the offer letter—creating a seamless onboarding process.

With an engaging onboarding process in place, employees feel included by the company.

In a general onboarding scenario, companies introduce new hires to the reporting manager, assign them tasks, and share the resources. But the right way to onboard employees requires more education and effort.

For example,

At HackerEarth, new hires are introduced to each department and the work they handle through weekly onboarding video sessions.

To make the onboarding process interactive at your company:

• Set up a meeting where you can introduce the new hire to all the different departments of the meeting.
• Give new hires access to all the relevant resources they need to accomplish their tasks. For example, get them to set up their company email ID and invite them to the company’s Slack channel where all the major communication happens.
• Provide interactive training and immerse the new hires into your work environment. To do this, assign training to team leaders of each department where they talk about how their department functions.
• Encourage the buddy system. With a buddy on the side, the new hire has someone they can rely on and reach out to every time they have concerns.

Strategy #2—Recognize your employees’ hard work

How do you support your employees when they deliver the work—appreciate them or highlight their weaknesses?

Here’s the thing: you don’t always need big paychecks to appreciate your employees.

Image Source

For example, Dribble orders short cameos from celebrities to give a shoutout to employees for great work.

A few ways to show appreciation to your employees include:

• Check in with your employees regularly. Talk to them about non-work related things. A simple “how was your weekend” and listening to what they say is a great way to start.
• Celebrate their success with the entire team and highlight the things that you like about them and their work.
• Say thank you to make the employees feel happy and confident and to encourage them.
• Give them non-cash gifts. For example, sponsor a course they have wanted to take for a long time, take them to a fancy dinner, or gift them an exotic trip.

Strategy #3—Give your employees flexibility with their schedule

Along with the different work options, employees want flexibility in their schedules. They don’t want to continuously glare at their computer screen even in a remote job.

Ask yourself:

• Do they want to work remotely?
• Do they want to work from the office?
• Do they want to work from 9-5 or from 12 to 7?
• Do they want to take a break between work and drop their kid at daycare?

Sidenote: Offer your employees a flexible work schedule.

But how?

Here are three ways to introduce a flexible work schedule in your organization:

• Pick a 3-4 hour time slot when your employees are available—for meetings, messages, or time-sensitive tasks
• Offer employees the opportunity to swap one working weekday with a Saturday or Sunday
• Introduce the 4-day workweek policy

Strategy #4—Provide learning and upskilling opportunities

Companies with the motto to constantly empower learning for themselves and their employees grow effortlessly. But the sad truth? Only 40% of companies invest in upskilling their employees, according to a 2022 PwC survey.

By working with an organization, employees aspire for their financial and professional growth.

When you offer them upskilling opportunities, you strengthen their skills.

For example, Workday supports the development of its employees by leveraging its technology platform. In 2021, the company rolled out a skill-based HR strategy that allowed the employees to find their weak areas and work towards the specific skill by connecting them with opportunities within the organization—like gigs, new roles, or extracting skills from experts.

Just like Workday, you can offer upskilling opportunities to employees. Here’s how:

• Organize weekly or monthly training within your organization and invite experts from different departments to share their expertise
• Run educational workshops and invite external experts to share their expertise
• Sponsor a learning program for the employees based on their skills
• Buy an online course, watch it with your team and learn together

Strategy #5—Stick with remote work options

When Apple transitioned from working remotely to hybrid work, many employees started quitting their jobs. Why?

The hybrid policy of the company. In his letter to the employees, CEO Tim Cook shared that employees would be working from the office on set days—Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and can work remotely on the remaining days only if approved by their manager. He also mentioned that the employees will be permitted to work from anywhere for up to two weeks per year.

Because of this strict hybrid work policy, employees started quitting their job as they did not have a remote or location-flexible work option.

Employees love working remotely. According to Flexjobs’ employee engagement report, 48% of employers are maintaining some form of remote work for their workforce.

Bottom line? Remote work will continue to exist.

Even if your company is moving to a hybrid or in-office work model, give employees the option to work remotely.

When hiring for new roles, highlight the different work options in your job description and communication the new hires and employees can choose from.

Strategy #6—Be transparent with compensation packages

Who doesn’t love compensation? And competitive compensation packages play an important role in attracting and retaining employees. Here’s the proof: 55% of employees leave their job for higher compensation, according to Lattice’s SOPs report.

Image Source

Many times, it’s the compensation package that makes the employees feel undervalued—because they feel their efforts haven’t been rewarded with the compensation they *actually* deserve.

So make sure you study the salaries other organizations are offering for the same role, check your budget, and roll out the salaries.

Strategy #7—Empower moonlighting

Picture this: your employee works as a web developer during the day and runs a small business selling handmade soaps at night.

Would you be offended at them for making extra income or be happy for them?

Moonlighting has gained momentum in recent times—but in a negative light. Saurabh Deep Singla, HR Officer of UpGrad notes:

However, HackerEarth has a different take on this.

HR Director, Swetha Harikrishnan says,

Employees who moonlight are passionate people and bring in multiple skills making them high-value employees. When employers support their choices, they feel valued and likely to work with the organization for a longer period.

But, the big question for organizations is how to support them while making sure they focus on their primary job too.

The solution? Create permissive moonlighting policies.

Here’s how:

• Set expectations that the employee will consider their day job as the primary job and will not allow other jobs to interfere with the performance of their primary job
• Make sure the employee does not work with your competitor while they are working with you
• Make sure the employee does not reveal the techniques, strategies, and programs they learned in their company either to competitors or any other organization
• Make sure employees get approval from their employer to conduct their moonlighting work

Strategy #8—Provide job security by improving the turnover of the organization

Who enjoys being laid off? Literally, no one! Layoffs happen when the company is reducing business costs, or shutting down.

In both cases, one factor remains constant—company turnover. If a company’s turnover decreases, it impacts employees’ job security.

To make sure employees feel secure, focus on improving the organization’s turnover. For this, companies need their employees’ support. That’s why it’s crucial for companies to educate and be transparent with them.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Educate your employees on how their contribution can help in increasing the business turnover
• Implement open book management practice and share the organization’s financial information with the employees

Also read: 4 Images That Show What Developers Think of Layoffs in Tech

Strategy #9—Practice two-way feedback

Two-way feedback makes space for the employer and employee to improve and grow together. With constructive feedback, employers and employees achieve two things:

1. Employees: They know the weak areas they need to work on.
2. Employers: They know how to make their employees’ experience better at the organization.

At HackerEarth, we ask for feedback from the new hires once they have completed their 15 days of working in the organization. They receive an email from HR and a notification from the bot on Slack where they have to fill out the survey—which they can do anonymously too. These surveys are conducted every month to keep a constant check on employees.

Doing this helps the HR team understand the employee’s experience in their early days.

To make sure the feedback culture keeps moving, encourage each department to give and receive feedback internally.

Here are a few ways how the internal team can conduct feedback:

• Ask your employees the “hero” questions to help them reflect on important moments and understand what it took to reach that point
• Run employee pulse surveys and anonymous QnAs using a reliable pulse survey tool to get your employees to share their ideas and concerns
• Conduct virtual town halls where employees can ask questions, share feedback face-to-face and offer solutions.

Strategy #10—Maximize performance management programs

With a performance management program, you help the underperforming employees polish and improve their weak areas so that they can perform better at work. This is a great way to uplift these employees instead of analyzing them over a one-month period and announcing whether they are the right fit for the company or not.

To ensure yielding the best results with a performance management program, here are a few best practices:

• Set goals with the performance plan. For example, based on the employee’s role, set a goal of 3 months to help them polish their skill
• Monitor the progress of the employee regularly
• Coach them and help them identify the areas they lag on and what steps they can take to be better

4 employee-first companies to take inspiration from

Here are 4 businesses that share how they have been building an employee-first company and community for their employees.

Motivosity: Form employee resource groups (ERGs)

One of the employee retention strategies that Motivosity supports is forming employee resource groups (ERGs).

Logan Mallory, VP at Motivosity says,

Also read: What We Learnt From Target’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategy?

Hable: Be vulnerable with employees

When leaders become vulnerable with their employees and show how they feel, think and function, employees get to know them better—which strengthens their bond.

Rosie Hall, Communications Manager at Hable shares the core values of her organization—honesty, and bravery—which has led them to build a safe space for their employees.

Monterail: Supports emotional well-being

Supporting employees emotionally comes in different phases. You could check in with them by talking about non-work related things and their challenges.

According to the People’s team at Monterail, talking about employees’ challenges and things that may not be working well helps them build a safe space for their people. They further add.

Also read: 7 Ways to Reduce Burnout in Your Tech Teams

HackerEarth: Encourages diversity and inclusion

HackerEarth is an employee-first company that focuses on diversity and inclusion.

D&I is not just another number that our targets have to hit. It is baked into the DNA of our company. We believe inclusion should be placed at the heart of everything we do as a company. The culture here is inherently non-judgemental.

We fiercely champion the cause for LGBTQ+ inclusion from the front by giving our people the correct language to use, asking them to call out behaviors that are not ok, and educating and sensitizing others towards these behaviors. We have also partnered with an insurance company that provides coverage for same-sex partners. We believe in investing time, maintaining an open dialogue, educating people on ‘ally-ship’ and support – and not restricting their education to only the marginalized groups.

We also continuously modify our internal leave policies to better take care of our employees. We added 12 period leave days per year to our policy, which can be availed depending on how the employee feels. Our paternity leave policy has been extended from the usual 5 days to a month—our way of ensuring that our Hacksters and their families can experience the joys of parenthood without any hassles.

No more goodbyes…

You have all the employee retention strategies to build an employee-first ecosystem—focusing on giving back to their employees. Start small. Audit your ongoing processes and strategies and find the areas where you need to rework. Is it communication? Bonding with them? Giving work flexibility? Or, focusing on their emotional well-being? Once you find out the right answer, go back to the retention strategies you read above and start using them as a framework in your organization.

New year. New you. New recruitment trends.

And with this, you need to tweak your ongoing strategies to find the best tech talent. Some trends will continue to stay the same while others will want you to multiply your ongoing efforts with a new approach. But to ensure you do all of this the right way, you need to know the recruitment trends that are being forecasted to turn talent acquisition on its head in 2025!.

Let’s dive in.

Trend #1—Recruitment through social media

Social media has been the north star for recruiters and hiring managers. It’s not restricted to building a personal brand and influencer marketing anymore; also finding quality and targeted candidates. With more and more people joining the social squad, social recruiting will continue to be one of the primary channels for recruiters to source candidates.

Clearly: recruiting via social media is an effective recruiting strategy. Recruiters are seeing the results and this will become more effective with social channels like LinkedIn.

If you are a recruiter leveraging LinkedIn, here’s how you can amplify your efforts:

• Connect with candidates by scanning their LinkedIn profiles and understanding their interests, skills, experience level and so on
• Send them an Inmail asking if they are open to opportunities and sharing the job profile you are hiring for

💡Pro tip: To reach out to super-targeted candidates, make a list of ideal candidates. Engage with their content first or connect with them on LinkedIn and introduce yourself and your company first.

Trend #2—Automation: or ATS- Automated nurturing for resumes

An ATS or applicant tracking system remains to be a savior in the recruitment industry and takes off the load of the hefty manual hiring process. Whether you want to create stronger job descriptions or automate tedious workflows—an ATS can do it all for you; however, recruiters will rely on the ATS only to an extent. They’ll leverage automation and manual efforts to get the best results. When hiring for super-targeted and niche job profiles, recruiters will still have to do a deep dive into their target candidate personas by reaching out to select candidates and scanning their profiles.

Recruiters will need to carry out several recruiting tasks manually if they are hiring for a laser-focused senior or niche role. On the flip side, an ATS works in favor when hiring for junior-level roles.

A simple workflow for carrying out your recruitment process via ATS looks like this:

Created a job posting for a junior-level role → candidate applies for the role → an ATS emailer is sent to the candidate asking for the online assessment → candidate takes the test → invited for the interview process (if the test gets approved).

When this recruitment workflow is conducted by recruiters manually for senior roles, each task remains the same but the workload of screening every profile for different roles lessens which makes the ATS a winner.

Trend #3—Reskilling and upskilling to enhance internal mobility

After the layoffs by big tech giants like Twitter and Meta, it is obvious employees can be laid off at any time, at any stage of employment. However, before laying off the employees, companies follow a layoff plan and a multi-step approach on who to select for the layoff. They look at tenure, certifications, performance reviews, and promotability. Based on these factors, they create a scale and measure the employees on this scale, and then lay them off.

External hires are 61% more likely to be laid off or fired in their first year of service and 21% more likely to leave.

And the common point for these layoffs is performance. If the employees are not learning and upskilling, there will always be a lag in their performance. That’s why you need to regulate programs for your employees to help them upskill and reskill themselves to stay ahead of such situations.

And how, you may ask, do you encourage them to upskill? Offer stipends for certifications or conduct in-house training—from educational programs to personal development programs—all of them help in the growth of the employee.

The key is to keep the employees in the learning loop—which will help you to fill open job roles internally and prepare them for any adverse situations ahead.

Also read: How HackerEarth Made it Through 2 Recessions Without Relying on Layoffs?

Trend #4—Employee well-being and engagement

Employee well-being and engagement have been the highlight for better workplace functioning ever since the pandemic. Candidates are now selective about the companies they want to work with. They even create a checklist of the kind of companies they want to work with. Here’s how a candidate’s basic filter checklist looks like:

• Do I believe in their company’s purpose?
• Will I work with people who inspire me?
• Am I going to learn something I don’t already know?

Candidates are as laser-focused on their choice of companies as are the recruiters on finding the right tech talent. They have switched from *just* focusing on paychecks to companies that:

• Offer career growth, and learning
• Respect their after-work boundaries
• Offer them the flexibility to choose their work options
• Value their emotional and mental health

Here’s the thing: offering employees an annual comp off to give themselves a break from the mental exhaustion of burnout won’t help. It needs to be ingrained in the company’s culture on how to create an employee-first ecosystem.

Trend #5—Employer branding

Employer branding will continue to stay to be a crucial factor in attracting candidates and filling up the roles at your organization with quality candidates. With a solid employer brand, you will be able to showcase your company values and aspirations and drive candidates who don’t want to stay with you for the annual package but for what you are building. However, building such an employer brand needs effort and you need to stay authentic.

To demonstrate your company values to the candidates and attract the best talent, do this:

• Get your employees to talk about the company on social media. For example, ask them to share about a fun activity the company did recently and how it impacted them
• Get ample PR coverage for the initiatives you have contributed to
• Showcase interviews with the leadership team—helps the candidates pick the brains of leaders by watching their videos

Also watch: Creating an Employer Brand That Sticks

Trend #6—Workforce diversification

Work diversification doesn’t just mean what, where, and how people work but also the type of work. Simply put, organizations don’t just rely just on a geographically distributed team but a distributed team with different employment types—full-time employees and freelancers.

With workforce diversification, companies are successful in doing two things: bringing employees from different backgrounds and having employees with specialized skills together.

A good way to amplify workforce diversification is by having a mix of full-time and independent employees, ideally, by following Pareto’s principle of 70:30.

Trend #7—Predictive analysis

Companies will use predictive analysis to audit the skills of existing employees, shortlist them for difficult-to-fill roles, provide them with learning opportunities based on their skills and help them build personalized career pathways for their employees.

Some questions that predictive analysis provides insights to you on include:

• What are your most effective candidate sourcing channels (job boards, social media, referrals, and so on).
• How long does the screening process take and which screening techniques are effective?
• How long does it take to go from the application to the offer letter phase?
• What positions are likely to be needed or become vacant in the future and what will the hiring manager’s needs be?
• How likely is it for a new hire to perform well?
• How long will a new hire stay with the company?
• At what stage do the roadblocks regularly occur, what is their impact and how to fix them?
• Which roles and skills are needed urgently to meet the company’s needs?

Trend #8—AI in Talent Acquisition

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly significant role in modern Talent Acquisition strategies. This section explores the impact of AI on recruitment processes and its growing importance in staying competitive in the job market.

Leveraging AI for candidate sourcing

AI-powered tools can efficiently scan through a vast pool of resumes and job applications, swiftly identifying top talent. These tools analyze not only skills and qualifications but also consider factors like cultural fit, improving the accuracy of candidate sourcing.

Enhancing candidate assessment

AI enables objective and consistent candidate assessments. Through natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms, it evaluates resumes and even conducts initial interviews. This not only saves time but also helps reduce unconscious biases, ensuring fair evaluation.

AI in predictive hiring

AI-driven predictive analytics models can forecast a candidate’s potential success and tenure within an organization. This empowers recruiters to make informed decisions and optimize long-term hiring strategies.

Ethical considerations and transparency

While AI offers numerous advantages, it also raises ethical concerns. Transparency in AI decision-making processes and addressing algorithmic biases are crucial aspects of responsible AI adoption in Talent Acquisition.

Incorporating AI in Talent Acquisition is no longer an option but a necessity for businesses aiming to attract and retain the best talent efficiently and objectively.

Grab the spotlight in 2025 with these recruitment trends

So now you have been through all the 7 recruitment trends that you need to leverage in 2025. Some of these are the trends you have already been implementing while some will require you to analyze and reanalyze your ongoing strategy, see what the other organizations are doing, and take inspiration.

What are you waiting for? Ship your efforts the right way!

Isabella is a recruiter at a multinational company with 1000+ employees. Her responsibility is to recruit the top talent—which she performs well by consistently looking for candidates that fit the company culture, collecting their information, reaching out to them, screening them, and finally interviewing them.

But…

She carries out the entire process manually—leading her to invest much time in the manual tasks—resulting in disengaged candidates (because who likes to wait this long?).

If you are a recruiter just like Isabella, you’ll soon find yourself burnt out and left without achieving your recruitment goals. This is where artificial intelligence has got you covered. In 2023, AI will play a major role in shaping candidate recruitment and making the lives of recruiters easy.

In this article, we’ll help you understand how artificial intelligence is used in technical recruitment.

What is artificial intelligence?

According to Techopedia, artificial intelligence is the field of study in which computerized systems can learn, solve problems and autonomously achieve goals under varying conditions. Simply put, artificial intelligence is about training the computer or the bot to do tasks that humans do—by feeding more data.

So what does artificial intelligence in technical recruitment refer to? It means a relevant technology has been used in the hiring process. There are three basic tech models artificial intelligence uses: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive.

• Descriptive: It tells us about what’s happening
• Predictive: It gives us an image of the future
• Prescriptive: It tells us what we should do based on the insights and findings

With this technology in the recruitment software, HR teams can focus on more strategic tasks without burning themselves out with manual efforts like candidate sourcing and outreach campaigns. Because organizations want to accelerate their talent acquisition efforts at scale, they hire recruitment agencies to find the top tech talent. But, when AI recruitment software is employed at your organization, you won’t have to rely on these recruitment agencies entirely—saving up 15-25% of employees’ first-year salary.

How can AI be used in technical recruitment?

Here are 7 ways how artificial intelligence helps improve the technical recruitment processes and set the ongoing recruiting for success.

Candidate sourcing

Recruiters spend ample time identifying top talent across hundreds of sources and platforms to find the best possible matches based on the job description—from job portals to social media profiles, they source candidates from multiple channels which is a time-consuming process.

When a recruiter sources tech candidates via LinkedIn, here’s what their process looks like:

• Searches for the candidate on the LinkedIn search bar with relevant keywords
• Gets a list of candidates from the received results
• Scans the LinkedIn profiles of candidates who match the job requirements
• Reaches out to them via Inmail or LinkedIn DMs

Recruiters have to invest time searching and scanning each profile. The process is toilsome. On average, recruiters lose 14 hours per week completing such tasks manually. Clearly, using recruitment software tools that help with candidate sourcing is a much better option. These tools look for candidates matching the job requirements and conduct outreach campaigns.

💡Pro tip: Use tools like Fetcher and Recruitee

Candidate screening

In a traditional screening process, recruiters prepare and send assessments to candidates. Once the candidate submitted the assessment for review, the recruiter checked each assignment manually.

Imagine the time a recruiter has to invest if they were to screen 100 such assessments manually. If the recruiter screened 100 candidates, they had to review all the dedicated assignments.

With AI, role-based assessments chop recruiters’ time to half. Role-specific assessments are the way AI screens the candidates. Candidates take these tests to showcase their knowledge and skills.

HackerEarth’s Assessments help you evaluate the developers’ skills with advanced coding assessments—all you have to do is upload job descriptions, create coding test interviews and find the top developers with the auto-generated leaderboard. Also, you can create the coding test interview from the list of interview questions to simplify your process.

For example, Nirvana Solutions used HackerEarth’s Assessments for technical candidate screening and reduced their cost per hire by 25%.

Why this works: Before using the automated screening method, the company relied on manual screening of applications which was a time-consuming process and led the company to exhaust its resources. Now, Nirvana’s team takes 5 minutes to create automated assessments and around 30 minutes to create the assessment from scratch. After the candidates submit the test, recruiters analyze candidate reports for each candidate’s performance—helping them screen and identify the top talent within 10 minutes.

Posting jobs

If you google “job boards to attract diverse candidates”, you’ll find endless results. Earlier, the most common were Naukri.com and Indeed. But, with time, job boards have expanded allowing organizations to distribute their job listings and attract the right tech talent.

Unfortunately, mass distribution of your job listing isn’t possible when you are a one-person army. That’s where AI tools like GoHire help recruiters and organizations automate job posting across different job boards.

Also read: A Checklist For Writing Job Postings That Actually Work

Hiring remote workers

Gone are the days when companies hired candidates from the same location. Walk-in interviews have been replaced by video interviews—which has helped companies to hire candidates while sitting in the comfort of their homes.

Sidenote: If your company follows a hybrid or remote work model, AI amplifies your recruitment efforts.

For example, after screening the candidate with automated assessments, you move to the next stage of conducting a face-to-face interview—which is conducted using a video platform like Zoom and Google Meet.

These tools miss out on features that recruitment software possesses, making AI in recruitment more prominent.

Let’s say, after screening the candidates via HackerEarth’s Assessments, you can use FaceCode to invite the candidates to schedule interviews, conduct live coding interviews with a panel of 5 interviewers, and evaluate them based on automated interview summaries with AI-based behavioral insights.

Diversity hiring

Unconscious bias is one of the staggering norms in the tech industry. Because tech is a male-dominated industry, companies see them as the right candidate compared to women. A 2022 report by Celential.ai emphasizes the gender diversity of software engineers where women represent only 21% of the workforce in software engineering.

And this bias starts right at the beginning of the technical recruitment process. Recruiters analyze the candidates based on multiple factors like location, gender, and educational qualifications on reference by the company’s employees.

But when AI comes into play in the recruitment industry, you shift towards unbiased hiring. This Twitter thread by Diversity Council Australia shares how women feel confident about applying to tech roles when companies use AI recruitment software.

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There are two ways in which AI recruitment software removes biases:

• When you use AI to send assessments to the candidates, you test them based on their skills. Once they submit the assessment, you get a report of each candidate and how they performed—this analysis helps you screen them and move to the next stage. During this process, your recruiter won’t focus on the candidate’s resume, location, or gender. They’ll *only* focus on the candidate’s skills and how they performed the assessment reducing biases.
• When interviewing candidates, robots can conduct face-to-face interviews. They analyze the candidate’s response based on the conversation, facial expressions, and a mix of natural language processing and body language analysis—which helps remove prejudice

Data collection

Imagine adding recruitment software that sorts data and saves the 5 hours that you’d have spent doing the work manually. You could focus on improvising your current recruitment strategy, in these 5 hours.In a traditional setup, a recruiter would start by writing the job listing and sifting through inbound job applications to find the right fit.In the modern setup, recruiters find candidates on LinkedIn to build the database. Before building this database, they have to brainstorm and answer questions like:

• How can I find the ideal candidate on LinkedIn?
• How to identify and shortlist the candidate for a specific yet complex set of skills?

Once you identify the answers to these questions, you start your search, collect data and build the candidate’s database to carry out the recruitment process further. But here’s the thing: sorting through multiple data points and collecting candidates’ data is a tedious process. Employing recruitment software that collects candidates' data and analyzes it, candidate sourcing becomes much easier.AI Recruitment software like Hiretual acts as a candidate data engine for your tech recruiting requirements—it centralizes all your talent management and helps you source across 750M+ profiles and actively rediscovers lost profiles.

Candidate onboarding

From sharing the resource documents based on their role to telling them about the salary processing, health insurance, and so on—you need to exchange a lot of information with the new hire once you onboard them.No doubt you can rely on a single person assigned for helping in the onboarding process, but the time taken to onboard the new hire will take more time than expected impacting the credibility of the organization.With AI employed to onboard new employees, you can simplify the overall technical recruitment process.For instance, Unilever implemented artificial intelligence to onboard new employees. The company used Unabot, a natural language processing (NLP) bot to understand what employees need to know and fetch the information for them when asked. The AI acts as a forefront for questions employees have—from HR questions to department-specific questions like IT systems and allowances. Beyond this, it also answers questions like:

• Where is the parking available?
• What’s the timing for shuttle buses?
• When are the annual salary reviews due to take place?

Basically, Unabot is the Alexa for Unilever—helping the company get rid of the back-and-forth of email and Slack messages to find and send resources when required.

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Also read: Remote Hiring and Onboarding Tips for Technical Roles

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Get ready to transform your technical recruitment process with artificial intelligence...

No doubt why recruiters like Isabella constantly ask themselves, “how to recruit tech talent?”. When you carry out each recruitment task manually, you are compressing the space for productivity and efficiency. A simple way to get out of this situation is by employing an AI-based recruitment software in your organization that:

• Increases pay transparency for employees
• Enhances candidate experience with pre and post-hiring communication
• Provides accurate assessments of diverse candidates and identifies the most qualified candidate

Like an onion’s skin, recruiters uncover multiple layers in their recruitment process: sourcing, screening, and evaluation to find the best talent with the modern tech recruiting strategies that gel into your organization.

Earlier, these layers had a traditional face.

Your company is looking for a front-end developer. You create a job description → publish it on job boards → scan the resume of applicants → shortlist the right fit candidate → call them for a walkthrough interview.

But with changing times, traditional talent acquisition has transformed in and out. Now, you can’t *just* hire tech candidates who are willing to work. You need candidates who align with your company values and have relevant skills and attitude to get the work done—which make the attributes of the best tech talent.

The process is complicated and draining. But we have 10 best recruiting practices outlined to help you navigate and find the right fit for your organization.

10 tech recruiting strategies for technical positions

Let’s break down each talent acquisition strategy and how to implement them to make your organization’s recruitment process seamless.

Strategy#1—Look for people who already fit the culture

You need people who understand your company’s vision and align with your values. These people make the best employees who fit into your company culture.

To hire based on culture fit, do this:

• Be clear on the kind of employees you are looking for based on their skill sets, values, good word habits, and personality.
• Ask the candidates to add a cover letter to their job applications. Observe cover letters that emphasize on company aspirations the candidate is attracted to
• Once the candidates are filtered based on their cover letter, give them a brief test to see if they fit into the company culture.
• Ask them specific questions based on their resume to understand their attitude and personality.
• In your interview process, talk about the company culture in detail and highlight what makes your company better than your competitors. Be transparent about the salary, benefits, work schedule flexibility, and type of job.

Strategy #2—Understand how candidates approach their work

Picture this: a software developer kickstarts a new project. No specific requirements have been communicated. There is a high chance that the project will go haywire. That’s where great communication and questioning skills come into play—to scour information from their client to get the project on track.

No matter the tech role you are hiring for, assess their work approach by asking them problem-solving questions.

Few ideas to start with:

• When was the last time you failed a project?
• Share your recent best project and how did you approach it
• Tell about an uncomfortable event or experience in your life that reshaped your work approach

Strategy #3—Review and optimize your job description

Your job descriptions should be able to do two things: be searchable and be easy to understand

When reviewing your job description, make sure:

• The job titles are easily searchable.
• Highlight the must-have skills and experience
• Use white spacing and bullet points for a quick scan

Take a look at how this job description focuses on two things—the roles and responsibilities and the best fit eligibility for the role.

Why this works: We have started by introducing our company and the work done—to give the tech candidate an idea of who we are and the kind of work we have done. Plus, the job description is formatted with bullet points, white spaces, and sections in bold.

Strategy #4—Use recruitment software to save time

Imagine sorting through multiple job applications and selecting qualified candidates for the role of Java developer.

The process can leave you drained. The result? You take a longer time to select qualified candidates—leading the candidates to lose interest. An alternative to enhance this tech recruitment strategy is using the best recruitment tools and improving your hiring performance without losing out on the best talents.

Technology in recruiting like HackerEarth’s Assessments helps you create coding test interviews, evaluate the developers accurately and shortlist them based on an auto-generated leaderboard after every coding test.

Also Read: Redefine Remote Work Management With These 6 Automation Tools

Strategy #5—Use reference screening calls

The reference screening call approach involves setting up a call through your cloud phone system or other available communication channels to a candidate’s former workplace to get more information on the candidate’s performance and skills. By doing so, you get two things:

1. Ensure the candidate has the relevant qualifications needed for the job role
2. Understand if their attitude and values are the right for the organization or not

To utilize this recruiting tip, ask the candidate to share the contact details of their colleagues you can reach out to. When you reach out to the candidate’s colleagues to know more about them, ask:

• What was the best project that the candidate worked on?
• What are the behavioral traits of the candidate you like?
• What’s one weakness of the candidate?
• What’s the strength of the candidate?

Strategy #6—Work with an industry specialist recruiter

Having an industry specialist or niche recruiter acts as an amplifier to your current tech recruitment strategies. When you work with them, you can expect comprehensive market advice from them—salary expectations, current market trends, and available skill sets.

Also, they have an active network—which gives you immediate access to the niche talent pool.

A simple way to find niche recruiters is through LinkedIn. Search with keywords like “technology recruiter”, “technical recruiter”, and “tech recruiter”. Filter down the searches based on your requirements and check the recruiter’s LinkedIn profiles.

Strategy #7—Hire a recruitment agency

When your company’s hiring requirements include hiring at scale, a single person cannot handle mass assessments. That’s where you need to hire a recruitment agency over a niche recruiter.

To find the right recruitment agency:

• Look for agencies with (at least) some amount of experience in the technology industry.
• Check the agency’s website, Glassdoor reviews, testimonials, case studies, experience, and socials like LinkedIn
• Explain to them your hiring requirements
• Interview the agency and ask relevant questions to understand if they are the right fit. Some questions include:

• how long does it take to find the best talent
• what does your hiring process look like?

• Check the portfolio and testimonials of each recruiter and see how the recruiters of the agency work.
• Confirm the recruitment agency’s budget before finalizing them.

Strategy #8—Leverage social recruiting

Socially active people are always on the lookout for new opportunities, and that’s where you can fill the gap by leveraging social media as an effective tech recruiting strategy. Social recruiting is all about sourcing and hiring candidates via social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.

There are two ways you can recruit via social channels:

1. By activating your LinkedIn profile and constantly sharing job roles your company is hiring for
2. By scanning the LinkedIn profiles of users who match the keywords your company is currently hiring for.

Sidenote: Combine both—activate your profile and do LinkedIn outreach for great conversions.

Let’s understand this with an example of Laura, a tech recruiter hiring Java developers for her company.

To hire the candidate, she created a job posting on LinkedIn and published a hiring post on her LinkedIn profile.

Next, she looked up candidates by adding the keyword “Java developers” to the LinkedIn search bar and selecting the LinkedIn profiles from relevant results. She then reached out to these people who aren’t actively looking for opportunities. She shares the details about the job profile with them and forwards the details of the interested candidates for the next stage i.e, candidate screening.

But here’s the catch: you need to have an effective social recruiting strategy for maximum results.

Here’s how you can do it:

• Define the candidate persona—one who has the expertise and fits your company culture
• Choose the social media platform where your ideal candidate persona is active
• Create an outreach strategy and a list of candidates you’ll reach out to
• Activate your social media profile by posting content about your company culture and the work you do
• Start the planned recruitment activity based on the strategy
• Measure how well your strategy is performing and review the KPIs; if not working well, tweak the strategy

Strategy #9—Invest in employer branding

Your employer brand defines your values and POV as a person and how it aligns with your company—attracting people who want to work with you.

With the changing recruitment practices, having an impactful employer brand is an effective tech recruiting strategy which helps the candidates decide if they would like to work with your company or not. According to CareerArc’s 2021 Future of Recruiting Study, 82% of candidates consider employer brand and reputation before applying for the job. Clearly: investing in employer branding is part of tech recruiting strategy crucial to building trust and getting the right candidate for your organization.

Shield’s Founder and CEO, Andreas Jonsson has built an engaged audience of 40K+ where he talks about personal branding and LinkedIn content creation. Because he actively creates content on LinkedIn, people who read his content know his aspirations and values.

And knowing Shield, and working with the company comes as a by-product. The impact of his employer branding is amplified by his employees too—who talk about their company, personal branding, and LinkedIn—the same content pillars the company is known for.

Because the employees enthusiastically talk about it, their connections got to know about the company, what it does, and the value it serves—which instantly attracts them to work with the company.

Also Read: Building An Employer Brand: Everything You Need To Know

Strategy #10—Organize hackathons

Hackathons are a gateway to hiring employees by testing their skills and selecting the best candidate who gives proof of their expertise. To hire employees through hackathons: create a problem statement for the candidate persona. Candidates who bring you the best solution to the problem statement are the right fit for the role.

To create the problem-solving statement for your hackathon, do this:

• Define the theme of the innovation
• Specify the pain points
• Narrow down the problem
• Define the eligibility rules for candidates to participate

Take a look at how Cogito runs its hackathon on HackerEarth. They have mentioned the job profile in their headline and highlighted the AI solution they want to build (the problem statement).

Also Read: 5 Lessons From Running 200 Remote Hackathons

Use these technical recruiting strategies to take recruitment to the next level

To amplify your recruitment and selection process, club 3-4 of these tech recruiting strategies together. For example, identify the candidates that fit into your work culture. Once identified, screen them and understand how they approach work issues. To screen them further, contact their former workplace to know about their skills and attitude better.

So, what are you waiting for? Solidify your recruitment system with these technical recruitment strategies.

FAQ About Tech Recruiting Strategies

1. What are the most effective tech recruiting strategies?

• The most effective tech recruiting strategies include leveraging AI-driven tools, offering flexible work arrangements, enhancing employer branding, focusing on diversity and inclusion, and utilizing data-driven recruitment analytics.

2. How can I improve my technical recruiting strategies to attract top talent?

• To improve your technical recruiting strategies, focus on building a strong employer brand, using targeted social media campaigns, participating in tech conferences and hackathons, and offering competitive compensation packages.

3. Why is employer branding important in tech recruiting strategies?

• Employer branding is crucial in tech recruiting strategies because it helps attract top talent by showcasing your company culture, values, and career growth opportunities. A strong employer brand differentiates you from competitors and appeals to skilled tech professionals.

4. What role does diversity and inclusion play in technical recruiting strategies?

• Diversity and inclusion are essential components of technical recruiting strategies. By promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace, you attract a wider range of candidates, foster innovation, and improve employee satisfaction and retention.

5. How can data-driven approaches enhance tech recruiting strategies?

• Data-driven approaches can enhance tech recruiting strategies by providing insights into candidate behaviors, optimizing recruitment processes, and enabling better decision-making. Using analytics tools, you can track the effectiveness of your strategies and continuously improve your hiring outcomes.