Stand out amid tight labor markets by taking an innovative approach to hourly recruiting. Immersive events, gamified applications, community sponsorships, unexpected advertising, nonprofit partners, referral rewards, and more provide creative solutions to build your talent pipeline.
Host Events Showcasing Your Culture
Host customized in-person and virtual events, allowing you to directly showcase your culture, work environment, and career opportunities to candidates in an interactive setting. Event options include open house hiring fairs, casual after-hours hiring socials, job fairs with booths facilitating one-on-one conversations, office tours, panel talks, and facility tours highlighting your workplace.
Use these immersive venues to vividly spotlight what makes your workplace unique, like values, sense of community, development opportunities, advancement paths, and camaraderie. Provide hands-on experiences, allowing candidates to actually experience your brand by meeting managers and employees and engaging in activities together. Events also facilitate making powerful personal connections between candidates and recruiters that emotionally engage talent.
According to recruiting experts, memorable candidate experiences during customized events deliver engagement and conversion benefits far beyond job ads alone. But also share videos and photos afterward through your channels to extend reach.
Gamify Your Application Process
Incorporate creative, skills-based games into your application process through gamification strategies, making applying more engaging, competitive, and differentiated. For example, have warehouse worker applicants play a timed Tetris-style game, seeing how quickly they can virtually stack pallets. Or challenge coding applicants to find bugs in sample projects against the clock for score incentives.
The key is ensuring games directly measure capabilities like attention to detail, multitasking, problem-solving, dexterity, accuracy, speed, and ability to learn software that is applicable to real on-the-job scenarios. Don’t use trivial games like word puzzles unrelated to role needs just for the sake of gamifying.
Focus fun gaming elements on seriously evaluating skills fit. Make the experience mobile-friendly and share practice rounds to reduce application anxiety. According to HR specialists, creative assessments provide meaningful screening while showcasing your employer’s brand personality.
Sponsor Local Community Activities
Raise awareness by sponsoring local cultural festivals, concerts, sporting events, fundraisers, and similar community happenings. Have a creative, engaging booth presence with activities like prize wheels, contests, demos, and giveaways that actively drive traffic rather than just passively distributing flyers. Get your brand authentically involved in events and causes your target talent cares about.
Staff your booth with knowledgeable recruiters able to have natural conversations sharing information about your company, open positions, culture, and values with attendees before tying it to potentially a good fit for their skills and interests. Collect contact information through lead gen promotions like raffles and text message send-a-text campaigns to follow up with promising candidates later.
Get creative brainstorming on how you can uniquely showcase your employer brand – both who you are and what opportunities you offer – at sponsored events beyond typical brochure booths. Pair with targeted digital advertising to interested attendees before and after events.
Advertise in Unexpected Places
Think outside the box on where you place job postings and outreach beyond standard online job boards. Consider advertising roles on niche hobby forums, streaming entertainment platforms, podcasts, organizations, and publications popular with your target demographic. Identify their stomping grounds digitally and physically.
Local print newsletters, radio stations, and local access cable channels provide traditional alternatives to crowded cyberspace. Use geofencing mobile ads targeting high foot traffic hot spots like malls, schools, entertainment districts, parks, or transit hubs to reach candidates where they already are.
Tie campaigns creatively to contextual moments like back to school, TV show premieres, or leading into major holidays. For example, target sports bars to promote open cook roles during big games. The element of surprise cutting through the noise differentiates your approach.
According to recruiters, unexpected and unconventional outreach captures more attention when done thoughtfully. It shows candidates you understand their interests and habits.
Partner With Employment Nonprofits
Seek out creative partnerships with local nonprofits, vocational programs, school districts, community colleges, chambers, and social good organizations that provide skills development and job placement support to overlooked talent pools.
Collaborate by conducting career coaching, hosting facility tours tailored for their program participants, serving as guest speakers or workshop facilitators, sponsoring events, funding grants supporting their initiatives, or providing work-based volunteer experiences. Help them make an impact while raising awareness of your roles.
In return, access motivated and qualified candidates from these mission-driven partners. Co-develop a talent pipeline that feeds your hiring needs by converting standout participants into employees after program completion. Make a hands-on social impact in the community while expanding your candidate sourcing avenues.
According to recruiters, today’s purpose-driven workforce – especially Gen Z – is attracted to brands aligning values with visible involvement upstream addressing societal needs. Shared priorities build authentic partnerships versus transactional relationships.
Offer Candidate Referral Bonuses
Incentivize your current employees to actively refer candidates from within their own networks by offering tiered monetary bonuses or high-value rewards for successful referrals who get hired and stay for at least six months. Promote the program creatively across internal channels like your employee app, intranet, email, posters in break rooms, table tents in cafeterias, and team huddle announcements.
As trusted insiders, employees can source promising applicants who may not be actively job hunting publicly. Their personal recommendations provide social proof conveying your employer’s brand differently than ads. Some referral programs offer escalating bonuses after 30/60/90 days to reward long-term fits.
Keep program accountability by tracking which employees drive the most viable referrals and hires over time. While rewarding success, ensure a few overly promotional individuals don’t dominate results. Combine referral rewards with proactive employee advocacy training, equipping staff with natural tips for sharing openings within their networks.
Final Thoughts
Standing out amid labor shortages requires moving beyond conventional recruiting tools by embracing immersive events, community connections, unexpected advertising, referral incentives, and other creative tactics to deliver memorable candidate interactions.
Chattr’s automated conversational AI recruiting platform provides several ways to optimize candidate engagement through proprietary tools. Click the link below to schedule a time to meet with a member of our team and learn more!
