In today’s highly competitive job market, winning at recruiting top talent is no easy task. Whether you’re a talent recruitment pro or a small to midsize business owner looking to find and hire individuals for your organization, success in recruiting today requires an understanding of your target “customer” (i.e. the job seeker or prospect). That means knowing where to find them, understanding what’s important to them, knowing how to market a job opening, crafting a job offer that will be compelling, and perhaps knowing how to use technology to make the process more efficient and effective.

Here are six ways your company can be more effective when it comes to talent recruitment:

  1. Take a social spin on recruiting. To find top talent, you need to think outside the box. Sure, nearly every recruiter, manager, or business owner uses LinkedIn these days—but there are more social networks out there. For example, Jobvite’s 2016 Job Seeker Survey found 35 percent of job seekers used Twitter to look for work, and 67 percent of them turned to Facebook. Companies are also using Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube as part of the way they showcase who they are, what they’re doing, and what working with them would be like. So if your company doesn’t have a legitimate presence on a variety of social media channels, know that it’s quite possible you’re missing out on opportunities to connect with prospective employees. They are checking you out, all across the web, and what you’re doing, or not doing, on social media channels makes an impression.
  2. Use technology wisely. Manually sorting through pages and pages of resumes and hosting a slew of in-person interviews to hire the right talent is one way to go about it, but it’s not the most efficient way. Technology can play a big role when it comes to streamlining recruiting processes. As my colleague Meghan Biro recently pointed out, HR and recruiting is the perfect place to leverage technology. Technology can be employed to help to manage the applicant process, combining deep learning algorithms with big data to determine which candidates are best suited for particular jobs. Companies are also using technology to streamline interview processes as well as onboarding processes. There’s much that the smart integration of technology into the recruitment process can do to make everything better—for recruiters and prospects alike.
  3. Make Marketing part of your recruitment efforts. Employees today want more than a job—they want a fulfilling work experience. Recruiting pros need to take a page from their pals over in the Marketing department. When competing for attention in a competitive job market, the more you can do to market your company and the opportunities your open positions present for job seekers, the more effective you’ll be at finding people interested in knowing more. Keep this in mind when creating job postings, job descriptions, and even social media posts, and develop messaging that speaks to the opportunities that working with your company affords prospective employees. This will go a long way toward attracting the right talent.
  4. Humanize your company. Job seekers today are selective, and rightfully so. When recruiting efforts showcase the corporate culture of an organization in a way that’s attractive to prospective candidates, it can make a big difference. There are many different ways to humanize your company. Featuring candid (and not super slick) photos of employees and events at your company on social media sites, using video on your website and in social media posts opens, and featuring employee voices in your corporate blog are all ways to humanize your company and open a window into the culture of the organization.
  5. Broaden your hiring horizons. As I’ve written about in the past, building an internal culture that hinges on innovation can have a direct impact on your success in the market. How do you get there? Diversity, diversity, diversity. Even Google encourages staff to uncover and ditch their bias in the workplace, so no company is immune to the need for more inclusion and equality when it comes to hiring.
  6. Employees are often your best source for new talent. Look for referrals from employees to streamline your path to the best hires. If you don’t already, consider starting a referral program for current employees incentivizing them to refer stellar candidates. Those incentives don’t have to be monetary, either—you could offer extra time off or another perk in exchange for uber-qualified personnel. It’s also smart to stay in touch with employees who no longer work for your company but left on good terms. Sometimes, these professionals are considered “boomerang” employees because they can be persuaded to return to your company for the right compensation package, title, or position.

Bottom line: Recruiting top talent today is not easy, but if you’re smart, you can gain a competitive edge when it comes to finding and recruiting the key players you seek. Get social, understand the role technology can play as part of your recruitment efforts, dig into data, think like marketers, humanize your company, prioritize diversity, and don’t discount referrals. In the race to find the best of the best, these tactics will set you and your company apart.

Additional Resources on This Topic:

Marketing (And Showcasing) Your Corporate Culture During Recruitment
Five Marketing Strategies HR Should Embrace

This article was first published on Work Connect Blog.