The Power of Local: Why Employers Should Focus on Community Hiring
When it comes to filling business-critical vacancies, the bottom line is: that you need to find the right fit, aka the best person for the job. Sometimes, this means widening your geographical reach far beyond your front door. But oftentimes, there’s no place like home – and no talent like homegrown talent – to make the perfect match. When employers hire local, they are helping themselves as well as the community that they operate within.
Hire locally and you:
Demonstrate your company’s commitment to the community.
When you hire local talent, you invest in your local community. Candidates, employees, customers, and others will see this and take greater pride in your association with them. This naturally leads to an enhanced employer and overall business brand.
Gain greater community insight.
By hiring locally, you gain greater insight into your customers, the challenges they face, and how your company can help. You also come to better understand your competition. And, local hires tend to be more invested in helping your business succeed, since your community is their community.
Support local development.
As you create local employment opportunities, you help reduce area unemployment. This contributes to your local economic and tax base and improves social cohesion. Hiring local workers also helps develop and retain local talent, contributing to a more skilled, competitive community workforce.
Control hiring costs.
A local hire helps minimize recruiting costs as relocation tends to be minimal. As an added bonus, several states including California offer tax credits to businesses that invest in their own communities. And as you hire locally, you are more likely to recruit employees who love their hometowns and thus are more likely to stay there, versus searching elsewhere in the future.
Facilitate easier onboarding.
Because they are already familiar with your geographic location, local hires often require less time to be introduced to their new environment. And if your company is well known locally, chances are they’re already familiar with your brand and possibly your mission, plans, and leadership team.
Benefit from already-established local connections.
In addition to knowing your community, many local hires already have a network of connections from which your company could benefit. These may include already established, warm links to potential sales leaders and business partnerships.
Enhance employees’ work/life balance.
Because they’re already settled into the community, local hires can often more easily segue into office activities and social events with peers. They also may have shorter commutes or at the least, are familiar with the most efficient ways to get to and from work. All this adds up to better work/life balance, easier peer relationships and ultimately, better engagement and job satisfaction.
While our reach extends nationwide, we will always remain committed to and are deeply embedded in the local communities we serve. Reach out to us today to learn more about how we can share our community commitment and grow your winning team.
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How to Stand Out as an Employer to Top Quality Candidates
In today’s marketplace, if you don’t stand out as a desired employer, you run the risk of losing good talent to your competition. First impressions matter to candidates – and this includes efficiency and responsiveness as they consider your company as a possible place to work. So, be sure you’re poised for success as you fill your business-critical job vacancies.
Garner positive Glassdoor reviews.
Glassdoor is one of the most popular online job search engines with 64 million monthly users and 55 million reviews. One of Glassdoor’s objectives is to enable job seekers to research employers by reading honest feedback from employees and others who have first-hand experience with companies.
- Drive candidate engagement by responding to reviews. This emphasizes your commitment to honesty, integrity, and ongoing open communication with job seekers in your pipeline. Even negative reviews can be opportunities for improving your brand and candidate experience.
- Further built trust by requesting reviews. Glassdoor’s Thank You pages let you ask candidates who score your company high to write a review on your page.
Position yourself as an employer of choice on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is about more than just posting job openings and company updates. It’s an ideal venue to position your organization as a preferred employer and strengthen candidate relationships and engagement.
Optimize your LinkedIn Company Page by:
- Completing your information. Completed pages get 30 percent more weekly views. Make sure your page is fresh and contains your logo, a cover image, an overview, and your website URL, as well as industry information, company size and location, and a call-to-action button. And every update should be consistent with your strategic plans and organizational goals.
- Showcasing your commitments. Highlight your strengths in areas including DEI, environmental sustainability, work-life balance, and social impact.
- Utilize Career and Analytics The former are tailored specifically to job candidates and are a forum for your employer brand to really stand out. The latter allow you to track who has viewed your Career Page or clicked your “I’m interested” button, or determine which specific content viewers are engaging with the most.
- Be an active participant. React to or comment on posts, congratulate people for their achievements, and chime in on relevant discussions, issues, and business insights.
- Empower your team members to be brand advocates. Facilitate their sharing of company news, articles, newsletters, and other relevant content on their personal profiles. You can also use the My Company tab to build an employee-only community where you can curate content and measure employee advocacy progress.
Engage with candidates throughout your hiring process.
To stay top of mind with preferred candidates, responsiveness to them should start as soon as their inquiries or applications start coming in. Reach out ASAP – within one business day at most, but even sooner if possible. This includes both online and in-person dialogue and feedback.
Work with the experienced recruitment team at PrideStaff to perfect your hiring strategy, including optimizing candidate experiences as you grow your winning team. Contact us today to learn more.
