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Competitive Recruitment in a Tight Labor Market

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What is competitive recruitment?

Competitive recruiting involves reaching highly qualified candidates in a competitive hiring market. Offering suitable compensation and benefits to job seekers and communicating them during the selection process is just one aspect of competitive recruitment. Human resource teams and hiring managers need to determine the who, what, where, and how of recruitment and selection.

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CheckmarkWho are the best candidates to fill the position based on skill sets?
CheckmarkWhat should the job title be?
CheckmarkWhere is the most cost-efficient talent located?
CheckmarkHow much should you pay?

As a recruiter, you need data-backed information to inform your recruitment strategies.

Access to the latest data on supply, demand, and compensation can help you understand your market, expand your applicant pool, and fill job openings. With the right information on these three metrics, recruiters can think strategically about locations to source talent, look to new roles to fill job openings, and make sure they’re including the right skills with the right job titles.

What do I need to know for competitive recruitment?

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Customer Success Story

A national health network

cut their cost-per-hire by 13% and reduced their overall labor costs by 4%  by focusing recruiting attention and spend to acheive more candidate responses and faster time-to-hire. They stopped recruiting in markets that were overly competitive and recruited from markets with lower talent costs

competitive recruitment

Lightcast is helping businesses competitively recruit.

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A global beverage company

achieved digital transformation strategy through a key skill and role profile analysis. Based on local labor market factors, they chose where to recruit digital roles across the world.

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A global digital communications technology corporation

assessed the competitive landscape for Data Analytics and Cybersecurity certifications to develop competitive offerings that teach in-demand skills. This allowed them to close critical supply gaps and reach new global markets.

Competitively recruit with Lightcast.

Get a free sample report with the latest data.

Consider the skills you’re looking for, are they the right ones? Are they even available in your market?

Look at the skills and qualifications you’re requesting in job postings and the ones that are actually necessary for the role. When you compare your requested skills to the ones sought by the competition, how do yours match up? If 40% of other job postings for the same role aren’t requiring a bachelor’s degree and you are, consider whether you’d be willing to take someone without the degree. If so, remove it from the posting. If your desired skills make the talent pool too small, remove a few skills if you can, and you’ll get more candidates.


Look at the profiles of people with the job title you want to inform your recruitment process. 

When you know what title a person is using, the skills they are listing in their profiles, and where they are working, you have a greater understanding of the candidates you’re targeting. Benchmark your job openings against the workforce, find matching profiles, and inform where you might want to focus your recruiting efforts. A competitive candidate might be right next door if you include profile analytics in your recruitment strategies

Be aware of the latest recruitment trends for a highly competitive recruiting strategy.

Wage transparency is a top recruitment trend and something job seekers are looking for in job postings. Advertising wage will attract highly qualified candidates to match expectations between your organization and applicants. But how do you know how much to pay? Use job postings analytics to assess compensation trends and see what your competitors are paying.

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Solutions for Competitive Recruitment

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Perform data-based recruiting analysis.

Dig deeper into specific occupations and locations, with supply, demand, compensation, and diversity data integrated into your recruitment strategy.

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Evaluate job posting competition.

Discover which occupations are in high demand based on online posting intensity and reveal which companies are your biggest competition in the race for talent.

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Take a broad view across geographies to see concentration of talent.

See a heatmap of talent across any given region to access the people you need.

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Apply profile analytics for competitive recruitment.

Take a deeper dive into Lightcast’s social profile dataset and filter by region, company, job title, skill, industry, or keyword.

Learn more about competitive recruitment.

Schedule a time to talk with a member of our team. We'd love to show you how Lightcast can help you make informed recruitment decisions.

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