Improving your recruitment strategies in Vietnam (with data)

Grove HR partnered with YouGov Vietnam to carry out extensive research on 'What Vietnamese candidates want in 2022'. The research explored the top driving factors for candidates to accept a job offer, plus, all the critical touchpoints between your business and the candidates. With these insights, companies are better equipped to optimize their recruitment strategies.

Since the Coronavirus outbreak, there has been a global shift in business and people operations. To adapt to the situation, the majority of the workforce had to switch to remote work. This has led to a great re-evaluation of job choices prompting organizations to get innovative with their employee recruitment strategies.

The situation is similar in Vietnam. It's hard to predict how candidates’ perception of the ‘most valued job offer’ would be. Therefore, Grove HR & YouGov Vietnam conducted an extensive experiment on over 1000 candidates to figure out which drives them to accept a job offer.

With the final result, this blog will solely focus on how you can improve the technical aspect of optimizing the hiring process. The full report can be downloaded for free here.

How to improve recruitment strategies in 2022? - a statistical view

1. Utilizing career pages to build an effective talent pipeline

As much as we dread the use of strenuous traditional hiring channels, some approaches are still highly beneficial and hard to change. 

A high percentage of job seekers go hunting for their next job using career pages. According to YouGov’s research, 73.6% of job seekers consider career pages as their first resort when searching for their next career destination. While online job boards come in second with 65.5%, followed by referrals from personal contacts with 59.1%. However, social media channels are the least used when talents job hunt.

With job seekers relying on career pages as their first resort, it is important that you have your company’s career page ready and attractive enough to engage top talents. To facilitate this process, you can get a branded, zero-code career page for your organization on Grove HR. This way, recruiting top talents will be simpler and more productive. Also, ensure that the job description is appropriately written, containing all the necessary details and requirements a potential candidate should know.

2. Focus more on Facebook recruiting

Although the research showed that social media is ranked the least on the list of hiring channels, it still remains the cheapest option which is high-trafficked and reaches out to a global talent pool at once. With almost three billion people on the platform, Facebook is the perfect social media for employers to reach out to talents and vice versa, and as reported, 87% of Vietnamese use it to seek jobs among other social media.

However, Facebook has decided to restructure its corporate strategy in 2022, as it seems to be done with the marketplace experiment. Here are a couple of changes recruiters might need to know:

• Existing Facebook Groups with a “Jobs” group type will be changed to the “General” group type and the “Jobs” group type will no longer be available
• The ability to distribute free jobs via a partner integration with the Facebook Jobs API will no longer be available
• The FB Jobs will no longer be available on the Facebook Lite app or Facebook mobile website (m.facebook.com/jobs) for both employers and jobseekers
• The FB Jobs browser will no longer be available
• Facebook Jobs is shutting down outside the United States and Canada

With these changes in progress, Facebook is working on two new products, FB Leads that help company to manage their leads, and the FB ATS connector that matches jobs to Facebook pages. This matching is done with the help of an employer’s ATS questionnaire requirements.

3. Leverage company reviews in building the employer brand

Talents in the labor market are now concerned about the work environment and workplace happiness now more than ever. Reviews from previous employees, clients, and customers give them a closer view of what it's like working at your company. Hence, the need to pay more attention to improving your employer brand.

According to our research, positive company reviews make up to 66% of a prospect’s perception of your employer brand. A study from Employer Brand Research 2022, also shows that 55% of job seekers don’t get through with the application process once they read a negative review about the employer. This attests to the fact that company reviews greatly influence employer brand and should be prioritized.

However, it doesn’t end there, prospects also believe that other factors can indeed affect employer brand. Our study showed that 58.2% agree that positive CEO or manager’s reputation influences employer brand while 52.3% believe that corporate social responsibility is a great influencer too.

Similar to our research on what Vietnamese candidates want in 2021 the overall brand is dependent on their relationship with their employees and how well they cater to their needs. Therefore, here are some tips to actively enhance your overall employer brand.

Build your online presence. Job seekers love to do a little research before proceeding with their applications. Having a website that portrays what your organization stands for or active social media profiles gives prospective candidates a positive impression of your company.

Inspire prospects with real-life stories. Encourage employees to be more expressive about their experience at your company. Have them tweet about it or make videos about what a day at the office is like. This will give prospects a glimpse of the people culture of your organization.

Prepare a communication plan for negative reviews. Always have a communication team ready to respond to negative reviews and engage in an adequate follow-up exercise that assures the reviewer and tends to their needs.

Engage in some PR. Build even more credibility with the public by getting your CEOs or Directors featured on relevant publications and websites that expose your company to other organizations in the industry, prospective candidates, and clients too.

4. Restrict the interview process to a 1-week limit

Reducing the time of hire is a subtle, yet smart way to keep applicants interested in the position. About 88.8% of job seekers attest to this and believe that the recruitment process should be completed in less than two weeks. 

Job seekers see interviews as an avenue to properly interact with the organization through recruiters. To keep prospective applicants actively interested in the interview standards of your company, practical assessments should be included, especially for roles where theoretical knowledge plays little role in the work field.

Giving quick feedback on the outcome of the interview is also an effective employee recruitment strategy. Job seekers want to know where they stand as soon as they can. 76.2% of prospective candidates would prefer at most, a one-week waiting period to get feedback on their interview.

To avoid losing top talents back to the labor market, ensure that the recruiting team stays in touch with the applicant and gives adequate feedback about the interview in a week or less.

How Grove HR can reduce your hiring cycle to less than 1 week?

Avoid keeping talents waiting due to slow processes and automate with Grove HR. With our comprehensive HR software, organizations can reduce time-to-hire with the powerful recruitment module.

Firstly, the careers page is taken care of without any coding. All you need to do is create your open positions in Grove HR to get them published on your branded career page which can be shared with all your talent portals.

When all those CVs start rolling in, Grove HR will parse the CVs and have them on their corresponding hiring pipeline where your team can evaluate, feedback, and make the hire faster. You don’t even have to send the emails, Grove have you covered with automated emails for each stage - everything is, of course, customizable.

Talk to us and discover more about Grove HR's recruitment module.