SaaS recruitment strategies: what are they, and why do you need them? If you want to land the very best SaaS talent for your company, having tactics that work are essential. There’s a huge pool of untapped SaaS talent out there, but for every bright-eyed and bushy-tailed candidate looking for work, there are hundreds, if not more companies – just like yours – looking to entice them in. So what SaaS recruitment strategies can you put in place to ensure that your business stands out from the crowd? Abika takes a look.
Almost half of the SaaS workforce is made up of engineering and sales roles; roles which are high in demand but limited in supply, which can make recruiting candidates particularly challenging. Filling these positions is not as easy as simply putting out job ads, you need to have a good strategy in place in order to find just the right SaaS talent to fit your requirements. If you want to win that talent, you’re going to have to be smart about it, by getting creative and thinking outside of the box.
Here are Abika’s top ten SaaS recruitment strategies for finding just the right talent to grow your company:
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Leverage AI-driven Recruitment Tools
If you want to find top SaaS talent quickly and efficiently, you’re going to need to invest in the technology that’s going to help you find it. AI-powered technology speeds up the time-consuming manual process of recruiting, so that recruiters themselves can focus on other areas of the recruiting process. It’s not about replacing human recruiters or human interaction, it’s about helping those recruiters discover passive SaaS candidates, and matching them to the right jobs.
AI-driven SaaS recruitment tools help to streamline tedious and repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as sourcing talent, by identifying the best candidates through matching and scoring, as well as helping with screening process, by ranking talent based on your defined criteria. You can also use AI-driven recruitment tools to set up the best times for interviews, thanks to chatbots and calendar integrations.
According to Dice’s Recruitment Automation Report, recruiters can spend up to 30 hours a week sourcing resumes from candidates, but with AI tools you’ll be able to narrow a large pool of applicants down to the most qualified and talented individuals in a fraction of the time.
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Utilise Social Media
Social media certainly has its evils, but is an essential and invaluable tool for businesses when it comes to reaching potential job seekers – especially those looking to fill SaaS roles. It’s highly recommended that businesses make the most of platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook, among others, to post job openings and attract candidates.
92% of recruiters worldwide have turned to social media platforms to find top talent, so if you’re not already doing that, then you’re definitely in the minority, and with 41% of job seekers admitting they regularly use social media to look for new job opportunities, you could be missing out on the perfect candidates for your SaaS business, if you’re not utilising this huge resource.
Social media enables you to research, engage with and attract ideal candidates, allowing you to find new talent, network with potential candidates and share job postings. Find out which platforms are popular with your competitors, see what they’re posting and how they perform in terms of engagement, to give you an idea of where you should be casting your net.
In your posts make sure you detail the requirements for vacancies at your company, including mandatory requirements, necessary qualifications and personality traits. Work out which areas of recruitment you struggle with, and prioritise that in your social media recruitment strategy. And remember to keep the postings polished and professional – each platform has different media specifications, such as image/video size, character count etc, so don’t simply cross-post the exact same contact across multiple platforms and expect to get good results.
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Create A Strong Employer Brand
In order to attract new potential employees to your company, you need to showcase your reputation as an employer. Creating a strong employer brand is going to help in your quest to bring in quality hires – in fact, it will do a lot of the hard work for you, and here’s why. When a candidate sees you looking for talent, they will no doubt go straight to your company’s website and social media accounts to find out what you’re all about. Doing this gives them an easy and instant insight into your company culture and image. Good employer branding is exciting – for both potential and current employees – and if it’s authentic, you’ll find that employees are more likely to refer untapped talent to you, helping cut down your recruitment efforts.
Simple steps towards creating a strong employer brand include having a strong and continuous online presence, with clear information about your company’s vision. Make sure you include your company’s ethos of inclusion and diversity; you want to look attractive to EVERYONE, and to build trust and credibility with potential employees.
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Develop A Referral Programme
It’s a fact that referred candidates are more likely to accept a job offer, perform better in that role, and stay at the job longer, resulting in lower recruitment costs and more productive and engaged employees. It’s a no brainer. And so developing a referral programme should definitely be on your list of SaaS recruitment strategies. The concept is simple: ask your existing employees to recommend or refer qualified candidates who would be a good match for the company. It’s less time-consuming than other recruitment strategies, meaning you can expand your talent pool without having to reach out to outside sources.
It’s highly likely that your employees will know people with similar skills and attitudes to themselves, and so their contacts could be highly valuable – plus, if they end up working for you because they have been referred by someone they respect and trust, they are more likely to become a motivated and productive employee.
Let your current employees know how they can refer candidates to you, and what is in it for them if they do. Keep it super simple, for example posting something about job opportunities within the company on your social media platforms and asking your employees to share it with their contacts. Update current employees if their recommendation has been successful, and make sure there is a good incentive (be it a bonus or a gift) to keep them sending new talent your way.
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Offer Flexible Work Arrangements
One of the top ways to attract (and ultimately hold on to!) the very best SaaS talent is to have flexibility within the workplace, with research conducted by OpenView revealing that 70% of full-time workers within the tech industry said that flexibility at work ‘critical’, and 36% saying that they would leave their current employer due to a lack of flexible work arrangements.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fact that being at our desks five days a week is unnecessary in order to be productive, and in fact many workplaces reported higher levels of productivity, a saving in costs, and happier employees overall, when workers were allowed to work from home either all or part of the week.
Offering work-from-home positions, part-time roles and freelance posts within your company could open a whole new pool of SaaS talent that would otherwise be unable to be a benefit to your business because of a lack of childcare arrangements, mobility problems, or not wanting to face a long and expensive commute. Championing flexibility in the workplace shows that your company has moved with the times, and has a vested interest in employees’ health and happiness, and in work and family life co-existing in harmony. Attractive indeed.
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Use Online Job BoardsÂ
The good old online job board is still one of the best tools at your disposal for reaching candidates, and utilising them should absolutely be a part of your SaaS recruitment strategy.
A job board is a website employers use to advertise vacancies, and where job seekers go to look for new employment opportunities. There’s a huge variety of job boards out there, including some familiar names like Monster and Careerbuilder, which cater to employers in all industries, while others are niche – for example Dice (the tech industry) and Behance (the design industry).
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Create Targeted Campaigns
A targeted recruitment campaign allows you to be very specific about the specific skills or qualities that you need or want your candidates to possess, or help you recruit people who live in a particular location. It allows your company to increase the number and quality of applicants, which is particularly useful if you are struggling with difficult-to-fill positions.
Targeted recruitment can trump open recruitment in several ways, by increasing current employee morale, lowering your turnover rate, and showing your commitment to local communities – to name but a few.
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Participate In Job Fairs
Recruiting digitally is ‘how it’s done’ for the most part these days, but for meeting potential candidates face-to-face, and showcasing your company’s culture and values, you can’t beat a good old-fashioned job fair.
These one-day events, where employers exhibit their job opportunities at a local venue can be invaluable in finding untapped SaaS talent. They’re a good way to speed-up the recruitment process, with many company’s hiring on the spot if they find a rare gem!
Make sure you prepare by bringing plenty of marketing material in order to attract potential candidates, including brochures with your company information, business cards, and exciting stuff featuring your company logo – choose something that represents your company culture rather than the bog-standard pens and stickers with your logo on.
Have questions prepared for interested candidates, ideally role-specific (do they have experience with a certain type of software, for example), as well as questions about their career goals, and what they know about your company.
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Tap Into industry Networks
Networking within the SaaS industry can be a useful Saas recruitment strategy, helping you to find top talent within other companies as well as the potential of having qualified individuals referred to you.
Who better to point you in the right direction of new talent than those who do what you do, and know exactly the sort of qualities you’ll be looking for in an employee?
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Utilise Video Interviews
Video interviews are incredibly popular, especially since the pandemic, and they can be a useful tool in SaaS recruitment. This is especially true if you are looking to recruit remote workers, or workers who are outside of the UK, saving you time as well as money on travel costs.
While technical problems could potentially put a spanner in the works (WiFi is not infallible), and some might find it harder to create a real rapport with a candidate via a screen, the benefits are many. It can shorten the interview length, be less stressful for nervous candidates, and streamline and speed-up the hiring process. It also helps you to filter out ‘bad’ candidates, so that you can narrow the field and only have to invite the very best applicants for an in-person or follow-up interview
If this still all sounds too much like hard work, why not let Abika do it all for you? Contact us today to discuss your requirements and leave it to our team of highly-experienced SaaS recruitment experts, or advertise positions with us directly via our state-of-the-art job board.
