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Do you remember the last time your organization lost top talent?

The consequences were huge: a lengthy recruitment period where competition from other companies for the best candidates was strong; frustration and disappointment within the organization; and the field of candidates wasn’t particularly strong and choices were limited.

Meanwhile, work output slowed and team members were overburdened perhaps leading to further team losses or even customer dissatisfaction. In turn, the financial implications of slower output, hiring and training costs were damaging.

These are problems that you will never go through when one of your prized employees leave if you have an agile hiring strategy in place. An agile hiring strategy is agile in name and by nature, which means you were able to prevent or combat these issues before they were able to cause any damage to your HR.

It’s certain: the wrong recruitment strategy can have serious consequences for a business of any size. Here’s why you need to introduce an agile hiring strategy that will eliminate many standard recruitment issues.

What is an Agile Hiring Strategy?

Agile businesses are responsive and reactive. This is because they pay close attention to their inner strengths and create a workforce where human intellect and employee mindset are incredibly highly valued. As a result, these businesses are quick to react to external changes within their industry such as new technologies or increased competition.

An agile organization knows its strengths and weaknesses because frequent internal analysis is key. Part of this is changing and adapting internal workflow processes as often as necessary so that the human element of the organization is adaptable, confident, and reactive.

Agile recruitment is responsible for creating this workforce. As such, it also needs to be agile by nature.

An agile hiring strategy may mean abandoning your organization’s traditional recruitment path, or funnel, your organization has typically used. It might be that an agile hiring strategy workflow looks more like this:

  • Paying attention to the who the ideal candidate will be particularly their behaviors and attributes.
  • Setting up alternative and multiple pathways to employment within your organization, including sourcing passive candidates.
  • Empowering your recruitment manager to make hiring decisions at whatever point they feel confident and comfortable doing so. This should not necessarily be at the end of a long and labored process.
  • Looking at alternative screening methods, beyond CVs, where candidates might be able to demonstrate the strengths you are looking for early on in the process.

Avoiding 4 Common Recruitment Issues with an Agile Hiring Strategy

An agile hiring strategy can help you easily avoid these classic recruitment problems:

  1. The Right Candidates are not Finding you

The way in which you cast your recruitment net may not be working for you. This means that there isn’t enough top talent approaching your organization. You may have vacancies for HR jobs in UAE, for instance; in this case limiting yourself to one rigid pathway will eliminate much of the vast pool of candidates who may otherwise be interested.

Solution:

Allow hiring managers to have a flexible route to finding the right employees and adapt the hiring process to suit them. This may mean multiple ways of locating the right talent but ultimately casts the net wider. It allows the right candidates to follow the path that best suits them.

  1. A Candidate Looks Great On CV but Performs Badly at Interviews

Interviewing candidates is time-consuming and costly. For this reason, it is frustrating when a candidate that turned in a great CV and looked so promising turns out to be not so great a fit for your role after all.

Solution:

Create a unique and powerful screening opportunity for candidates to demonstrate the skills you are looking for, alongside submitting their CV. For instance, a short video response if communication skills are key to the role, or an appropriate technical task.

  1. Great Candidate, Awful CV

You probably suspect that at some point, you’ve lost out on talent because their resume or application didn’t cut it. There are a number of valid reasons a great candidate can have a terrible CV, especially if they have not been actively seeking the role you are advertising.

Solution:

Attach greater weight to alternative screening opportunities to ensure this type of candidate is not ruled out instantly. An agile hiring strategy will allow hiring manager the opportunity to spot this type of candidate and develop a process that allows them to shine too.

  1. Top Talent is Lost to Competition

If your organization is confident that there is the right talent within a pool of candidates, why waste time continuing down the traditional hiring funnel. This time-consuming process means you risk losing them to a competing organization.

Solution:

Empower your hiring managers to extend offers as soon as they see fit.

In essence, an agile hiring strategy gives you the right tools to help you find the right employees more efficiently, and faster. In the current climate, this is essential if you are going to attract the top talent before they take up an offer elsewhere.

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Anyone who has had any experience with marketing over the past couple of years is privy to how quickly the rules and regulations of the field can change. As marketing technology becomes more refined and the number of platforms being utilized increases, the old guidebook for how to run a successful marketing strategy has become almost obsolete.

While some marketing managers are desperately trying to keep making the old strategies work, others have shifted their sights further and gotten on-board with a whole new approach.

Agile principles gained prominence in the software development sphere where iterative and incremental development is prioritized. However, it wasn’t long before the benefits of the approach were tried and tested in the marketing world.

What is Agile Marketing?

Agile marketing can be defined as an approach where the priority is being open and responsive to change instead of following a specific rigid plan.

Firms implement agile marketing tools because they improve efficiency, transparency, predictability, and the ability to adapt to change. For example, instead of writing a 50-page marketing plan every once in a while, you would write a one-page proposal every quarter. The proposal would specify your firm’s goals and aspirations and ensure everyone is on the same page. After a month, your team would come together to reset priorities and make a plan of action for the next month.

The Agile Marketing Manifesto & Principles

The Agile Manifesto was created in 2012 by a team of savvy marketers who wanted to establish an agreed-upon set of values and principles to guide marketers as they adopted this approach.

According to the manifesto, Agile marketers value:

  1. Validated learning over opinions and conventions
  2. Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
  3. Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
  4. The process of customer discovery over static prediction
  5. Flexible vs. rigid planning
  6. Responding to change over following a plan
  7. Many small experiments over a few large bets

They didn’t vote on a set of principles, but these are the current proposed ones:

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of marketing that solves problems.
  • We welcome and plan for change. We believe that our ability to quickly respond to change is a source of competitive advantage.
  • Deliver marketing programs frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • Great marketing requires close alignment with the business people, sales, and development.
  • Build marketing programs around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • Learning, through the build-measure-learn feedback loop, is the primary measure of progress.
  • Sustainable marketing requires you to keep a constant pace and pipeline.
  • Don’t be afraid to fail; just don’t fail the same way twice.
  • Continuous attention to marketing fundamentals and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity is essential.

Benefits of Agile Marketing

As a result of these values and principles, there are plenty of benefits to agile marketing and agile marketing automation. Here are four of the main ones:

1.   It allows you to adapt.

Obviously, the most important and vital benefit of agile marketing is that it ensures you and your firm are in a position where you can adapt. You could even use SMS as a method of communicating, test the idea and adapt it with this method.

Marketing professionals in 2017 know that another algorithm change or marketing trend is around the corner at any given moment. While we don’t necessarily know what the modification will be, we can be sure that platforms are gearing up to serve us something new. That means that marketing plans have to be able to adjust swiftly and flawlessly and agile marketing is the way to do this. It is why 23% of senior marketers say Agile marketing delivers higher marketing metrics and KPIs.

  • It is more efficient.

No matter what context the term is used in, agility is associated with speed. In fact, 93% of CMOs who employ Agile practices say their speed to market for ideas, campaigns, and products has improved.

Issues, obstacles, and scheduling dilemmas show up sooner when using Agile and campaigns can be released faster.

  • It focuses on the correct timing.

At the end of the day, no matter how great a marketing campaign is, if it is the wrong time, it isn’t going to work.

By implementing agile marketing strategies, your team will be able to interpret and adjust to new data in the timeliest of fashions. Agile reduces the number of approvals needed to get work off the ground and allows teams to be more responsive to customers. These are just a couple of reasons why 21% of senior marketers enjoy more efficient marketing iterations once they’re Agile.

  • It leads to greater communication.

A key aspect of agile marketing is transparency, meaning that communication and feedback between team members is vital. This greater communication benefits the whole firm because the constant loop of feedback ensures that the whole business stays as adept as possible.

Many marketing departments who have implemented Agile find that their teams are now more in sync than ever about the department’s priorities.

Agile marketing can transform your marketing department and can make it a lot easier to build and manage a team that creates marketing magic. If you decide to implement Agile marketing, remember that simplicity is key. You want your plans to be more of a flexible outline than a 50-page book and your teams to be working in frequent, short periods of intensive work. By operating in this way, you can quickly measure the impact, timeliness, and efficiency of campaigns and continuously use that information to improve results over time.

By experimenting with lots of different strategies and then repeating those that work, you will begin to see the results of your agile marketing endeavors.