Talent acquisition will always be a challenge.

Whether your recruiting team is struggling to put together a pool of qualified candidates or you’re overwhelmed by a horde of applicants on every job listing, the target is always moving when it comes to hiring the best employees into your company.

What most firms don’t realize is that the key to being a world class company is to is to invest in the employees you already have. Your existing employees have already been through recruitment and most likely have valuable feedback that can help you improve your process. They are your best advisors when it comes to evaluating and adjusting your benefits package. They’re walking representatives of the culture you’re trying to create and the behaviors you want to see in newcomers to the office.

Most importantly, they’re your loudest and best source of advertising when you put out the call for new team members.

Here are three proven strategies you can use to leverage your current team and attract the best employees on the market.

Top 3 Strategies to Attract the Best Employees

The best talent acquisition strategy starts with optimizing your internal employee experience. Pursuing these four tips, in order, will help you develop an employer brand and a corporate culture that speak for themselves.

1. Create an employee-first culture.

Start by gathering valuable intel from companies who have their employee culture locked in.

After reading through the HubSpot Culture Code or the “Employee First” culture manifesto from The Container Store, you can immediately see what an employee-centered culture looks like from the inside—and you’ll notice a distinct difference from companies who focus their culture entirely on the customer.

Focusing on employees doesn’t just look good on career pages. It pays off. Firms who rank highest on Comparably’s best company culture list are some of the biggest players in the global marketplace today.  

Start putting your employees first by making sure trust and respect feature prominently in your company’s core values. Then act on those principles, right now, in ways that truly matter to your employees:

• Prioritize flexibility and work-life balance. Extend your work-from-home options. Roll out a flexible schedule policy. Reevaluate your PTO. These changes show that you trust your employees to make sound decisions about their own work-life balance.
• Expand internal career opportunities. Today’s candidates demand clear and exciting career pathways when they join a company. First things first: establish a firm policy for promoting from within. Then make sure that internal opportunities abound for advancement across your company—and if those roles or pathways don’t yet exist, create them.

2. Engage employees with an incentive program.

Bolster your company culture even more by creating a lasting source of employee engagement.

Research from Bersin & Associates found that employee incentive programs actually help create a culture of recognition within a company. The same study also found that companies with fantastic employee recognition programs experience 31% lower turnover. Talk about an unexpected way to ease your recruitment woes!

You may already have an incentive program in place. But whether that’s a “president’s club” reward for your top salespeople or a point-based rewards system, you might be focused on incentivizing just the top 5% of your employees. The overachievers in your company are already used to receiving recognition. The big question is: what are you doing to motivate the other 95%?

We recommend putting your employee rewards budget toward a program that intuitively and proactively works to engage employees at all levels of success. The best employee incentive programs allow employers to create unique benchmark goals for each role in their company. The programs we create for our clients at Inproma allow for multiple winners at each level, and for each employee to earn incentives each time they reach a new milestone.

High-quality incentive programs significantly increase employee engagement by giving employees the rewards (and bragging rights) they crave. They weave recognition into the fabric of your organization and help your employees love coming to work each day.

Even better, a good incentive program is a valuable benefit that can attract potential new hires during the interview phase.

3. Leverage your best brand ambassadors.

After you’ve created a solid foundation for corporate culture, you can put the finishing touches on your employer brand.

Every company engages in strategic brand development to design a killer brand and manage ongoing brand equity. However, companies like Salesforce and Netflix have used the same process to build their brand as employers—perfectly projecting to the world and to applicants what it means to be part of their team.  

Get your marketing team involved and solidify your own internal brand.

First, clearly identify your company’s purpose, mission, and vision as they relate to the employee experience. Survey your current employees to discover what attracted them to your company, and use that data to form a well-rounded brand identity statement. Tally out all the most valuable benefits you provide for your employees. And use all of that data to form a convincing value proposition for candidates who apply to work for you.

Now it’s time to leverage the best brand ambassadors you could ever hire: your own employees.

With the incredible culture you’ve created and the amount of engagement you’ve inspired through powerful incentives, they’re probably already talking about your company. Take things further by encouraging your employees to:

• Leave honest reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed.
• Share your company’s biggest successes and best thought leadership content on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Bring in their friends and former colleagues to interview for open positions. (And don’t forget to offer a healthy referral bonus!)

There is no better advertisement for your company than a satisfied employee. Leverage your best team members, and arm them to help you bring in 20, 50, or 100 more.