Win the war for Dynamics 365 Talent with our free guides

We’ve been saying this a lot: there is a war for Dynamics 365 Talent. If you’re an employer in the Microsoft Dynamics area, you’ve been experiencing this first-hand.

You also know what kind of challenges this war for talent brings: filling your Dynamics roles is difficult, and your Dynamics employees don’t always stay with you very long.

In order to build and maintain strong Dynamics 365 teams, it’s essential that you expand your focus from ‘how to quickly fill these urgent Dynamics openings’ to also include ‘how to make my Dynamics hiring easier on the long-term’.

There is one great way to do this: building a Dynamics-targeted, candidate-centric and employee-centric HR strategy.

While this is an easy thing to say, it’s not quite as simple to implement. This is why we created guides on how to improve parts of your hiring strategy in ways that will help both with your current openings and with your long-term Dynamics 365 talent sourcing and talent management.

We’ve called this series of guides the Winning the war for Microsoft Dynamics Talent series. If you haven’t yet read them all, now is a great time to catch-up.

With this article, you will get a summary of all the steps you need to follow in order to build a stronger HR strategy in the Dynamics sector.

There are six essential areas which you’ll need to look into if you want to build a candidate-centric hiring strategy.

1 – Attracting Dynamics 365 talent

This is the area in which many of the Dynamics employers we talk to struggle the most: there are not enough good candidates for their job openings.

If you find that your job openings take way too long to be filled, that your adverts get very few applications or that you can’t seem to get a CV that’s even close to meeting your hiring needs, chances are this is the area on which you need to focus first.

By making a few adjustments to the way you build your Dynamics roles and to the way you write your Dynamics job adverts, you should be able to increase not only the amount, but also the relevance of the Dynamics applications you receive.

The key is to create attractive roles and job adverts so that more Dynamics consultants want to work for you. Another part of this is also to create smarter job adverts which will make it easy for consultants to find out whether the role might be right for them or not.

To get started, it’s this way: How to attract Dynamics 365 candidates – 5 step guide.

2 – Selecting the right Dynamics 365 candidates

When you’ve spent so long looking for your new Dynamics employees, it’s important to have some confidence that they will fit well within your organisation.

If you find that your new Dynamics employees’ performances tend not to match what you expected based on their CVs and interviews; or, perhaps, that some of them don’t seem to be a great fit for your company culture, it may be a good idea to review your Dynamics candidate selection process.

A solid Dynamics selection process focuses on what you need to find out most about your candidate, but also on what the candidate needs to know and understand about you.

Its purpose is to make sure all parties can make an informed decision as to whether or not you are the right fit for each-other. And as an added bonus, if your candidates really enjoy your interviewing process, they’re more likely to end-up saying good things about you to their colleagues and network, which helps to build your employer brand.

If you are interested in exploring this topic in more depth, our guide to selecting the right Dynamics 365 candidates will help you to build effective CV screening and interviewing processes for Dynamics.

3 – Retaining and nurturing your best Dynamics employees

Reducing the turn over of your Dynamics teams is an important part of your success as a Dynamics employer. If you have a good strategy in place for hiring and selecting your Dynamics candidates, why not invest some time in making sure they stay longer?

Particularly, this should be an area of focus for you if your Dynamics employees tend not to stay very long, if you regularly hear complaints about the work conditions in your company or if you notice employee motivation and commitment dropping.

Get started now with our guide: How to retain Dynamics 365 employees.

4 – Expanding your Dynamics 365 talent pool

Another great way of building your perfect Dynamics team is to find new ways of discovering Dynamics 365 talent.

Your perfect Dynamics employee might not have been trained in Microsoft Dynamics 365 yet. Or they might be living in a different country but wanting to relocate to where you are. Or they might be missing one key skill which you could help them learn.

The cost of hiring the wrong candidate for your team or company is much higher than that of training or cross-training the right one.

Expanding the range of your options when looking for Dynamics candidates can not only make your Dynamics hiring process quicker and cheaper, it also gives you a greater range of opportunities to find amazing new team members.

There are several options which you can explore if you are interested in the idea of expanding the pool of Dynamics 365 candidates for your roles. If you are intrigued, read more details here: Expand your Dynamics talent pool – a guide for employers.

5 – Building an inbound Dynamics recruitment strategy

The guides listed above have practical steps you can take which will help to quickly fix the most challenging areas of your Dynamics 365 hiring strategy and which, if you implement them as processes, will have long-term benefits too. But for a solid long-term change, you can go a step further and start building an inbound Dynamics recruitment strategy.

What does this mean? Instead of focusing your efforts on aggressively head-hunting for your current roles, you would work on making Dynamics candidates come to you.

How would you do this? By applying marketing techniques to your hiring process and hiring campaigns.

Inbound marketing techniques can and should be applied to all the stages of your hiring process. They are also connected to your policies for retaining and nurturing employees.

As this represents a more ‘global’ change than the steps listed above, a good time to start working on Inbound Dynamics recruitment would be after some of the advice from the previous steps has been successfully implemented.

If you are ready to learn more about this, read our guide: Build your Microsoft Dynamics inbound recruitment strategy.

6 – Building your company culture and using it to find candidates

Finding the right candidate isn’t just about finding someone with the right set of skills. Skills can be taught. In the Dynamics world (like in many other markets), culture fit makes a huge difference to the overall performance of your teams.

First, you probably want to hire employees who share your company’s core values: they will be the ones to carry them out when working with your customer. Second, you should aim to hire candidates who will fit in well within your team and thrive within your company culture.

To this end, make sure you are clear as to what your core values are and what you want your company culture to be. What kind of work ethics do you expect of your employees?

Do you value a healthy work/life balance, or do you want people who are looking to work hard and earn a lot in return? Are you more of a fun and relaxed company, or do you value a structured and professional environment?

Once you know the answers to these questions, there are two things you should do:

1. Check that your current company culture and the values displayed by your existing employees are a match for what you have determined you want. If it’s not, you will need to work on your internal HR policies in order to build your perfect work environment.
2. Build your hiring process around your values and company culture. These elements should be clear in your job adverts and on your career pages. They should also be integrated to your interviewing process.

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365 Talent Portal is the Microsoft Dynamics platform that “has developed the right model to meet today’s demands with openness, transparency, and a focus on adding value.”

Thousands of Consultants have joined us for free Dynamics online training and great jobs. For your Dynamics staffing needs visit 365talentportal.com

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