Recruiting top talent is a prerequisite for the success and long-term growth of your organization. Today’s recruiters need to be prepared for an increasingly competitive and fluid job market. You can’t wait for your dream candidates to come to you; you must thoughtfully recruit them.

Below are five strategies to reimagine your recruitment process:

1. Turn Your Sourcing on Auto-Pilot

The best candidates usually have a job and are not applying to your open positions. You need to proactively source them, but searching for these passive candidates on Linkedin, GitHub, and Twitter takes tremendous time. Companies like Fetcher combine AI with a team of human recruiters to source candidates in a more efficient and cost-effective way.

Once you have calibrated a search, you can fully automate the candidate outreach as well, ensuring a qualified, diverse pipeline of talent for your open roles whether or not you have the time to source. With automated sourcing, recruiters can now refocus their time on the higher value aspect of recruiting — building relationships with top candidates.

2. Leverage Your Employee Networks

Referrals remain the #1 source in hiring volume and are hired at a rate of 1-out-of-3 applications for top-performing firms. Your employees are the best source of referrals because they often have a network of contacts with similar experience and can play matchmaker to your company’s culture. To grow these networks, it’s important to encourage team members to participate in conferences, networking events and professional associations where they might meet potential co-workers. After asking your employees for referrals, you could also consider a referral incentive program.

3. Enlist the Expertise of Existing Employees

Allowing your team members to give feedback on the job description will help you expand your candidate pool. Employees who would work alongside a prospective new hire also have a deeper understanding of the type of person who might work well with the rest of their team. Given this, it is important to have your current employees help you review resumes, sit in on interviews, and give you their perspective.

4. Make your Employee Brand your Talent Magnet

Today’s job candidates expect transparency about the reality of working at your company. Additionally, candidates are more excited to work at ethical, mission-driven, and innovative companies. If done correctly, your “employee brand” should convey the value of working for your company. Your brand should engage candidates, expanding the candidate pool and making the recruitment process easier for you.

The first step to improving your employee brand is having an understanding of how your company is currently perceived and being open to feedback. Next, find a clear mission and market definition that your team has agreed on for how you would like to be seen. Finally, you must make the new brand a reality inside your organization and communicate it as such. After you internally apply your new brand, spend time making a compelling job description, while also building your online presence in order to distinguish your organization as one that has an inclusive, fun, and collaborative culture.

5. Consider Internal Candidates

Consider posting an open position internally first. A study by Wharton Professor Matthew Bidwell found that not only do external hires get paid more, but for their first two years on the job, they receive significantly lower marks in performance reviews. External hires were paid 18% more than the internal promotes for the same job, while also being 61% more likely to be fired. Even though the external hires tended to have more education and experience than the internal hires, Bidwell says employers need to appreciate how important it is for workers to know the inner workings of an organization.

Moreover, promotions, if done correctly, will often improve morale at your company because it assures your employees that their work is appreciated while also demonstrating the potential for upward mobility. This has the power to improve your company’s culture and retention rates.