Regardless of your industry or business model, you must attract top talent to your organization. Like any other piece of your business, you need a plan. That’s where a robust and dynamic recruitment strategy comes in.
A recruitment strategy clearly outlines how your company will approach the recruitment process and the tools it will use to do so. A sound recruitment strategy should include sub-strategies for different teams and work groups within your organization.
Developing A Recruitment Strategy
Here are some essential steps to formulate a viable and effective recruitment strategy.
1. Assess current strategies
Before you launch into the new, you should review existing corporate recruitment strategies. The documents you pull together can provide critical details such as the skills you need and the compensation packages you can offer based on your current business growth and goals. You may also find information about key recruitment events during the year and the places where you have found the most success.
The main aim of the step is to discern and preserve best practices. You should also review what other companies are doing and see what can be applied to your organization.
At the end of this step, you may need to update some of the administrative practices in your recruitment program. You should consider the process from the candidate’s perspective. Don’t be afraid to cut: Have your talent acquisition team walk through all the steps a candidate might take when considering a position and remove procedures that are no longer applicable or useful.
2. Solicit feedback from stakeholders and candidates
Gathering feedback from front-line managers, executives, and employees is essential to making your recruitment strategy consistent with current needs. You should also solicit information from job candidates—from those you have and have not hired.
3. Identify new ways to attract job candidates
Posting to job boards, creating referral programs, hosting recruitment events, and outsourcing the entire recruitment process to an independent contractor are some ways to attract active and passive job seekers. When developing a recruitment strategy, you should look at all these options and determine which ones best suit your business model and organizational culture.
4. Implement advanced tools and technologies
You should aim to extend your recruitment reach as far as possible. Digital tools and platforms will vastly increase your candidate response and engagement. However, much of the process will become automated, making it much easier and less costly to find and select the right people.
5. Review the interview process
There is no one right way to conduct interviews. But your company should have a standard way of doing them. Consider whether phone screening would be used for the first interview for all positions or only for certain positions. Think about the team interview structure and which questions will be standard. Evaluate the types of background checks you will conduct on candidates who have made it through the interview stage.
6. Develop a guide for internal recruitment
If your organization is large enough, you may be able to recruit current employees. Your recruitment strategy should include guidance for any team, group, or department to recruit someone from another part of the company.
7. Assess the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing your recruiting process
Once you have developed the general outlines for a recruitment strategy, it may be best to turn over the execution of such a plan to a professional agency. Your talent acquisition team can handle the day-to-day work of interviewing, evaluating, and selecting new candidates. However, it may be more cost-effective to outsource the much bigger job of keeping your talent pipeline full.
The Bayard Difference
Bayard Advertising specializes in helping companies find the right talent. We offer solutions to companies that want to develop a recruitment strategy.
Attracting talent is only one part of the equation — hiring, onboarding, and retaining talent are equally critical to achieving organizational goals. As a full-service partner, we are experts in the entirety of the hiring funnel. We help our clients evaluate every point of their process based on our years of experience and aggregation of industry best practices. Our recruitment strategists then work as a second arm to your talent acquisition team, adding support wherever you need it — from job postings to application reviews, from interviews to onboarding. We leverage effective strategies, tactics, and technologies to optimize talent management and minimize our clients’ recruitment workload (and stress).
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