How a Well-Structured Recruitment Plan Looks Like
Let’s start with the recruitment plan’s building elements to get the whole picture of the recruiting process. To remember them easier, all you need to do is answer the five big questions:
- What: Skill gaps. This is the starting point of every recruitment strategy. You need to identify your company’s needs for the future. Suppose the skills that your employees are lacking can be taught in a shorter period and with a smaller amount of resources (being time-effective and cost-effective). In that case, your next step should be Learning & Development, not Hiring.
- Where: Positions. If your current workforce cannot fill the skill gaps, your recruitment team must open new positions for qualified candidates to bring the missing skills into your company.
- When: The Calendar. For this step to happen correctly, hiring managers must regularly check and adjust the calendar with the calendars of the departments needing employment.
- How: The Budget. Nothing is possible without the cost-awareness of each hiring process. For example, if you consider hiring a higher management role, you would also need to increase your budget.
- Who: The Candidates. The most important question is answered last because you must solve all the other 4 to clarify who you can hire. Imagine it like a puzzle, and this is the last piece – the final act of the recruitment strategy. The candidate will naturally fit in if all the other parts are correctly set.
Understanding Your Recruitment Needs
A good starting point is to assess your current recruitment status and future hiring needs. This involves considering factors like expected growth, potential employee turnover, and any new roles required to achieve your company’s objectives. Also, identifying skill gaps in each department can help you develop a strategy to enhance your organisation’s overall strength in the coming quarters or years.
Assessing Current Workforce and Identifying Gaps
The first step in determining the best talent for your job is identifying skill gaps. Determine what functions are needed for each department and how. What’s going to happen in the upcoming year?
By understanding how your staff will handle future work assignments you can make the best possible decision for hiring staff and reducing costs.
Defining Job Roles and Responsibilities
Understanding roles and responsibilities is crucial for the smooth operation of any business. When team members are clear about their duties, they can perform their tasks more efficiently and effectively. The clarity helps avoid confusion, reduce overlap, and ensure everyone is aligned towards common goals.
Developing the Recruitment Strategy
Recruiting strategies are your blueprint for re-creating the successful hiring journey. Once set right, they provide a smooth and efficient process whenever you follow them. Starting from the detailed job descriptions, as they lay the foundations of a successful hiring plan. Once we clearly formulate our vacant position, it’s time to find suitable candidates. Targeting the audience seems easy, especially now that tools like LinkedIn Navigator exist. But don’t forget to look out for a few traditional means of recruiting, like spreading word-of-mouth through your network or visiting industry events.
Next in line are your resources: the budget frame and the timeframe. Keeping your recruitment process on track and on the budget is crucial. This is the part when you don’t have to be creative, as you should adhere to the strict rules that were functioning previously. Don’t forget to include the final step that some companies miss: building and presenting a strong employer brand. It reflects the company’s culture as a whole, and it attracts not only qualified but also culture-fit candidates.
Setting Recruitment Goals
The recruitment plan must contain quantifiable goals to confirm that the recruitment process meets the company’s hiring needs. Here we are talking about the industry’s standard – the SMART goals:
- Specific goals – Be clear and detailed about what you want to accomplish with your recruitment plan. Instead of response rate, set your goal of improving the candidate-to-hire ratio by 20% within the next quarter.
- Measurable goals – Set a benchmark: Key Performance Indicators you want to achieve, like the one mentioned above. Or are you aiming for lower cost-per-hire? Higher conversion rate? Better time-to-hire? Choose one, add a time frame and follow up on it.
- Achievable goals – This is about setting the right expectations. Experienced recruitment agencies have mastered this method of knowing the limits of their partnering companies and pushing them smoothly upwards by setting ambitious but attainable goals.
- Relevant goals – By focusing on what drives the company’s financial engine, you wouldn’t be spending valuable time and effort setting up goals that are not productive for the business.
- Time-based goals – The timing of hiring is also of the essence. Ad-hoc vacancies require more resources, and they bring a lot of uncertainties. But when there is an appropriate recruitment plan, it helps to guide the hiring process more smoothly and efficiently, throughout the year.
Choosing Recruitment Methods
Job vacancies can be advertised through various marketing and recruitment channels. Job boards are mandatory when it comes to finding qualified candidates. Going through your recruitment agency’s talent pool is also a quick way to pre-select a higher volume of job seekers. An applicant tracking system is another popular way to manage job applications at a large scale. Whatever you choose, be aware that recruitment agencies can also help you find the most suitable one, according to your recruitment plan.
Creating an Attractive Employer Brand
Appealing employer branding is about your company’s culture, mission and vallues, showcased through your work. Your organisation’s social media profiles are the best place to exhibit the culture of your workplace. This is the most suitable way to ensure a flow of culture-fit candidates who like the image of the company they follow online.
Building a Positive Company Culture
It’s all about improving people’s experience at work. The pleasure of coming to the office is replicated and spread quickly among colleagues. And we are not talking about the results of providing small perks and fancy offices, but rather about the psychological safety in the workplace. Whenever and wherever people feel a positive work environment, they thrive. And they don’t hesitate to share their optimistic energy further on.
Promoting Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
Employee Value Proposition is also an Employer’s Unique Selling Point. What you give vs. what they get. But when presented to a broader audience, it is better to show the perspective of the receiving side.
For example: “The Cradle of the Rising Stars” could be the EVP for a recruiting company—an inspiring, motivational message aimed at the success of both the employees and the talent they recruit.
When you get the right message that resonates with all the employees, you are ready to promote it to third parties and potential candidates. Starting from the company’s website, especially its “work with us” page, continuing with social media and including the message as a signature for every post. Do not forget to include the EVP in the job boards’ ads and emphasise it during interviews.
Crafting Effective Job Advertisements
Formulating appropriate and accurate job descriptions is crucial here. But before you can do them correctly, your HR team needs to know all the requirements about the job postings and state them clearly on the job boards. Job seekers are not fond of generic explanations. The more detailed the ad, the more job candidates it will bring. This meticulous process will also result in a less confusing onboarding process later.
Implementing the Recruitment Process
The screening phase starts immediately once the job applications start arriving. You don’t have to wait until the last deadline to close the door for any future potential candidates. But at the same time it is also good to restock the talent pool with more new CVs.
Nowadays, it is popular to go through two or three rounds of interviews. The hiring managers do the first interview to collect all the essential info. The second round is the assessment phase, where the hiring department manager leads the interview, trying to learn more about the candidate’s technical knowledge. The last interview is for the final decision and arrangement of the employment.
Evaluating the Recruitment Process
Every successful process needs evaluation to keep up with the upward movement. Hiring managers can identify the strengths and weaknesses and map out the opportunities and threats noticed while recruiting. For the progress to take place, you can try to apply the changes and do the refreshed procedure again from the start. Software developers call it the Fail Fast Principle, and recruiters could learn a lot from acquiring it. It means delivering the required actions without delay. Quickly evaluating their efficiency and then going back to step one to re-apply the corrections.
Successful Recruitment With Olive Recruit
Olive Recruit’s Applicant Tracking System ATS is your hiring manager’s proven success rate amplifier. It cuts down the time and resources needed while, at the same time, it doubles the results. But it wouldn’t be possible without joint recruiting efforts from both sides: effective recruitment strategies and plans are built with the help of our dedicated account manager and your talent acquisition team.
Olive Recruit is deeply committed to making a positive impact by focusing on collaboration and finding top talents in the UK.
We are placing the right people in the right roles, following the custom-made recruitment plan created according to your company’s needs.
Make your wise decision now: partner with a reliable, experienced recruitment agency. Contact us today!
