Here are six steps to create an effective turn-key recruitment process.
Step One: Preparation & Planning
A full cycle recruiting strategy requires that you take time to create a candidate persona and job description.
Your candidate persona should represent the ideal candidate for the job. Document the traits, skills and other characteristics that align with the position you’re seeking to fill. This persona will guide your whole recruitment process, so take the necessary time to fully build out the profile.
Next, write a job description that will attract that persona. Your job description shouldn’t be a laundry list of job requirements. Make people want to apply. Talk about salary range, benefits, perks, and corporate culture and values.
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Step Two: Sourcing Candidates
There are two options to explore when sourcing candidates: internal and external.
Internal sourcing:
- Internal recruitment – the right person may already be an employee!
- Employee referral programs – a great fit may be a friend or former colleague of an employee.
External sourcing:
- Passive candidates – these people aren’t actively seeking a job, but they could be an excellent fit for your business or your client’s job openings. Find them through networking, online research, or your employees.
- Social media – use paid and organic social media efforts to market your open position and engage both active and passive candidates.
- Job boards – get your job description in front of candidates who are scouring job boards like monster.com or indeed.com.
Step Three: Screening
Ready to narrow down those candidates you’ve sourced? You can either use a manual screening method leveraging resume parsing tools or streamline screening by leveraging an applicant tracking system (ATS) that includes automated screening.
While resume parsing tools can help you search resumes using phrases or keywords to find potential employees, you’re only searching the story that the candidate wants you to hear.
With an ATS, you can use data collection tools to augment the resume and provide critical insights into your applicants’ personalities.
Step Four: Selecting
You’ve narrowed down your candidates, and it’s time to select the right person for the job. When selecting the ideal candidate, remember to:
Step Five: Hiring
When you find the right candidate, you can call the individual to extend the job offer. Be sure to follow up with a formal job offer letter or email that details duties, work schedule, start date, compensation, benefits, and other pertinent details.
Be prepared to negotiate if the person doesn’t accept your initial offer.
Step Six: Onboarding
This step is key when it comes to reducing turnover. Few things will scare off a new hire more than a lack of guidance and clarity on what he or she should be doing.
Create an onboarding plan for new employees. Be sure to include:
- Introductions to other team members.
- An orientation that covers corporate guidelines, values, and culture.
- A training schedule to help new staffers get acclimated and ready to succeed.
Streamline your end-to-end recruiting process
Everything that goes into an end-to-end recruiting process may sound time-consuming and costly, but the long-term ROI in hiring the right employees is undeniable. You just need to plan appropriately to strengthen your hiring process.
Selecting the right ATS can solve many of your recruiting challenges and streamline your recruiting process. Learn how the right platform can help your organization hire the best of the best:
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Recruiting is the lifeblood of any staffing organization. It is therefore critical for any staffing business to develop a strategy to consistently attract and retain quality talent while ensuring maximum resource utilization. One of the most effective ways of increasing profitability and staying ahead of the curve is by designing a strategy around the recruitment life cycle.
As such, any effective staffing strategy must include sales, recruitment, and human resource management processes.
Now, let us take a deep dive into what a recruitment life cycle is and learn how you can leverage it to achieve your business goals.
What is the Recruitment Life Cycle?
The recruitment life cycle is the process that begins with a need or requirement for a candidate and ends when the candidate is successfully hired or placed. It encompasses everything from that first moment that you decide you need a new employee to the process of onboarding your new hire.
Once we reach the end of the cycle, it starts all over again. This allows your to systematize your hiring process. It also lets you constantly tweak your recruitment process so that you are making fewer mistakes and hiring increasingly outstanding employees.
The recruitment life cycle is helpful for hiring every single employee. Whether you are looking for part-time employees in your customer service department or your next CEO, this process can maximize your odds of finding that outstanding employee.
Now, let’s take an in-depth look at the six stages of the recruitment life cycle. No one stage is more important than the other. Rather, they all work together to help you find and hire great employees.
When describing these stages, we are going to discuss them in the context of a company trying to fill one open position. That said, you can apply this same process if you are trying to fit multiple positions.
Recruitment Process Step 1 – Preparation
The first stage of the recruitment process is preparation. In this stage, you are defining the ideal candidate and preparing your search for that ideal candidate. There are plenty of factors that you will want to likely consider.
For one thing, you and your team will need to settle on the skills, education, and experience that are desired for that open position. While this may seem obvious on the surface, it’s important to sit down with your team and agree on the specifics.
Along with these “hard” skills and experiences, you may also be looking for “soft” factors. These can include personal characteristics and other factors that fit in with your company’s culture. Once you have settled on these qualities, you’ll want to write a job description that clearly outlines these requirements.
Recruitment Process Step 2 – Sourcing
Next is the sourcing stage. Here, you will want to be searching for both active and passive candidates. Candidates can come from anywhere, so you’ll definitely want to cast a wide net.
Some of the places where you can source candidates include your website, social media websites (like LinkedIn), and job boards. Employee referrals are also an outstanding source of potential hires.
Recruitment Process Step 3 – Screening
The third stage is screening. This occurs when you have sourced a large number of applicants. You and your team will go through the applicants’ resumes to determine which candidates are qualified.
If you are interested in any applicants, you will likely schedule in-person or phone interviews. While this stage in the recruitment process can be lengthy, it’s important to be patient and add promising candidates to your shortlist.
Recruitment Process Step 4 – Selecting
Selecting is the fourth stage. This is when you actually interview the candidates. It’s important to remember that a candidate’s CV only reveals so much. You’ll want to ask detailed questions about the candidate’s experience, skills, and knowledge about your company.
Behavioral interview questions can also be insightful. Finally, depending on the position, you may need to conduct reference checks or formal background checks.
Recruitment Process Step 5 – Hiring
The fifth stage is hiring. At this stage in the recruitment process, you’ll choose the qualified candidate that you want to hire. While this can be difficult, it’s important that you make the decision based on the role you are hiring for.
Once you have made your selection, you will submit a formal offer letter to your candidate. You should also be willing to answer any questions the candidate has before he or she accepts the offer.
Recruitment Process Step 6 – Onboarding
Finally, onboarding is the sixth stage. Upon the candidate accepting your offer, you will want to start familiarizing him or her with your organization.
This may include everything from a formal orientation and mandatory training programs to an organized lunch with the new hire and their colleagues. Don’t slack on this stage, as it is extremely important to the future success of your new hire.
Tools to Manage the Recruitment Life Cycle
With this background in mind, let’s talk about some helpful tools that can help you manage the recruitment life cycle. You may already have some of these tools in your workflow.
If so, that’s great! You can supplement those tools with others mentioned below. If not, we recommend that you implement the following tools to help you with your work.
To start, you’ll want to invest in a high-quality Applicant Tracking System (ATS). ATS is a helpful tool that can help you manage every part of your recruiting process. For instance, you can easily search through candidates in your database and easily communicate with large groups of applicants. Investing in an ATS is a fabulous idea.
Next, think about investing in candidate search engines. This is more of an active way to find potential candidates in the marketplace. No matter the position that you are trying to fill, these candidate search engines can help you find interesting candidates. From there, you can reach out to those candidates directly.
From there, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with job search engines. Job search engines like Indeed can be great platforms to post your open positions. While we don’t necessarily recommend one job search engine or another, we encourage you to experiment with them. You may find your next great hire from one of these platforms.
Finally, seriously consider creating an internal employee referral system. Studies show that some of the best hires come from referrals from current employees. You can also leverage this benefit—so long as you work to create a referral incentive system. Incentives can be everything from bonuses to some other non-monetary incentive. – Check G2Crowd top recruitment tools here.
Leveraging the Recruitment Life Cycle
The recruitment life cycle represents just one part of the staffing business.
As you likely know, most staffing companies have resource pools with a set of skills, experience, qualifications, etc. Each day that a resource pool candidate spends on the bench, the staffing business loses money.
To ensure full utilization of the source pool, staffing companies must track employee performance, skill shortages, and industry trends.
Staffing businesses need to deploy emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) that can help them stay competitive and ahead of the curve by offering timely, accurate, and data-backed insights on hiring trends, bench management, skills shortages, and employee performance.
Ultimately, when the recruiting life cycle is effectively dovetailed into your staffing business, it can go a long way in accomplishing all of your strategic goals.
The recruitment life cycle is an essential component of any staffing business. No matter the size of your business, we encourage you to leverage the recruiting life cycle in your day-to-day work. By doing this, you can substantially increase your chances of accomplishing all of your strategic staffing goals.
Oorwin to the Rescue
With an integrated approach to the staffing business, Oorwin helps you maximize profitability effectively dovetailing sales, recruitment, and HR processes.