Human Resources Blog - Spark Hire

How to Create A Recruitment Strategy For Your Business

A company is only as good as its employees. That means you need to exert every effort to attract top talent to your company. To get top-notch personnel, you need to plan. In other words, a recruitment strategy is critical.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can create that plan to attract employees who will help propel your company to success.

5 Steps To Create Your Recruitment Strategy

Creating a recruitment strategy is much more than just knowing the job vacancies you need to fill. Here are the five steps you should follow to make the plan that won’t just increase your chances of getting the right people, but will also help reduce time-to-hire and bring down company recruitment costs. 

1. Analyze Recruitment and Skills Gaps

You can’t hire new employees without knowing what positions the company needs. That means the first thing you need to do is identify your company’s hiring needs and look at the gaps that your current employees won’t be able to fill.

Identifying your firm’s current hiring needs is simple. When someone leaves the company, a position opens up. Managers can give you this information. Meet with them to discuss their current staffing needs.

But knowing the company’s current hiring needs is not enough. Creating a good recruitment strategy entails anticipating future hiring needs, too. To determine what those are, you need to analyze the company’s growth and anticipate new job functions, promotions, and employee turnover. Which departments do you expect to grow, and will they require new employees when they do? Which ones are launching projects that will require extra human resources?

Once you have your skills gap analysis, look at your existing employees and see who has the skills to fill those job vacancies. There will likely be some functions that no-one on your current team can fulfil. You’ve found your skills gaps.

2. Create a Hiring Calendar

Now is the time to create a hiring calendar. Your hiring calendar should show when the vacancies you’ve identified need to be filled. It should also show how many new hires each department needs. Make sure your recruitment calendar covers the entire year.

Based on your calendar, create a hiring timeline. You want to indicate when each round of hiring will begin for each position. If you need a job filled by the third quarter, you’d need to start preparations by the second quarter at the latest. In other words, you need to give ample time for the preparations so you can meet the deadline for filling each vacancy.

It’s important as well to plan around your budget. The team at Unscrambled Words, for example, creates their hiring calendar as part of their budgeting process, to make sure they have the needed resources to meet their hiring goals.

The more specific your hiring timeline is, the better. A timeline with definite dates will help you see if you’re on track to meeting the deadlines once you start the hiring process. Remember, writing a recruitment plan is a lot like writing a business proposal. The more details you can include and the more specific you can be, the better.

3. List the Processes for Your Hiring Plan

Once you have your calendar and your deadlines for specific objectives, it’s time to specify how you will hit those objectives. 

The processes for achieving the final goal of recruitment are similar across companies and industries. You need to source strong candidates, review their applications, interview them, and then make an offer. Some companies include a test assignment if the position requires specialist or technical knowledge. 

Determine if you will be hiring from within the company or externally for each post. Your decision can depend on your skills gap analysis. If your current crop of employees doesn’t have the necessary skills for a vacancy, then you’ll have to source candidates from beyond the organization. Remember that if you promote someone from within, you’ll also need to fill the role they leave vacant. 

Specify how you will go about each stage of your recruitment strategy. For example, to source candidates, where exactly will you go? Will you post job advertisements on job boards only? Or will you include social media, too? You might prefer to attend job fairs in universities, if you’re looking for recent graduates. And so on. 

You should also specify the tools you will use in each process. For example, you might want to use applicant tracking software (ATS) to help facilitate application reviews. If you’re conducting virtual interviews, you’d need a video interviewing platform. Again, the more specific you can be, the better.

4. Write the Job Descriptions

At this stage, you need to go back to your skills gap and recruitment analysis and your list of the company’s vacancies. Now specify the requirements for each vacancy and write your job descriptions. What will the daily responsibilities of the new hire be? What are the specific skills needed to be a successful candidate? Specify any qualifications or certifications required, too. 

Here are the things you should include in your job descriptions:

  • Required education and experience
  • Skills needed (soft skills as well as technical skills) 
  • Professional accreditation or certification required
  • Other skills (e.g. languages)
  • Personal qualities and attributes
  • Day to day responsibilities
  • Chain of command (i.e. to whom the person will report and who will report to them)

Don’t overdo it, though. According to Harvard Business Review, women tend to apply for a post only if they meet 100% of the job description. Men apply if they meet at least 60%. So if your job description is highly specific, you may get fewer women applying and fewer applicants overall. Talk to hiring managers to figure out exactly what is a requirement and what isn’t. 

Make sure you make your job description compelling. Since you want to attract top talent, include what the company can offer to the successful applicant. A summary of salary range, benefits, and any other perks (such as flexible working) should be included. 

5. Create a Recruitment Budget

It’s time to create a recruitment budget.

Go back to what you have on your plan so far and figure out what each stage is likely to cost. According to Glassdoor, these are some of the typical cost of external recruiting:

  • Job sourcing
  • Background checks, work eligibility, and drug testing
  • Recruitment technology
  • Contractors
  • Pre-hire assessments
  • Recruitment process outsourcing (if outsourced)
  • Job boards
  • Marketing

Internal recruiting costs include payments to in-house recruiting staff, full-time internal recruiters, systems and technology, and referral awards. You can search for estimated costs online or check expenses based on your previous hiring. 

Once you’ve got an estimation of all your costs, draw up a detailed budget. Remember, this is what you will present to management for approval. It must be as accurate and as comprehensive as possible. Remember that it is always best to come in on-budget or slightly under budget at the end of a project, including a hiring process. 

A Recruitment Strategy is an Investment In Your Business’s Future

Employees play a critical role in business success. Without good employees, your company won’t be able to achieve its business goals. In short, any business that wants to succeed must be able to attract, hire, and retain great talent.

You cannot achieve this objective without a strategy. This means that a robust recruitment plan is vital. And creating that recruitment plan requires following a process.

Follow the steps we’ve laid out for you, and invest the time and effort in building your recruitment strategy. Remember: it is your investment in the future success of your business. Once you’ve nailed your perfect recruitment strategy, you’ll be able to attract the cream of the crop who will help propel your business to success.

About the Author

Petra Odak is a Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals, a simple yet incredibly powerful proposal software tool that helps you send high-converting, web-based business proposals in minutes. She’s a solution-oriented marketing enthusiast with more than 5 years of experience in various fields of marketing and project management.

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