The Strategic Recruiter’s Guide to Talent Acquisition

Be it an entrepreneurial startup business or a Fortune 500 company, the success of an organization depends on the quality of its employees. According to SHRM’s talent acquisition study, employers who excelled in recruitment and talent acquisition experienced 3.5 times more revenue growth and twice the profit margin of other businesses. Acquiring the right talent, however, can be immensely challenging.
 
Employers must decide what type of people they want to attract, what message they want to convey, and how best to target and attract top talent. To help overcome these challenges and acquire the best-fit employee platform, we’ve outlined a model on how to optimize your recruitment process.

The Current Recruitment Landscape

By improving their recruitment process, employers can attract and retain top-talent, optimize employee performance levels, and enhance the efficiency and success of their business operations. Poorly executed recruitment processes can result in missing top-talent opportunities, hiring unqualified applicants, and increases the likelihood that employees will quit. In recent years, social media platforms have not only emerged as a showcasing opportunity for job-seekers but also as a recruitment tool for employers looking to hire or catch a glimpse of a prospective candidate’s aptitude and values.
 
In 2009, UPS utilized online-networks to hire 19 people; with the same approach only six years later, the enterprise hired a staggering 24,475 individuals. Today, even mobile technology has helped facilitate the recruitment process, as many candidates apply for jobs using their cellphones. While the exponential growth of networking websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook have proved beneficial to recruiters and applicants alike, it is vital for employers to consider the pros and cons of technology in the hiring process before developing new talent acquisition practices.
For example, many companies use a mobile-friendly website to ease the application process for prospective candidates. However, this heightened accessibility/easy submission process could result in a large applicant pool; increasing the potential for not-so-serious applicants and risking potentially overlooking top-talent.
 
Studies have also shown social networking sites present passive candidates that fulfill the criteria that business is looking for but are shown to be more expensive and not as efficient as candidates actively looking for the position. So how can we blend the modern recruitment climate and media-driven strategies with classic methods that have withstood the test of time?

Establishing Objectives and Crafting Your Strategy

The first step to take when beginning a successful recruitment process is establishing your objectives. These objectives should align with your business’s overarching goals and short/long-term strategic plans. For example, if a company’s strategic, long-term objective is to be renowned for their customer service, their recruitment objectives, be it cost-per-hire, type of applicants, job performance goals, or the positions that need to be filled, should align with their desired plan to enhance customer service.
 
What is it that your organization needs most, and how will you best meet these needs/goals through your recruitment strategy?
 
After clarifying what exactly your objectives are, you need to develop your recruitment strategy. The design of your plan should further specify/outline the “what, when, and how” objectives with concern for your business needs. The following questions can be used to help you craft your strategy:

• What type of individuals should you target?
  
• What recruitment message are you looking to communicate?
  
• How should you reach the individuals you want?
  
• What should be the nature of a site visit?
  

 
Answering these questions might require some research. For example, if an organization’s recruitment strategy development includes determining what type of applicant is best for a job, be it recent college graduates, individuals who have worked similar roles, or even candidates from competing companies, evaluating past recruitment efforts will help determine what sources of recruits have historically fit well. The process varies for every company, so it’s vital to determine what individuals will help you reach your objectives.

Proactive Recruitment and Post-Evaluation

Once your recruitment strategy is designed, it’s time to set it in motion. Be sure that the activities you carry out are consistent with the initial, thought-out objectives. For example, will advertising a job opening on the company website attract the intended audience? What other advertising avenues could we use to hone in on a selective group?
 
Furthermore, look at a variety of recruitment metrics to see if your strategy and implementation were effective. This post-recruitment analysis is a step that many companies underestimate; many don’t gather data on recruitment metrics throughout the process and therefore cannot modify future recruitment strategies.
Here are some of the important metrics to look at:

• Time-to-hire
  
• Yield ratio for individual recruitment methods
  
• Cost of filling the position(s)
  
• New employee retention rate and performance level
  
• Applicant perception of recruitment
  
• Quality of hire
  

 
Gathering and analyzing these factors should be prioritized, as talent analytics can also help recruitment teams illustrate the bottom-line implications of employee acquisition to functional managers within an organization. This data can be used as evidence for a variety of needs and changes, including justifying additional resources for recruiting.

Final Evaluation

Evaluating each step of the recruitment process can help point out flaws or inefficiencies, as well as successes, helping you optimize recruitment in the future. Past outcomes, good or bad, can drive future improvements that will streamline the hiring process and benefit companies and applicants alike. Here are some of the results of an evaluation and the changes they prompt:
 
Evaluation: Recruits didn’t completely understand what the job entailed.
Change: Try targeting individuals who worked for the organization or in a similar role.
Evaluation: The employee referral program is not bringing in the number or quality of applicants desired.
Change: Offer a referral bonus contingent upon retention for one year and new-hire performance.
Evaluation: Some applicants withdrew during the referral process.
Change: Start the process earlier or make timely job offers.
Evaluation: Only a few colleges provided a sufficient number of applicants to justify a college visit.
Change: Place greater emphasis on the successful colleges and select new, similar colleges.
 
The recruitment process can be challenging, but the benefits of a well-developed strategy can reach across an entire organization. After all, effective recruiting lays the foundation for talent management, the key to a business’ internal and external success.
 
Lauber Business Partners has all the expertise and capability needed to help you develop and fine-tune your company’s recruitment. Lauber’s HR Business partners have worked with private firms, non-profits, and Fortune 500 companies—so they are the perfect solution to a problem of any size at any business. Lauber can help you in all your recruitment endeavors so your company can see the future it wants to see.