The backbone of any business is its employees. Regardless of what product or service you offer, a motivated and professional workforce is necessary. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that you’re attracting the best and brightest talent for your business. In other words, you need a recruitment strategy plan.
At the moment, there’s a massive pool of talent to draw upon. The last couple of years has seen a dramatic increase in people quitting their jobs to search for something better. This surge in available workers is an excellent opportunity for any business leader. Who wouldn’t want to hire enthusiastic individuals and make their company thrive?
A business recruitment strategy plan will help you achieve your recruitment goals and ensure you stand out from the other companies also looking to hire the best. All recently formed businesses understand the importance of a great team which will help build a stronger company. So, the question is this: How do you create a business recruitment strategy plan?
Here are the steps you need to follow:
Examine the skills and recruitment shortfalls
Before diving headfirst into recruitment, take the time to analyse your company and determine what you’re recruiting for. For instance, are you filling an established but vacant position, creating a new role from the ground up, or even building an entirely new team?
You’ll also have to consider any skills gaps in your workforce. That’s not as rare as you might think. According to Challenger, the skill gap also exists in the job market. Around 43% of companies say they have enough applicants, but they don’t have the skills necessary for that specific job.
You need to conduct your skills gap analysis at the individual and team levels. Speaking to the team leaders and keeping abreast of what’s happening with your staff is an excellent way to stay one step ahead of any changes on the horizon.
Knowing your recruitment needs, however, isn’t enough. You also need to determine what your organisation needs in the future.
When doing your analysis, consider where your company is headed, too. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Where is the company going in the next 12 months?
- What positions will need to be opened? Will there be people quitting their jobs or retiring?
- What specific skills do these positions require?
- Is there any existing employee who can fill the position?
- If existing employees can fill the position, what positions will be left open if they fill that position?
Consider where the industry is going as well. For instance, if you know the emerging automation trends in your industry, you’ll know which positions you won’t have to open in the first place.
Businesses grow and develop over time. If you regularly look at market trends and company performance, you can make the necessary preparations for recruitment years ahead.
Establish hiring schedule in your business recruitment strategy plan
Once you know what you need, you’ll need to develop a hiring schedule. Creating a detailed calendar outlining every step of the recruitment process may seem time-consuming, but it is worthwhile in the long run.
A hiring calendar works just like an editorial calendar. It helps you visualise the steps you need to take and when you need to take them so you can meet your goals.
A calendar typically spans months, and it should show who’s in charge of each step in the recruitment process. If you want to be even more detailed, you can make a calendar that shows how many vacancies need to be filled and the recruitment deadlines.
Be sure to give yourself ample time and allow yourself room to be flexible. You might not get enough applications and need to extend the deadline, or you’ll have to postpone interviews due to sickness.
Consider putting the calendar together alongside the budget (more on this later). Otherwise, you’ll risk creating an elaborate and highly detailed schedule, only to discover that you have no funding left over for the last six weeks.
Develop job descriptions
You’ll need to create job descriptions to be used when you need to hire people. We’ve all seen these job descriptions. They’re detailed articles on job sites that outline what you’re looking for. They entice potential candidates with compelling offers of employee benefits and salaries that make your company look like the ideal place to work.
If you’re recruiting for an established role within your company, there’s a good chance the job description already exists and can just be re-used. But if it’s a new role or developed so much over the years that the old description is no longer valid, you’ll need to create one from scratch.
Writing a job description is an art form, and there’s a lot to consider. If they’re too vague, potential candidates won’t have a clear idea of the required skills and expected responsibilities.
But on the other hand, too much detail can make them intimidating and turn potential clients away. Finding a balance between the two can be tricky, but they can be highly effective if they’re done well.
So, what do you include? Well, you should always aim for the following:
- A short description of the job (two or three sentences)
- An introduction to your company
- Day to day responsibilities
- Required education/training
- Skills you will use in the role
Job descriptions should also offer some idea of the culture and values of your workplace. It can also include information about the working environment. For instance, you need to indicate if the position will be working on-site or working remotely.
Above all, you’ll want to make your company look appealing; candidates can spend hours going through job descriptions, and yours must stand out.
Specify the appropriate tools to help you
You’ll also need to consider which tools you’ll use during the recruitment process.
In recent years, video interviews have exploded in popularity. According to Hirevue, a video interview provider, 41% of 1,140 hiring leaders interviewed said they plan to use a combination of in-person and virtual interviews for recruitment. Around 23% said they would do only virtual interviews. In other words, the days in-person interviews were the only option are gone.
There are several tools you can use for virtual interviews. Here are only some of them:
- Willo
- Brazen
- Hireflix
- Hirevue
- XOR
- Interviewstream
Pick the tool that best suits your needs. Make sure that you familiarise yourself with the technology before any interview, though. Fumbling around trying to turn a camera on or trying to figure out how to make the candidate see you can be an embarrassing and awkward experience.
Similarly, your candidates should be familiar with the technology. You can make sure they familiarise themselves with it by announcing the use of the tool in your job description in the first place. Candidates, or at least the responsible ones, will find a way to get a hold of the platform and use it before the actual interview takes place.
You can use other tools for recruitment that can help you streamline your process. When preparing your business recruitment strategy plan, you need to consider these.
Applicant tracking software, for instance, can help you save an astonishing amount of time. ATS can sort through hundreds or thousands of resumes, so you’re left with only the candidates who qualify for that specific post.
Some platforms feature automatically scheduled interviews, recruitment analytics dashboards, a branded online application process, and more. Make the right choice, and you can avoid lots of tedious admin while providing a great candidate experience.
You can also consider services like programmatic marketing platforms. These can help you save time and money by running targeted adverts on social media or on the websites your ideal hires are likely to visit. That is especially useful if you have no experience in digital marketing. It can help you keep the process entirely in-house without needing a full-time recruitment marketing team.
Finally, don’t overlook employee onboarding software. It can help the candidate become more acclimatised to the workplace culture. The earlier they get used to it, the more productive employees they can be.
Set a budget for recruiting
A well-planned budget is an essential part of any recruiting plan. Hiring new employees costs money; figuring out how much is vital. The budget will also need to be signed off by management, so making it as accurate as possible is a must.
Look at your existing plan and determine how much each stage will cost. There are different factors to consider for external and internal recruiting, but generally speaking, you’ll need to look at:
- Background checks: According to Scout Logic, the cost of a background check can range from $10 to $500 per hire, depending on what is covered by the check. A single check of a hire’s criminal background (or lack thereof), for instance, is cheaper than
- Recruitment technology: According to Capterra, the price of ATS, for instance, ranges from $4 to $7 per month per employee. There are many factors that go into an onboarding pricing structure. Workbright said these are the number of employee onboards per year, the forms in the onboarding packet, software support, and the number of administrators of your account.
- Pre-hire assessments: Include these in your budget because they can save you time and money in the long run. With the tests, you can determine whether a candidate has the specific knowledge you require for the job.
- Job boards: Check out how much you spent to get your job ad out on job boards in previous years. If you never used job boards, then you can just go to the site itself and look for that information. On Indeed, for instance, you can sponsor jobs for $5 a day.
- Marketing: Include your costs of marketing on other platforms, if any. For example, if you decide to run your job posting on Facebook, after 30 days, you’d need to pay $10 per day for every click.
Once you’ve got your estimates in place, you’ll need to create a detailed budget plan. Remember, it’s better to be pragmatic than overly optimistic. Going under your recruitment budget will reflect well on you. On the other hand, overshooting a low budget makes you appear wasteful.
In Summary
Every business wants to succeed. For a business to succeed, though, it needs a dedicated workforce. Even if it has the best products, a business without dedicated staff who can assist customers can’t possibly make it in the competitive market.
That’s why a recruitment strategy plan is so important. That plan is your game plan. It tells you how you will attract those candidates to stay ahead of the competition.
You learned how to craft such a plan from this article. Just examine your recruitment needs, establish a hiring schedule, and develop job descriptions. Specify the tools you need and the recruitment budget, too.
You can use recruitment strategy plans repeatedly, but you should make adjustments to them, too, when necessary. With the right plan in place, you’ll have that dedicated workforce to help your business succeed in no time.
About the Author
Matt Caron is a content marketer, writer, editor, manager, community builder, and UX/UI architect. At Ardent Growth, he helps companies create successful content and get the content ranking on Google.
