Author: Dhruv Dev Dubey, Director HR@3DIndiaGroup.Com
Whether you work for a small startup or a massive enterprise with
thousands of employees, you need to know how your team is going to grow over
time—in other words, who you’re going to hire and when. That’s why you should
develop a recruitment plan to help streamline your hiring processes and make
sure you have access to the talent you need when you need it.
A strategic recruitment plan is not only important for filling job
vacancies, but also because poor recruitment decisions can be costly. By taking
a proactive approach and building out a plan for your recruiting in advance,
you can save time and money and make sure your team doesn’t find themselves short-handed
down the road.
The question is: how can you develop a recruitment plan that
reflects the dynamic nature of the contemporary job market? In a market that’s
constantly changing, how can you anticipate future staffing needs and
proactively plan ahead?
Keep reading to find out the steps you need to take to develop and
execute a strategic 21st century recruitment plan at your company!
What is a recruitment plan?
11 Steps to creating a successful recruitment plan
1.
Analyze recruitment needs and skills gaps
2.
Create a hiring plan and recruitment calendar
3.
Identify the tools you need to bring your plan to life
4.
Determine the requirements for each position
5.
Build out a budget for recruitment costs
6.
Start with a compelling job description
7.
Establish a candidate selection process
8.
Conduct background and reference checks
9.
Make an offer to the chosen candidate
10.
Define what happens after the job is accepted
11.
Learn and optimize your plan as you go
What is a recruitment plan?
Recruitment plans are about much more than just knowing what roles
need to be filled in the near future—they’re an opportunity to align company
goals and skills gaps with your hiring efforts in order to strategically plan
for the year ahead. A strategic recruitment plan should include the positions
you need to hire for, a recruitment calendar, budget information, tracking and
assessment tools, and other important details about how you’ll manage your
recruiting efforts.
Steps to creating a successful
recruitment plan
It’s clear that building out a recruitment strategy is the best
way to rethink and improve your hiring practices—but many companies fail to
plan accordingly. To help you navigate the planning process, here are 11 steps
to creating a successful recruitment plan.
1. Analyze recruitment needs
and skills gaps
The first step to creating a recruitment plan is to identify your
hiring needs and where there are skills gaps your existing talent can’t fill.
Start by analyzing the growth of your company, taking into consideration
important factors like employee turnover and anticipated promotions, as they
will impact your hiring needs.
Estimate which departments and roles will need strengthening and
why. Is a key member of the team leaving? Will a new project be kicking off? By
learning which skills your team will be missing and the ones you’ll need to
tackle the future workload, you can take a proactive approach that better
aligns hiring with staffing needs.
2. Create a hiring plan and recruitment
calendar
Next, you can put your analysis into practice and estimate how
many people each department will need and approximately when they’re needed.
This will help you plan ahead and anticipate future needs in time to prepare
for them. (For example, if you need to fill a role in Q3, you might need to
start your preparations in Q2 to make sure you fill the position in time.)
With this information, you can build out a full recruitment
calendar for the year. This should include the positions you’ll need to hire
for per quarter, total headcount for each department, and a hiring timeline for
when each round of hiring will begin.
3. Identify the tools you
need to bring your plan to life
Now that you have a recruitment calendar and a hiring plan, you
can identify the tools you’ll need to execute your plan. Some of the most critical
solutions for your recruitment tech stack are
an applicant tracking system (ATS), accounts on various online job boards,
pre-employment assessment and screening tools, and more.
These tools will help your team organize and streamline your
company’s hiring efforts, automating time-consuming tasks and improving the
candidate screening process. Not only should you invest in the tools needed to
get the job done, but also make sure that everyone involved has access to the
tools and is trained to use them.
4. Determine the requirements
for each position
With a solid idea of which roles you’ll be hiring for, you can
begin determining the requirements for each job opening. What are the
characteristics and skills that you want job candidates to have? What will
their daily responsibilities be? And their goals?
To make sure everyone is on the same page and decrease time to
hire, you should meet with hiring managers and talk through this step together.
This will help you develop a thorough understanding of each role and what the
needs are to fill it effectively.
When determining job requirements, consider these 8 areas to
establish what exactly the ideal applicants should be like.
5. Build out a budget for
recruitment costs
Based on your previous cost per hire, you can estimate how much
your recruitment costs are going to be for the year ahead. Bear in mind various
costs involved in the recruitment process that you’ll need to account for in
your budget.
Some of the common recruiting costs include:
·
Advertising on job boards and social media
·
Job fairs and campus recruiting costs
·
Recruiting technology costs
·
Employer branding expenses
·
In-house salaries and benefits of the involved
·
Background checks and drug tests
·
Recruitment travel expenses
6. Start with a compelling
job description
Attracting the best candidates all starts with a strong job
description. However, many companies take the wrong approach. They list the
specific job requirements and expectations, but fail to share anything about
what the company has to offer, possibly discouraging job seekers from applying.
Avoid this mistake and instead, aim to write compelling and
inclusive job descriptions that will appeal to job seekers. They should include
information about your company’s mission and values, along with the specifics
for the role. Don’t be afraid to show some personality—remember job
descriptions are an opportunity to sell the job to potential candidates.
7. Establish a candidate
selection process
Next, you should think about how you’re going to handle the tricky
task of candidate selection. Clearly define how the overall process will work
by establishing how many interview rounds you’ll have and who will be tasked
with interviewing and selecting candidates.
That said, you shouldn’t use a one-size-fits-all selection process
for choosing candidates. Rather, you should look for different ways to
personalize the experience for each candidate. You can do this by considering
what questions, needs, or concerns they might have throughout the interview and
selection process and proactively addressing them.
Pre-employment assessments are
a great resource for selecting qualified candidates early on and moving them
along in the selection process. There are many different types of assessments, from
measuring skills and personality to determining cognitive ability and cultural
fit. With a customizable pre-hire assessment tool, you can create gamified
online assessments that will help with selection and engage the candidate.
(Sounds like a win-win, right?)
Check out the online application experience Netflix created and
think how a similar pre-selection method would benefit your application
process.
8. Conduct background and
reference checks
Once you’ve selected a candidate, you should conduct a background
check as needed. This may not always be necessary, depending on company policies
and the role you’re hiring for. Determine whether background checks will be
needed early on, as this will help to avoid potential process delays down the
road.
You should make it a point to check references, which are a way
of assessing organizational fit and
confirming their qualifications. They essentially help to confirm your internal
assessment of whether or not a candidate is a good fit for the organization.
During reference checks, try to ask open-ended questions about performance,
accomplishments, and difficulties to learn as much as possible from the
reference.
9. Make an offer to the
chosen candidate
As part of your overall recruitment plan, you should define who
will make the offer and further negotiate with the chosen candidate. By
determining how this will go in advance, you can ensure a much smoother
candidate experience.
First, you should call or email your ideal candidate and offer the
position. Once you have confirmation that your candidate will be accepting the
role, it’s common to follow up with an official offer letter that outlines the
agreement in writing.
On average, 9 out of 10 job
offers are accepted. If your ratio is lower than this, you might want to look into
where the problem lies.
10. Define what happens after
the job is accepted
That’s the last step in the plan, right? Wrong! The best
recruitment plans don’t stop with the offer letter. As you wrap up your plan,
define what will happen after the job is accepted. Who is going to take care of
preboarding and onboarding? By answering these questions in advance and having
a plan in place, you can make seamless transitions from candidate to employee.
11. Learn and optimize your
plan as you go
Lastly, you should leverage new hire feedback and analytics to
inform your recruitment plan and optimize it accordingly. Send out an anonymous
survey to collect feedback from new hires. How was the interview and selection
process? What part of the process was done well and what part could have been
better?
You can also make good use of your hiring analytics. Review key recruitment metrics like
time to hire, quality of hire, early turnover rates, and cost per hire. Then
find ways you can improve your recruitment process based on those insights.
Just like the 21st-century job market and the recruiting industry are always
evolving, your recruitment plan should also develop over time.
…and don’t forget that a
corporate job opening can attract up to 250 applicants on average. Your
recruiting game must be continuously optimized to bring you the best results.
A concluding thought
A recruitment plan should be the ultimate guide for your
recruitment efforts. It may take time and effort to create one; however, don’t
think it’s final once you’re finished. You should adapt and optimize your plan
based on the business’ needs and how they fluctuate over time.
For example, what if your company grows faster than expected and
you need to hire more people than you originally expected? Or what if you
decide to implement a brand new technology? Continue working on your
recruitment plan, measuring key metrics and enhancing it as you go to achieve
the best possible results.
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