This Is How You Can Improve Your Recruiting Strategy
Strong recruiting is obviously essential to any organization’s success. A company can’t thrive without the right people. However, strong recruiting can also be difficult. The best practices for finding and attracting top performers are always changing for a variety of reasons.
That’s why you may want to seek outside help when filling important positions. For example, if you were looking for a new CEO, you might get help from an executive hiring firm. With an executive search firm on your side, you’ll have experts who can assist in your recruiting efforts, helping you find and connect with ideal candidates more quickly.
That said, it may also be a good idea to reassess your recruitment goals and practices. There are instances when you may benefit from adjusting some of the ways you go about identifying, attracting, or engaging with new talent.
Are you at a stage where you may need to make significant changes to your approach? If so, consider the following points.
Identify What’s Not Working
If you’re thinking about adjusting your recruitment practices, odds are good you’re not completely satisfied with the results your current approach has yielded.
If this is the case, you need to specifically identify why you’re not satisfied. This is key to understanding where you need to make changes.
Perhaps, after closely reviewing your hiring and employee data, you’ll find you have a relatively high new hire failure rate. Maybe you’ll learn retention is fairly low across the board. Or you might find out that you’re attracting far fewer applicants than you should be, given your industry.
These are merely examples. The main point to keep in mind is simply that you can’t make improvements if you don’t know what’s not working. Once you identify the problem, you can make a plan to address it strategically.
Survey Candidates and New Hires
It’s not always easy to see what is and isn’t working about your hiring practices when you’re the one implementing them. You need insights from those who may be less biased.
Luckily, these insights are readily available to you. Survey candidates or newly hired employees about your recruitment processes. Surveying all candidates — even those who did not receive an offer — has the added benefit of showing that you care. By asking for feedback, you send the message that you value applicants’ opinions and appreciate the time they spent applying and interviewing with your organization. This enhances your brand as an employer.
Ask candidates or new hires to rate their satisfaction on a number of statements, such as “It was easy to find all the information regarding the position,” “I was happy with the time between the application and the response,” and “It was easy to apply for the position.” You can also ask open-ended questions like, “How did you learn of the job opening?” and “What can we do to improve the recruitment process?” You can find many recruitment satisfaction survey templates online.
Define Your Goals Precisely
Changing your approach to hiring will often involve changing your hiring goals. Keep in mind that hiring goals — or any goals — are only valuable if they are specific. You have to know how you’re going to measure your success in order to determine if your new strategies are delivering the intended results.
In other words, your goals should be measurable. They should also be goals that need to be achieved within an established timeframe — in other words, specify a deadline. Additionally, it’s important that your new goals be realistic and achievable. You don’t want to waste energy and time pursuing goals that are simply out of reach at the current moment. Remember the acronym SMART: goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Reasonable, and Time-Based.
The nature of your goals will vary depending on the changes you need to make to your recruiting strategies. It can be a good idea to focus on improving specific metrics, like the time it takes to fill a new role, new employee productivity compared to existing employees, cost of hire, or metrics related to sourcing, such as the number of candidates recruiters reached out to during a particular campaign. These are just a few examples of recruitment metrics; what’s essential is that you determine the problem at your organization and how you want to change it in the future.
Research New Trends & Developments
Again, while recruitment is important, it can also be complex. Everything from new technological developments to changes in general attitudes toward work can impact your strategies’ effectiveness from one year to another.
That means you need to stay abreast of these developments. As you make time to change your approach to recruitment, research new technologies that recruiters may be using to more efficiently find candidates. It may also be worthwhile to take a more holistic, deeper look at your organization and learn about the benefits, perks, schedules, and work environments that today’s ambitious workers want the most. Find out if there are any new channels you can leverage when filling positions. The more you stay on top of developing trends, the more you’ll understand how you can improve your methods.
There’s a good chance many of your current methods are already delivering results. However, there’s always value in assessing your approach and determining where improvements are needed. These tips will help.
