What is a Recruitment Plan?
Before we begin with how you can create a strategic recruitment plan, you may want to know what a recruitment plan actually is. A recruitment plan is a defined strategy aimed at attracting, screening, hiring and retaining the right talent for your business. This can include developing an employer brand, outlining your hiring objectives, determining your ideal candidates, assessing your selection process and numerous other tactics to improve your hiring. This article will outline some of the key steps you need to make your recruitment plan a success.
Why do I need a Recruitment Plan?
It’s always better to have a plan, and this is no different when it comes to recruiting! After all, you wouldn’t skimp on planning your marketing, so why do so for recruitment when it’s just as important to your business? A recruitment plan is a powerful tool in your arsenal, allowing you to strategically approach the hiring process in the future, ultimately reducing costs, saving time and finding better candidates to join your organisation.
How to develop an effective Recruitment Plan
1. Define your hiring objectives
The first focus for any plan, including your new recruitment plan, is to set out your goals. You want them to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based; a SMART objective. For example, an objective may be to increase the headcount by 5 in the next six months. Another could be reducing the average hiring process time by a third in the next 2 years. Basically, you want something tangible, so that you know when you have succeeded or missed the mark, rather than an undefined ideal like “hiring better people.”
2. Anticipate future hiring
While you can never be 100% accurate, it is a good idea to predict how much hiring the business will do in the next year or so. You can more effectively plan your approach and hiring budget with this information. It will also help you to be more proactive in building up a talent pipeline of potential hires that you and your team may meet throughout the year.
Take a look at your current structure. Is anyone likely to retire, be promoted, go on long service leave or otherwise leave because they are unhappy in their role? You may also be able to look at historic trends to garner this information.
Another thing to consider is revising role descriptions, identifying any responsibilities that have changed hands. Doing so allows you to perform a more accurate skills gap analysis, and recognise any skill shortages to be filled by new recruits.
Of course, the natural growth of your company should also come into your plans, and you should identify those core support resources which need to increase in order to effectively nurture your business into the future. This will look very different across the technical and client service teams so input should be included from the leadership teams across these divisions.
3. Define your core values
What kind of employees do you want to attract? Identifying common traits among past recruiting successes can help you to define what you and your company value in a worker. Maybe you emphasise creativity and resourcefulness, or you prefer a diligent person who can get things done. Maybe it’s a mixture. Whatever the case, knowing what kind of person you value is essential to both speeding up the hiring process and ensuring that whoever you choose is a good fit for the company culture.
4. Develop your sourcing strategy
Now you know who it is you want to hire, you can focus on how you’re going to attract them. Leading employers don’t just rely on job boards, they also use their existing networks, talent pipelines, job fairs and campus recruiting.
Platforms such as Seek, Indeed and LinkedIn are low-cost, and easy to use. They can get you a large number of applicants quickly, although it will take more time reading through countless CVs and filtering out the poor ones. Receiving a lot of CVs for a role doesn’t mean that any of them will be ideal candidates. This has given rise to the popular analogy amongst recruiters of ‘applicant rich, candidate poor’. Another downside, if your position is niche or difficult to fill, is that generally you are only reaching active job seekers on these platforms, when your ideal candidate may be working at another company.
This is where the real value of using recruiters comes in. They have a large, pre-existing network of contacts from which to draw from, and take much of the leg-work out of finding the perfect candidate as you can focus on the important parts of your role whilst the experts do all the heavy lifting. They are well networked and know how to find candidates with niche skill sets. The difficulty lies in finding the best recruitment agency, with rates, quality and specialty varying from one to the other. There is no shortage of recruitment agencies in Australia, but finding the right specialist with a proven track record that’s able to work to your budget can be the challenge.
5. Update your hiring process
Ultimately, you want to reduce your staff turnover rate, and the best way to do this is to ensure your hiring process is refined to hire the right people from the start. Consider your past experiences and take note of what can be improved. Was the communication process efficient? Was every candidate given a fair chance? Can you think of any way it can be streamlined? Was there any unintentional bias in the process?
There are a number of ways you can tackle each issue, and the solution will depend on you and your business. For example, you may wish to introduce blind hiring if you identified an issue with hiring bias. Alternatively, communication issues could be addressed by formulating a plan, or automating some processes. Speak to your employees to hear their opinion on your hiring process and what can be improved. These conversations should also be included in exit interviews as you will learn a lot of valuable feedback from employees that might have been unhappy during their time in your organisation.
Another way to address issues with the hiring process is to hire an specialist, as a recruiter can take much of the work off your shoulders, letting you focus your efforts in other vital business areas. TalentVine can help you to compare the best recruiters in your industry and find the ideal candidates.
6. Set the budget
You can effectively predict future costs and demonstrate positive change to stakeholders by developing a well-planned hiring budget. To begin with, you will want to consider the costs of sourcing, selection, onboarding and overheads to identify areas for improvement. With effective budget management, you can demonstrate ROI and open the door to potentially securing additional resources for the future.
Final Thoughts
Building a strategic recruitment plan can make an immensely positive impact on your business. By reducing turnover, efficiently managing time, planning for the future and providing return on investment, you can position yourself for success.
Of course, you should evaluate the needs of you and your business, as you may find that working with a recruiter would be a more effective option. For example, if you are filling a niche position that does not have many job seekers or simply do not have the in-house resources. For others there may not be any available budget for recruitment fees, so that might not be a viable option.
If you feel that a recruiter would be a valuable part of your hiring plan, you should try TalentVine. We connect you with specialist recruiters that bid for the opportunity to work with you, allowing you to view and select the best options, based on your unique business needs. You are able to evaluate their rates, experience, reviews, and more to find the one that helps you recruit your next great hire.
You can sign up and post a role for free, with no obligations until you select your recruiter. And if you need to manage your budget, you can even pay a recruitment fee off over a six-month period.
