Do you have a solid recruiting strategy?
Companies that have healthy hiring and retention rates typically have an effective recruiting strategy and a positive company culture and brand. Both attributes take time to build and perfect.
If you don’t have a recruiting strategy right now, it’s important to define one to maximize your recruitment efforts. Every recruiting strategy can look different based on your organization’s size, market, location, budget, and level of specialization required in your current employees. Here’s a streamlined approach to help you develop a strategy that attracts the right talent.
What is a recruiting strategy?
A recruiting strategy is a structured plan to attract, evaluate, and hire the right talent for an open role. It includes defining hiring goals, building a strong employer brand, identifying candidate personas, selecting effective recruitment channels, and building candidate pools.
Key elements involve crafting compelling job descriptions, designing a user-friendly application process, establishing standardized interview techniques, and leveraging technology like applicant tracking systems.
Additionally, it emphasizes building a talent pipeline and monitoring success through metrics and feedback. You may also hire the help of third-party services to assist with or conduct the full-cycle recruitment process.
Overall, a well-crafted recruiting strategy helps organizations find and retain the right talent, contributing to overall success. And not one size fits all, so it’s important to continue to evaluate your process to determine its effectiveness and to readjust parameters when necessary.
How to Craft a Recruiting Strategy
To make a recruiting strategy, you need to get organized. It’s important to define your needs, goals, capabilities, and hiring timeline to develop a template of foundational requirements. Defining these aspects will help you craft the right recruitment process to identify and onboard qualified candidates.
1. Define Your Goals
A good recruiting strategy starts with defining what you want to achieve with it. Typical goals of a recruitment plan include:
- Identifying the roles you need to fill. Is it a C-suite role, director-level, or entry-level? The higher you go up in levels, the more specialized the search. Every role has its unique skill set, making it important to organize these requirements before you craft a hiring strategy.
- Setting specific hiring targets. What is the number of new hires that you need, and what are the onboarding timelines for each of them? The more needs and different timelines you have, the bigger the job your recruitment team has.
2 Define Your Brand & Culture
According to our 2025 Recruitment Trends Report, high quality candidates are more concerned with a company’s culture than ever before. Having a well-defined, positive company brand can assist you in filling open positions, as a good culture helps attract and retain ideal candidates.
To find out how appealing you are to candidates, take inventory of your unique selling points. Do you know what today’s candidates are looking for when they join a new company? Offering the benefits and other perks, like work-life balance, are going to be key to attract and retain talent into 2025 and beyond. Evaluate what you offer and see where you can improve your offerings to make them competitive.
- Tip: Don’t know where you stand in your industry in terms of competitive offerings? It takes more than a Glassdoor search to find out. To look deeper into competitor companies and know what they are offering, consider hiring a research recruitment firm to conduct some Competitive Intelligence.
3. Identify Target Candidates
What does the right candidate look like for you? Creating a candidate persona for each open role based on the ideal skills, experience, and characteristics of a new hire will make your search easier. You can then take this criteria and use them to help identify the best candidates for the role. Whether you plan to recruit in-house or deliver a list of criteria to a third-party recruitment agency, knowing what you need to fill job openings helps everyone stay on-target.
4. Determine Who Will Do the Recruiting
Will you recruit in-house or, hire third-party recruitment services, or use a blend of both? Now that you know your hiring needs and ideal candidate profiles, it’s time to decide who is going to do the work. Perhaps you have an in-house recruitment team and you’re all set.
Or, maybe need a third-party recruitment service to handle the initial steps to support your recruitment team. In all of these situations, a full-service recruitment firm or an hourly recruitment research firm can help you meet these needs.
5. Identify Where to Find Candidates
Will you put up a job posting or attend a job fair and wait for job seekers to apply, or will you use a mix of channels to reach your audience? Job boards like LinkedIn are great places to start. In addition, LinkedIn is a common place to start looking for passive candidates, which is a preferred path of recruitment for director to executive level hires.
Recruitment research firms like Corporate Navigators are excellent at identifying passive candidates and verifying their current positions. This hourly service can save companies money and time if they prefer to outsource only core recruitment processes. On the other hand, full-service agencies can do this while handling the entire onboarding process.
6. Build a Talent Pipeline
Companies that need to fill specialized roles need to tap into more than niche job boards. There is a goldmine of qualified candidates who are actively employed elsewhere. Engage with these passive potential candidates before roles open by building a talent pipeline and maintain a database of these individuals for future hiring needs.
Past applicants can also be viable additions to this pipeline as these individuals could be qualified for roles that open in the future. You may have an in-house team to foster these ongoing relationships through updates and engagement, or you can hire a recruiting research firm to do it for you.
7. Create a Great Candidate Experience
Candidates who have a positive experience with the job hunting and onboarding process are more likely to be happy and stay with you for the long run. Here are a few ways to optimize the candidate experience.
Craft Compelling Job Descriptions
- Clearly outline responsibilities, required skills, and company culture.
- Use inclusive language to attract diverse candidates.
- Include information about growth opportunities and benefits.
Streamline the Application Process
- Ensure the application process is user-friendly and straightforward.
- Minimize the number of steps and required information.
- Provide clear communication throughout the process.
Implement a Strong Interview Process
- Standardize interview questions to ensure fairness.
- Train interviewers on effective techniques and bias reduction.
- Include practical assessments or case studies where applicable.
Promote Diversity and Inclusion
- Implement initiatives that promote diversity in hiring.
- Foster an inclusive environment where all candidates feel welcome.
Leverage Technology
- Use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to manage applications.
- Consider AI tools for resume screening or chatbots for initial candidate engagement.
8. Continually Evaluate and Adjust Your Recruitment Strategy
As companies evolve, so do the needs of candidates and your needs as well. This is why it’s important to always keep track of your recruitment progress to identify your strengths and weaknesses in attracting and retaining talent.
Track key metrics like time to hire, quality of hire, source of hire, and gather feedback from candidates and hiring managers. This will help you regularly review and refine your strategy based on data and feedback.
By following these steps, you can create a targeted recruiting strategy that not only attracts top talent but also aligns with your company’s goals and values.
Do You Have a Recruiting Strategy?
If you want to ensure that you have the best talent to fill future job postings, you need to have a solid talent acquisition plan.
Key elements involve crafting compelling job descriptions, designing a user-friendly application process, establishing standardized interview techniques, and leveraging technology like applicant tracking systems.
Additionally, it emphasizes building a talent pipeline and monitoring success through metrics and feedback. A well-crafted recruiting strategy helps organizations find and retain the right talent, contributing to overall success.
