Is Your Recruiting Team Doing These 7 Things?

Is your recruiting team doing enough to help your company win the war for talent? I’ve worked at companies prior to Glassdoor where the recruiting team seemed to be in a permanent reactive mode, and that’s always baffled me. While many other teams and departments within the organization need to have an airtight plan for the year and metrics in order to secure budget, recruiting somehow gets a pass. For example, your marketing team can tell you which programs are driving business, how they will attack different market segments, how they are automating marketing and all about customer satisfaction – at least, I hope they can. Is your recruiting team providing the same level of intelligence, optimization and strategy? If you don’t look at recruitment strategically with a heavy emphasis on planning, metrics and efficiency, it’s going to be tough to get your fair share of the budget. This makes meeting recruitment goals all the more difficult. If it feels like your recruitment team isn’t running like a well-oiled machine, make sure you’re doing the following seven things so you can start delivering stellar results and fare better in the budget scramble next year. 1. Having a Plan. Can you explain to execs exactly how you’re going to attack the company’s hiring plan? A thorough recruitment plan is a necessity. This plan should communicate success criteria, marketing channels, investment, technology and a line item budget (at a minimum). Socialize your plan with key stakeholders, get their feedback and think through the entire year. If you need help laying out your plan for the year, here is a recruitment budget template you can use. 2. Tracking metrics. Are you tracking and reporting on key metrics for all recruitment activities? At a minimum, you should have metrics that clearly demonstrate top-of-funnel activity (e.g. candidate pipeline and applicants per req), efficiency (e.g. cost per hire, recruiter efficiency, sourcing channel, time to fill, offer acceptance rate) and quality (e.g. quality of hire and retention rate). Your team should be setting baselines for all metrics and have a goal to constantly improve through optimization. 3. Showing results. If you had another dollar, would your team know exactly where to spend it to best meet your hiring goals? If not, you may not be tracking marketing channels in enough detail. Ideally, you should determine which channels have the best ROI, work best for certain types of candidates and which aren’t working well. Analyze and adjust continuously based on the results you see in the data. 4. Focusing on the candidate experience. Your recruitment team should take ownership of making your candidate experience as positive as possible. Are you analyzing feedback on your interview process? Are you pinpointing issues and building plans to resolve them? Are you training your hiring managers on interview best practices? If not, you should be. Analyzing and improving the candidate experience is a must to improve recruitment – and it’s your job to provide a regular update on progress here. 5. Being efficient. A critical part of any strategy is learn how to become more efficient over time. Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

• How will the team use automation to reduce manual tasks?
• Have you built a community and automated communications to improve your attraction and nurturing techniques?
• Are you optimizing your marketing spend based on ROI?
• Do you have the right staffing firms/outsourcers to meet your specific hiring needs?

You should be evaluating these areas during your planning process and rethink them several times throughout the year so that your team can continue to show tangible improvement. 6. Going mobile. You’ve heard all about the importance of mobile recruitment. With 45% of job seekers saying they use their mobile device specifically to search for jobs at least once a day, it’s important to take the movement to mobile seriously. Are you tracking your mobile candidate activity separately? Do you have the right technology is place to allow your candidates to easily apply on their mobile devices? It not, it’s time to get on board with mobile or you’ll continue to lose candidates because you can’t capture them where they are – on their mobile devices. 7. Tying in your employer brand. Of course, no list on recruiting best practices would be complete without mentioning the importance of employer branding. The strength of your employer brand can make or break you – 69% of job seekers would not take a job with a company that had a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed. The overall responsibility for employer branding may or may not sit within your team, but many of your activities may affect it nonetheless. If you do have full responsibility, however, it’s important to understand the current status of your brand and reputation. Use Glassdoor to get a real-time pulse on your reputation! And if you’re falling short in some areas, listen to your employees and candidates, discover the root causes, make positive changes, and monitor and report on your improvement. If you don’t have full responsibility for your employer brand, you still need to pay attention to it, because your interview process (which recruiting does control) can dramatically affect your employer brand. Remember, 94% of job seekers are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively managers their employer brand.