Recruitment should be something that includes every department in your organization. And just like you have a marketing strategy; you should have a recruitment strategy. Below are seven paths to building a better recruitment plan.
- Align recruiting with business goals – Determine the overall goals of your business and tie hiring in. (Example: if your business goal is to grow by 15%, you may need 15% more staff). Also look at how your boss’s performance is measured and rewarded. Use these factors and goals as a baseline to see if you need to revise your recruiting and retention approach to better meet the needs of the business. Realize that, as a manager, you are responsible for the company’s success…and success depends on having the right people at the right time.
- Develop a written strategy – If you don’t already have one, begin developing an overall recruiting strategy. Tailor its design after that of your product marketing plan. Include as an essential element building a strong employee and non-employee referral network, since referrals from top performers are invariably the best way to identify and recruit top talent. After you develop your recruiting goals, make sure there is a measure and a process to monitor each one. Have a feedback loop in your recruiting plan to provide for areas of improvement.
- Establish concrete objectives – Create an action plan with measurable objectives and timelines. If your goal is to add 15% more staff, your objective might be to make 5 recruiting calls per week.
- Demand accountability – Work with HR to ensure that every manager is held accountable for great recruiting. Make sure they are measured and rewarded based on how well they recruit, develop and retain top performers. Be accountable for hiring top performers. Add it to your, and every hiring manager’s, performance appraisal.
- Anticipate – Assume that recruiting will become more difficult and that turnover rates will increase dramatically as the economy heats up. Forecast the hiring you’ll need to do as a result of turnover and then add to that the hiring needs as a result of corporate growth.
- Be continuously recruiting – Develop prospects and build a talent pool long before you need to hire anyone. Use personal courting to build a relationship over time with good people. Periodically send them a newsletter, e-mail, card, or gift to keep their interest up. Proactively meet people all the time even if there isn’t an immediate opening. And when you find superstars when you don’t have an open requisition, have the courage to create a new position for them (or let a poor performer go).
- Don’t forget retention – Develop a retention program that focuses on increasing the amount of challenge, growth and learning that key employees receive. It’s also important to realize that “bad managers” are the root cause of most turnover.
Written by TalentClick CEO Greg Ford, M.Ed. and Dr. John Sullivan.
